Girl on the Net

I could just jam this into the FAQs, but I’m feeling feisty today so it’s going to be a blog post instead. Since I started creating audio porn, one of the most common questions I am asked is ‘will you turn my story/fantasy into audio porn?’ – so I thought I’d have a crack at answering that question.

If you’re an individual who wants a private story: I can’t do this

I get why you might want this. If you support me on Patreon at the $50 tier I will give you the opportunity to put forward your idea/fantasy and I’ll turn that into a story that goes on Patreon and/or the site. However, I don’t ever work on stories which I send privately to individuals in exchange for one-off payments (sometimes called ‘customs’). There are two reasons for this: I can’t and I won’t.

Let’s start with ‘I can’t’: I work in the adult industry and as such I exist on Patreon on a wing and a prayer. They have extremely strict rules about how those of us who produce adult content interact with Patreons – thanks to the puritan credit card companies who they have to keep sweet in order to keep their business going, they cannot support anything that looks like private, 1-to-1 sex work. And ‘you sending me a fantasy and me then creating audio porn which I send privately to you’ is 1-to-1 sex work. If I were to do it, I’d get kicked off the platform: my livelihood would be gone and this whole site would come crashing to the ground.

Let’s move on to ‘I won’t’ though, because this is important too: I don’t want to do this. It doesn’t sound fun for me. Most of the things I enjoy about writing and making audio porn come from the fact that I’m doing it for an audience. The way that audience responds to the ideas, kinks and stories is a core part of what I love about this job. If I were to take your fantasy and turn it into beautiful audio porn, a part of my soul would crumble as I realised that this lovely thing I’d created might only ever be heard by one person. I have a lot of respect for those who can do this, and I know there are many who will happily take your money to create custom audio: please go and find these people.

As I say, if you support me at the $50 tier on Patreon, I will do something kind-of similar for you if you ask, but the resulting story will be published, it can’t be ‘for your ears only’. I have written a few fiction pieces based off requests from Patreons which have gone up either on the site or behind the paywall there. If these were private, to be blunt: even for $50 I could not afford to do them. On a good day I can knock out a blog post in a couple of hours, on a bad day it’ll take me longer than the day itself – that’s when the idea is mine and I’m fired up about writing it. Creating a piece of fiction based off someone else’s fantasy, which I may have to research/read about to get my head in the right space, ask more questions about and spend time pondering? That can take anywhere from 5 hours to weeks and weeks. If the piece only ever goes to you privately, then the only value I can extract from it (sorry to sound like a capitalist, but we live in a capitalist society and I’ve got bills to pay) is the money you pay me up front. If I write it as a story that I can use publicly – on Patreon and/or the website – then I can also use that post to generate traffic, which gets me pageviews, which I can monetise in other ways.

This is my job. Any time I spend writing private stuff for you is time I cannot spend doing this work right here. Usually the requests for private audio come wrapped in compliments for my writing (for which I thank you, you lovely fucker!), so I’m going to ask you to remember that the writing you love wouldn’t exist if I spent all my time doing private work instead.

If you’re asking because you want my time for free? Sod off

Here’s the ranty bit, so brace yourself: I’ve noticed a significant uptick in men (no, it’s not all men but yes, it is always men) asking me to ‘collaborate’ with them on erotic stories. “I have an idea!” they tell me, then proceed to detail how they’ll tell me that idea, I will write the idea up into a story, record that story as audio, and put it on the website. I am sorry, my dudes, but this isn’t how it works.

Kudos on recognising that I need any work I produce to be published publicly, but points are gonna be deducted here for your assumption that your idea is exactly as valuable as my time and expertise. I’m a professional sex writer who’s been doing this for 11 years. You are someone I have never met before who wants me to custom-write fiction that’s laser-focused on your fantasies.

I understand why this is something you might want, and if it is – see the above section! There are many people who do 1-to-1 work who would be more than happy to create something like this for you in exchange for a payment which values their time and labour. But if you come to me with a vague ‘idea’ which you expect me to turn into erotica, that is not ‘collaboration’, that is ‘taking advantage.’ That is ‘seeing a woman who exists sexually in a public space, and assuming that her raison d’être is to mould that sexual existence to exactly what you want.’

Well over 130,000 people visit this website each month: can you imagine if they all requested this kind of interaction with me? Even just replying politely to their emails (as I have done to so many of these) would take up more than a 40-hour week and mean I would never have time to write any actual content.

These requests aren’t just frustrating, they are also pretty insulting. I wouldn’t normally say this so openly because over the last few years I’ve become a bit mousy and nervous of sounding critical, but fuck it, as I say, I’m feeling feisty today: over the last month or two I’ve had quite a few emails from guys requesting this kind of ‘collaboration’ so I’ve allowed myself to slip from sadness into genuine frustration. Sometimes they don’t call it a ‘collaboration’, sometimes they call it an ‘offer’, but either way what they’re after is this:

• they send me an idea (a fantasy of theirs, or story, which they would like turned into erotica but which they’re not sure they know how to write well themselves) – time taken for them to write this down? 1 hour, absolute max.
• I take that idea and work it up into a story that’s suitable for publication on my website (sometimes this would be as straightforward as just writing it in a sexy way, other times it would involve researching their kinks, having discussions about details, etc etc) – time taken? Anywhere between 5 – 20 hours.
• I record that idea as audio porn, edit and upload it to the site. I’ve recently tried to work out how long it takes me to do this for each guest piece – it’s an investment of both my time and, if I get a guest reader and/or need to hire a studio, money. I reckon the average time it takes to record, edit and produce a single piece of audio is anywhere between 2-4 hours. And it costs anywhere between £20 (if I do all the work, because I pay myself less than minimum wage) to well over £100 depending on whether I need to hire readers/studio/etc. Time taken to do this? 2-6 hours. 

