Writing and tweeting about the sex industry (part one)

My latest case-study is about writing and tweeting about the sex industry. Our host this week is writer Rose who runs the Twitter account @VibesDirect.

I asked Rose how she got into the industry. 

“After graduating with a 2:1 in Writing for Media Arts from South Bank University, I managed to land myself an internship at risqué national women’s magazine, Scarlet. After interning there for only a month, I was astonishingly then offered the position of Editorial Assistant. Crazy really how it happened, as I wasn’t even sure what area of writing in the media industry I wanted to go into, but it seemed clear that I was to fall into journalism and publishing as opposed to documentary, which is where I thought I was headed.

After a year of working for Scarlet, the magazine closed, but the publisher offered me the opportunity to create a weekly online version called Harlot (http://www.harlotmagazine.co.uk) which I did for about eight months. With no budget for images or writers everything produced was either written by myself or very generous journo friends that were willing to help me out. Running such a magazine was definitely a massive learning curve and although I cursed it in many ways, it did show me what I was capable of. Enough time has passed now that I can look back at it and feel proud that only a year after graduating I was producing a weekly online magazine with fuck all budget and mailing out to around 20,000. Not bad.

After leaving that venture I spent a bit of time working in a secondary school in London to get some money together for a trip to Australia, but I realised I wasn’t happy there and writing is really where my heart is. Jacking it all in, I’ve put myself out there as a freelancer and trying to carve some sort of career out of it. I now write for Adventure Bike Rider, www.cityplanter.co.uk and have most recently landed myself back in the world of smut and adult toys by taking over all editorial content for www.vibrationsdirect.co.uk.”

Over the last few years publishing has changed dramatically with free online content being readily accessible, how do you feel this has affected the erotic industry? 

“As soon as the Internet took off it was inevitable that sex and erotica was going to be the (near) death of printed adult content, not just because you can get it for free, but because it’s a lot less effort to type your favourite fetish into Google and come up with thousands of hits, opposed to having to go out to your local sex shop and scour the shelves.

That’s not always to say that all adult content you find on the net is good quality – there is a lot of crap stuff out there and a lot that could be very questionable in terms of how ethical it is. So many adult sites charge audiences to view their content now though, and rightly so. I know that in terms of men’s top shelf magazines their sales have taken a massive hit over the last 10 years or so, simply because the next generation aren’t sneaking into their local news agents to subtly buy a porno mag, it’s much safer and easier to look online. Plus there’s more variety.

For women in particular I think the rise in erotic fiction sites, sex blogs and adult toy retailers has been a blessing. Women have been sexually liberated for decades now, but it  has given us another forum in which to openly discuss topics that may have been otherwise brushed under the carpet or thought of as taboo, or weird, only to find that there are over 10,000 pages on vaginismus, or pain play or whatever you’re into, so that thing you thought was weird in bed actually isn’t.

It’s great that people are willing to put their sex stories out there and share them, whether in the form of sharing their sexual liaisons or providing toy reviews or advice. It’s fabulous that Xcite books are now putting many of their titles on download for Kindle. How much easier is that? Only once did I walk into a Waterstones and pick up a book from the very narrow, one shelf Erotica section and was made to blush (only slightly) at the till when the guy asked me, “you are aware of what sort of book this is aren’t you?” Well yes, but thanks for highlighting that in front of a queue of people. Idiot.”

You previously ran Harlot (the email newsletter for Scarlet magazine) which continued after Scarlet’s demise, why do you think it was so successful? 

“Harlot started out as the fortnightly email newsletter that belonged to Scarlet. It was a shorter, online extension of the magazine that was sent out to people who signed up through www.scarletmagazine.co.uk. It would include some of the best bits of the mag, pic of a hot guy and so on, but in all honesty it was a bit half-arsed. We were only a very small editorial team and pretty much all of the focus was on the print magazine rather than creating great online content or maybe utilising it as much as we perhaps could have done.

When I was given the opportunity to start Harlot, after Scarlet was forced to close, I was both sad, but also excited because the potential of moving a magazine like that online was massive. There weren’t as many restrictions online as there were in print, so if I wanted to make it ruder, more explicit or include pictures of dildos on the cover, I could. It was really liberating in that sense.

Initially we were emailing out to 30,000 or so subscribers and then got a further 2,000 hits through the website. As far as I was aware there wasn’t another page turner magazine like it out on the net. I’d get so many more emails from online readers to Harlot than I ever did for Scarlet. Getting in touch with an online magazine is obviously so much more accessible than perhaps writing a letter to a print mag. We really utilised social media with Harlot too, so I got the Facebook page and Twitter page set up and managed to get a lot of good dialogue going with readers so it really felt like they were contributing to the magazine more.

There was so much potential for that magazine; although we had the readers we didn’t have the financial backing. It was hard to get advertisers interested, maybe we weren’t as savy with SEO as we should have been and the marketing team were trying to sell ad space at print prices. Obviously this didn’t work because you can get cheaper links elsewhere on the net. There was also no extra budget for marketing or publicity and because there are so many sex sites out there on the internet it was, of course, going to be important that we tried to show Harlot as a cut above the others.”

READ PART TWO OF THIS BLOG ON THURSDAY WHERE ROSE AND I TALK MORE ABOUT @VIBESDIRECT (SUBSCRIBE TO GET MY BLOG UPDATES). 

You can see all of Rose’s blogs at www.vibrationsdirect.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @vibesdirect or search Vibrations Direct on Facebook.