All These Roadworks 2024 Survey Results – Part 2

In the first post looking at my recent reader survey, I looked at demographics, product and customer experience. (Click here to view.)

This time around we’re going to look at content and kinks. As a reminder, the survey had 530 responses, split roughly evenly between paying customers and non-paying readers.

Commentary: This really belonged in the demographics post, but I forgot it, sorry. Thanks to everyone who felt the need to precisely describe their relationship, and sorry to try and put you in a box, but all I really cared about from this is how many people had attached relationships, how many people didn’t, and how many people were poly. It wasn’t the best-phrased question to get that data accurately, but mostly I just wanted to know how different my audience was from my own situation, to get a sense of what kind of gap I was bridging in my writing.

Commentary: “Every couple of days” would have been my guess for how often the average “ATR reader” engages with my stuff, and the survey results bear that out. The results further show that (with a couple of exceptions) readers who engage monthly, or less, have overwhelmingly made either zero or one total purchases from my shop, so I’m treating that audience as welcome, but largely irrelevant to my business. Given that I have daily content and weekly book launches, there’s probably not much I can realistically do to get that cohort checking my site more often.

Commentary: Okay, here’s the meat of the content questions. I’ll just quickly note that the discrepancy in the names of the “sadism/torture” categories between the two questions relates to a change I made to the survey just after the first few responses came in, that locked the old category name in on the “avoid” question, but you can treat it as if it just says “sadism/torture” because that’s what 527 of the 530 respondents saw.

Please also note the discrepancy in the horizontal axis between these two graphs – the right extreme of “ENJOY” is 500 but on “AVOID” it’s 200. Bars of similar length across the two graphs do not mean equal strength of sentiment.

Finally, this obviously didn’t ask how MUCH people liked or didn’t like these kinks. Opinions of “this is fine” are treated the same here as “this is primarily what I come to you for and I will buy every book featuring this theme”. Likewise “I’d prefer you didn’t write this but I’ll survive” is treated the same as “I will not read any of your stories out of fear of encountering this”. That’s a matter for a future survey.

Here’s what I take from the results that I got.

(a) My readers are overwhelming supportive of noncon and humiliation content, which is good, because that features in almost every story I write.

(b) My readers also overwhelmingly like mind control stories. I think to some extent that’s a factor of the mind-control-specific erotica sites being the easiest to find readers on, so I’ve drawn a particular crowd with particular tastes. For various reasons, I should probably write at least 20% more long-form mind control stories than I currently am.

(c) My readers are split on incest. 191 specifically enjoy it. 138 specifically don’t. And I note that I haven’t done this granularly, and split it into sub-categories of mother-son, father-daughter, sister-sister, or asked whether consent or age make a difference. My incest books continue to reliably be some of my best-sellers (particularly if they also feature mind control) so incest stories aren’t going anywhere, but I think I should probably decide at the beginning of ongoing stories whether they’re going to feature incest, ever, and tag them with content warnings appropriately, to help readers know whether they’re going to enjoy that particular story or not.

(d) Readers are largely in agreement on office/demotion fetish, orientation kink, fantasy/sci-fi, spanking/whipping, schoolgirl, impreg/breeding, and gangbang. Readers who were enthusiastic vastly outnumbered readers who weren’t, and I can probably go on writing these in exactly the way I have in the past, without any particular warnings.

(e) Patriarchy/new laws and bimbofication had particularly overwhelming positive ratios of “enjoy” to “avoid”, which is probably unsurprising given they’ve been pretty core to my brand since the beginning. (But note some of the comments I got about misogyny when we get to the free-text answers below.)

(f) I was interested in the results for romance and consent. 26% of respondents actively enjoy romance, and 12% of respondents actively don’t want it. On realistic consent, we have 25% who want to see more and 8% who want to see less.

These results are interesting to me because I write very few romance and consent stories, but the three serial stories I have ongoing in this space – The Bonuses, Selling Brielle and The Silver Leash – are some of my most wildly popular stories. Particularly The Silver Leash, which people are going nuts for. Everything I’m hearing in my normal engagement suggests readers want more stories like this (although they do still also want nasty fucked-up shit along with it).

This disconnect may be a case of how I’ve defined the categories, or the relatively small number of romance/consent stories I write, or just the problem of the survey not measuring actually how passionate people are about these opinions. I’m going to bear this result in mind, but probably place greater weight on the specific engagement levels I’m seeing around those romance-heavy storylines.

(g) Sadism / torture is a big space, and I think there’s probably definitional problems here. Everyone has a limit on how dark they’re prepared for a story to be, and few people enjoy it when a story goes significantly past that limit. On the other hand, hitting a reader’s limit *exactly* or pushing them just a tiny bit is often the thing that drives them to buy every book in my store. It’s definitely the case that readers come to me for dark stories and fucked-up shit.