Special shoutout to the guy who recently told me that his ‘idea’ definitely needed three (THREE!) different female voices and possibly one male voice too. I’d need to pay each reader at least 3 hours at their hourly rates (one hour each for studio time, two hours for travel time each way, plus travel costs plus studio hire), even assuming I’m editing it all and not paying myself a penny, all my readers lived within an hour of the studio and wouldn’t cost more than a tenner in travel fees, and we managed to knock out a recording in record time… just recording this story alone would have cost me well over £300. That is what I personally earn in a week, if I am lucky.

So before you email me asking to ‘collaborate’, please consider what you’re requesting versus what you’re offering in return. I genuinely feel a bit mean highlighting how insulting it is when people ask this, because I feel like this stuff should be obvious. But it’s clearly not obvious enough to those who keep emailing to ask me this question. As it is apparently not obvious that I run this site on an absolute shoestring budget and a hell of a lot of goodwill.

I’m working on the latter, of course: my goal for this year is to stop bleeding my savings into GOTN. The cost of living hits me too, as it also hits those I work with for whom I would desperately love to increase rates. Right now, this is my primary focus, and if you’re one of the people who is up for helping – either an erotic writer who wants to genuinely collaborate by licensing me your amazing work (see below) or a supporter who’d like to chip in to the Patreon which funds the audio project, then I thank you from the very bottom of my tired little heart. But if you’re thinking of emailing me asking to ‘collaborate’, or requesting some free labour from me, I’d urge you to please consider first: how long will your request take? How much will it cost me? And what will I get in return? If you’re just trying to get me to fulfil your fantasies for free, I’ll invite you to go and get the un-fun version of fucked.

So how do I take part in the audio project?

I commission audio in rounds two or three times per year. I commission in one large batch because it saves time: turning your work into audio involves a lot of boring things like paperwork and logistics/scheduling. I need to license the stories from you, sometimes make slight edits/add content notes to the text, pick voices to record, book studio time if necessary, schedule it all so I’m not having two similar stories go up in consecutive weeks, create your author page, and do all the behind-the-scenes work. That’s why I don’t have a running open commission like I do for guest blogs.

However, if you want to submit your work to be turned into audio, and the work already exists somewhere (on your website or on another website, but where you still have the rights to republish), and you have at least five pieces that might be suitable, then I would absolutely love to hear from you come commission time. Especially if you are LGBTQ+, disabled, or a member of any marginalised community that is underrepresented in the audio project right now, even more so if you have kinks that differ from my own. Part of the point of publishing audio porn from others is to expand the range of perspectives on the site. I am but one straight-cis-middle-class-white-girl with a penchant for getting spanked and facefucked: there is so much beauty and joy that exists in sex outside my narrow perspective, and that’s why I love bringing guests here in the first place.

Why do I say the work must already exist? Because the core goal of the audio porn project is to make erotica more accessible to blind people, and others who use screenreaders. When I turn your work into audio I don’t just put it on my website, I also give you a widget to embed the audio in yours, so your little patch of the internet becomes more accessible to smut-lovers too. It’s a core goal of the project.

On top of this, I am extremely aware that I do not – and cannot currently – pay brilliant rates to writers. It’s OK for me to make less than minimum wage doing this, but I can’t ask other people to work for next-to-nothing. By licensing stories and blog posts that you have already written, I can pay you a small license fee which gets you some money from work which otherwise would not have been paid for (plus an hourly rate if you can record it yourself), then I do all the work to create the finished audio piece. Although I’ve done it with a couple of writers in the past, right now I cannot afford to pay people to write something brand new. Why do I ask for you to have at least five pieces? Just because it takes time to do all the admin and paperwork to bring a new writer on board, and that amount of work makes it impossible to take on twenty new writers each with one piece rather than four new writers with five. Hope that makes sense.

So! If you’re an existing writer with stories under your belt, the best way to submit them is to contact me during a commissioning round! I will be doing another of these in the next couple of months, subscribe to the blog for updates.

How do I apply to be one of your readers/voices?

This is a common question too, and the answer is often disappointing to people who want to dip their toe into the water of audio recording. The short version is that, because I need to focus a little more on audio quality than I did in the past, if you want to apply to be a reader you need to have access to decent recording equipment and a space where you can record without lots of background noise. Sorry. I used to be totally cool with people recording on phones etc – for me, the content is the main event rather than the quality of audio – but I got a lot of feedback that poor audio quality made it harder for people to enjoy the stories, so now I do aim for a minimum audio quality that requires at least a decent mic and usually some kind of sound-dampening.

I’m working my socks off to get a guide live on this site about how to record/create your own audio, so I can pass on some of the little tricks I’ve learned doing this and include some recommendations to good/cheap-ish equipment and hopefully get some other people started in recording their own erotica. In the meantime, though, if you do want to read for me and you have a decent mic (or are close enough to London that you might be able to make it to a studio to record), then again – subscribe to the blog for updates – and I’ll make sure to include instructions on how to audition in the next commissioning round too.

And if all you’re after is the chance to hear some sexy stories read aloud? Then I thank you, again, from the bottom of my ragged, grumpy heart. You help keep this site going and I’m so grateful – come browse the over 370 FREE audio porn stories that we’ve created together since this began!