Follow me to SubscribeStar, maybe?

There's an erotica exodus underway ...

I’m giving some thought to moving this popsicle stand to SubscribeStar, a somewhat more erotica-friendly platform, given some recent developments. For the time being, I’m sticking around Substack, because it has some features that I really like, but I’m cautiously watching the storm clouds in the sky and contemplating a dash for the cellar.

Stripe, the payment processor behind the Substack subscriptions service, is starting to crack down on its “prohibited and restricted businesses” rules. In addition to prohibiting illegal and deceptive businesses, like fake IDs and Ponzi schemes, Stripe doesn’t allow “[p]ornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts” to be sold through their payment processing. The “including literature” part (bolded and italicized above by me) is what’s chasing some of my favorite Substack writers, including Mia Hill’s Naughty Step and Sinful Urges Publishing, off the platform. This on top of recent changes to Medium’s payment algorithms (incidentally also a Stripe payment processor customer) is making it increasingly difficult to find places where you can get paid for writing short-form erotica and spicy stories.

The use of the payment processor gauntlet to strangle perfectly legal but “unsavory” services is a scary development. Even when the platform itself doesn’t prohibit adult content — Substack and Medium are both open to the whole gamut of sexually explicit literature — having the possibility to be compensated for your work cut off is stifling and restrictive. Of course, it’s not really a new development; MasterCard did something similar in 2021, making it impossible for people on OnlyFans and other platforms to be paid for their work. This article on the website them.us does a good job of laying out the pernicious effects of MasterCard’s policies.

The Stripe rules have been on the books for a while - the version of their “restricted businesses” language on their website was last updated in May 2023, and I believe the general prohibition on adult content predates that - but were laxly enforced. I’m not sure what’s driving the sudden crackdown, but it certainly doesn’t bode well for anyone trying to make a little profit off short form erotica.

Of course, if you want to trade in your dirty stories for anti-Semitism, neo-Confederate drivel, or straight up Nazism, Stripe’s got your back. (No, I’m not going to start writing “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS” fan fiction; well, not yet, anyway …)

The great loss here isn’t just on the payment side of things, though; there are other ways to get paid for writing erotica. Substack, Medium, and Ream have been tiny income streams for me compared to Amazon and Smashwords. What Substack and Medium have provided, and which Amazon and Smashwords can’t replace, is discoverability and network effects. Because there are so many restrictions on how we can advertise our erotica — we can’t buy Amazon and Facebook ads, for example — we rely on platforms that are good at gathering like-minded readers. Unlike Ream, which really requires you to bring a pre-existing audience to the platform, Substack and Medium allow a new writer to build an audience by putting out short stories, and then get some of those readers to give their longer pieces on Amazon and Smashwords a try. When the platform itself promotes networking, it’s possible to grow a following by doing what you do best — writing stuff — rather than by doing things like marketing, which most writers would really rather not have to do at all.

In my case, I went from zero Substack subscribers when I set this account up in March, to 78 now. Not a huge subscriber base, and not a lot of those are paid, but getting 78 people to sign up for an unknown writer’s little weekly-ish newsletter, and maybe give my stories a shot, is huge, and largely the result of other writers sharing the link to my newsletter on theirs and vice versa. I really appreciate your signing up and taking that chance! That’s the network effect that Substack and Medium lean into, and which Ream really lacks.

As I’ve already noted, Substack and Medium aren’t great revenue sources for me; I tend to write longer form pieces, so Amazon and Smashwords are better delivery mechanisms for my stories. If my Stripe account got deleted tomorrow, I could still keep putting free content on Substack and Medium and probably continue to reach and grow an audience. But I’m not sure that I want to stay in places that make me and other writers of erotica unwelcome: even if Substack and Medium are fine with adult content, they’ve chosen to work with a payment processor who isn’t. Ream and Wordpress are also using Stripe, so they’re really no better for erotica authors.

The best subscription service I’ve run across as far as being a welcoming place for adult content is SubscribeStar. It’s a little more Ream-like than Substack-like — it’s not really geared toward the sort of essays I do here — but it’s openly and proudly welcoming of a whole range of erotic arts. There are still some limitations — for example, you can’t put photographs of real people on the site, including stock photography, so most of my book covers are verboten — but they’re hardly egregious. And they don’t use a payment processor with a history of treating adult content like the plague.

I’m not planning to shut down this Substack any time soon — my content here is pretty PG-13, R at most, with rare forays into the NC-17 — but I am planning to explore SubscribeStar as a better subscription platform. If you’re curious, check it out — I’ve got five subscription tiers, ranging from free (which will get your these kinds of little essays and occasionally other tidbits) to $1 a month (which gets you a monthly title from my catalog) to $6 a month (which gets you all of my published stories plus bonus stories).

I don’t think it’s going to help me grow an audience the way Substack has, but it may help me serve my audience a little better.