In the survey we have 39% “enjoy” and 19% “avoid”. That’s one of the highest “avoid” rates, but it’s a little hard to handle this with just content tags, because it’s not really a matter of “does this story feature pain and misery”, but rather how much, and what specifically, and that doesn’t lend itself easily to binary content warning tags.

My previous experience trying to label high-end dark stories where the girl doesn’t enjoy it with a “misery” tag seemed to be turning off potential buyers generally, including those who may have enjoyed some level of darkness.

In addition, often the stories that I’ve personally thought were the darkest and nastiest get shrugs from audiences when I share them, while I’ll have people coming back to me after having bad experiences with stories that I thought were incredibly silly and non-serious.

I’ll think more about how to handle this going forward.

(h) Hucow / lactation – I’m honestly surprised by the “avoid” stat on this (20%) which is high enough that I probably need to tag these stories with content warnings. But also I’m suffering from not having broken this up further. From anecdotal feedback, the thing that really bothers many people in the “avoid” camp is the dehumanisation aspect, rather than the lactation aspect, and that’s really a different issue altogether.

(i) Watersports (piss) – I’ve always known this was a niche kink. Those who want it often want it *a lot* – including me, when I’m in the mood, so I’m definitely going to keep writing it. But if it’s not your kink it can be a big turn-off.

My policy for a long time was to carefully segregate watersports content into silos, like the anthology Golden Sins which largely features piss-themed stories that aren’t published anywhere else. And generally speaking I try to avoid putting serious and explicit piss-play into serialised stories unless it’s going to be a constant theme through the whole serial (such as in Brea Comes Home).

I’ve gotten a little lazy with that policy recently, encouraged by the continuing strong response to piss-heavy stories such as my novel Titcage and Brea Comes Home. But the survey results suggest I really shouldn’t, and watersports stories should be both tagged and siloed, which is what I’ll be doing in future.

Commentary: Zero surprises here. People like longer stories, and really the only reason I ever write anything other than longer stories is to have one-shots available for marketing purposes. (And because microfic takes very little work so it sometimes balances off-weeks where I’ve written particularly long serial chapters.)

THE TRANS QUESTION

This question was “are you trans, and/or do you engage in genderplay as a kink”. I’m not publishing the full chart because (a) I got too many “let me define myself precisely” answers for it to be easy reading, and (b) I got one or two actively offensive answers, and it’s not worth the effort of sanitising the data just to show the pretty chart.

First up, if you felt the need to answer this question in an insulting way, you can fuck right off and never come back. I don’t write explicitly trans characters or themes because it’s not my kink, but I have many trans friends – and many trans readers – and there’s a zero tolerance policy here for non-fantasy hate speech.

So here’s the short version of the data:

• 483 out of 530 people who filled out the survey answered this question.
• Of those, 373 (77.2%) answered “no”.
• 70 (14.5%) answered “trans”.
• 32 (6.6%) had a crossdressing/sissification kink.
• 31 (6.4%) engaged in cross-gender erotic roleplay online.

Note that responders could choose multiple options for this question, so a single respondent may have checked several boxes.

The “other” answers included some people who I might have lumped into one of the above categories but who clearly had different opinions; a few adjacent kinks I hadn’t mentioned (detransition kink, for example); some readers who were unsure or exploring their gender; and one reader who was opting out of the concept of gender entirely. I wish to sincerely thank all those answers – no one likes being put in a box when it comes to their identity, when they feel uncomfortable in those boxes, and I take all those responses seriously.

I was really interested in several things here. The first was getting a feel for how many of my readers were trans, because I knew there were a lot of you, and I know that trans people are (for whatever reasons) wildly overrepresented in the mind control and bimbofication kink communities. Up until now I’d been just going with a gut feeling, backed up by anecdotal information, but now I’ve got some hard data showing that you’re a significant subset of my readers.

The crossdressing / sissification / erotic roleplay question was ancillary to that, in that I know I’ve *also* got those readers – particularly some who contact me with names or online handles that don’t match other account details that may be available – and I wanted to let that cohort be identified too.

To be clear, I have absolutely no issue with my readers presenting as any gender they like in interacting with me, whether they’re cis, trans, or just roleplaying. That’s a matter for you, and you’re beloved and welcome as a reader.

And while we’re here – sorry, trans folks, I’m still not going to be writing explicitly trans characters or themes, but I will keep writing the sort of content that brought you to me in the first place.

Free-form feedback responses

Okay, let’s look at some of the content-related things that people wrote in the free text questions.

