I've only been in the erotica business for about three years now and right from the start my plan with Wenches and Warriors was to go wide and appeal across platforms. Thanks perhaps in no small part to George RR Martin, the medieval fantasy has become...ahem, fertile ground for tales of unwilling maidens being plundered by rapacious knights and nobles, so adding dubious consent to the genre, on the appropriate platform seemed like a no brainer.
Those involved in erotica writing however will wonder how not to run afoul of Amazon's content policy, while getting the most out of a brand. Well, you will have noticed by now Wenches and Warriors can be found on both Amazon and Smashwords and it is promoted differently in the blurbs. In short, the mainstream versions follows mainstream content guidelines. On smashwords, where taboo is catered for, the content takes a wilder, darker turn.
This involves a balancing act when it comes to KDP. Once I went wide with W&W, releasing the dubon and noncon versions on Smashwords, I had to unenrol the originals from Amazon's exclusive KDP Select. That meant giving up KDP page reads in favor of the raunchier versions available on SW. This is the compromise each writer has to weigh up and calculate.
So writing two versions of the same book sounds like a lot of work. Actually not if you write it carefully the first time. The secret is in the designation. We all know the terms, but I'll spell them out:
Dubcon means dubious consent where it is unclear the characters consent to the sex or not. Then there's Relcon, reluctant consent, where a character is coerced, blackmailed or otherwise left with a poor choice that ends in sex. Some of these can and do get through amazon's filters, but they are a risk not worth taking. The last is Noncon - non-consensual - which can only be described as flat out forced. There's a surprisingly big market for this so Smashwords allows it, but Amazon most certainly does not.
There is one more category that can minimize the workload, Abcon: the absence of consent. Simply put, I write many of my scenes in the original version without explicit or implicit consent. I may hint at consent or lack thereof, but leave it up to the reader's imagination. Those so inclined can pretend it's reluctant if they want to; those not so inclined will see a normal sexual encounter. In that way the scene is already written dubcon-ready and it only takes a few lines to spice the scene up. Abcon in a nutshell.
Of course in many cases I simply add a chapter to the dubcon version that wasn't in the original but that is never the only relcon scene in the book and I think of it more as added value for Smashwords customers.
In this way I spread my stories around to appeal to two types of reader: those who want straight up consensual sex in a medieval fantasy setting can find it on Amazon; those with darker desires can get "Game of Thrones on Steroids" at Smashwords. For those on the fence, there's always Abcon to let their imagination fill in the blanks.