Too rapey (2 responses)

Two readers felt the level of non-consent in my stories went too far, and one specifically mentioned the word “rape” as a trigger. I’ve discussed this a bit above, under the “sadism” kink, but the short version is that while I absolutely understand that my darker stuff is going to be a problem for some people, it’s also overwhelmingly what sells memberships and books. And yes, the word “rape” is a very charged word, and that’s why I use it, specifically for the taboo effect. For some people that will trigger an aversion reaction. For others (myself included) freely using such a charged word is what makes it hot. I’m probably not going to do this any differently in future (but see my comments about doing some thinking about ways to identify the darkest stories).

Be more extreme (1 response)
Be less extreme (2 responses)

I’ve discussed this above, so I won’t repeat it here, other than to say that one of those readers who asked for stories to “less extreme” was also asking, in another comment, for me to write scat stories, which just goes to show it can be hard to define exactly what “extreme” is in a way that satisfies a majority of readers.

LESS incest generally (3 responses)
MORE mother-son incest (2 responses)
MORE father-daughter incest (1 response)
MORE incest generally ( 2 responses)

See my discussion about the incest kink above. I’m not going to stop writing it, but the strength of feeling on this means I should probably tag it better, and make it clear at the start of ongoing stories whether they’ll be incest stories or not, and stick to it.

More impregnation and hucow (2 responses)

I’m probably not going to write more than I already am, given the results of the enjoy/.avoid questions above, and I might label it better.

More cuckquean (1 response)

(This is the gender-switch of cuckold, where the kink is that the girl is humiliated by her boyfriend cheating on her, often for the deliberate purpose of humiliating her.)

I got this kink from the Purple Man arc of Alias, where Jessica Jones is forced to watch as the Purple Man fucks other girls. It requires a fairly specific setup, so it doesn’t come up often, but I do enjoy it and I’ll write it when the story gives me space.

More stories like Surrender (2 responses)

Neither of these responses told me exactly what they like about “Surrender”, but it’s a popular story with readers generally, sitting at the nexus of mind control, bimbofication, patriarchy, and demotion fetish, all of which are kinks that reliably sell books.

I can promise that, for reasons of money if nothing else, I will always have at least one ongoing office story and at least one ongoing mind control story, if not more, so you’ll probably see more like Surrender in future.

More stories like Tuning Chloe (2 responses)

Neither of these responses mentioned what they like about Tuning Chloe, but one did give examples of similar stories being “Correcting Kelly” (by Tori Hamlin) and “Ashley’s Addiction” (by me) so I’m assuming they were big on humiliating and disciplining bratty teens, which is certainly something I’ll be writing more of.

In any case Tuning Chloe is one of my all-time bestsellers, so I have strong incentives to write more stories about hypnotised humiliated brats.

More chapters of Ashley’s Addiction (1 response)

Part 6 is available to paid members right now. Whether Part 7 gets written will depend on whether any of my long-term Premium Members want it.

More stories like Selling Brielle (1 response)

Again, no indication as to what specifically is good about it, but I like this story too, and I’m certain to explore both the orientation kink and romance and D/s aspects in further stories.

More chapters of Workplace Culture (1 response)

It’s been years since I wrote the last chapter of this, largely due to a lack of requests for more, but good news – I’ve requested a chapter from myself, which means there’ll be a new chapter available to paid members within the next month, and available to free readers 50 days after that!

More infantilisation (1 response)

Adult women being treated like children, basically. In my stories it’s usually for the purpose of humiliation. I probably won’t write this more than I already am, because it sits right at the edge of a line for me, where if the women are treated *too* much like children (a) it stops being sexy for me and (b) it can cause problems with sites like Smashwords that are wary of underage-adjacent themes. But there’ll probably always be a place for forcing strong empowered women (or bratty teens) to dress in pink, put their hair in pigtails, and suck on a lollipop.

More corruption stories (1 response)

The responder cites “Brea Comes Home” and “The Silver Leash” as examples. (I didn’t think The Silver Leash *was* a corruption story, but okay.) But generally I’ve been writing corruption stories since I started. “The Foster Girl” is probably the clearest example of this among my current ongoing serials, and there will be more.

More bimbofication (4 responses)

As above, ATR readers love bimbofication. It’s not going anywhere.

More gender traitors (2 responses)

At this point I honestly don’t know how I could write more gender traitor stories without forcing out other kinks. Readers can currently enjoy this kink in “The Foster Girl”, “The Parole Officer”, and “Surrender”, among others.

More high-concept stories / more fantasy stories (4 responses)

Two readers specifically ask for fantasy. A third asks for “degraded royalty”. A fourth asks for more like Persephone Nine, Witch Trapper, and Noncon Isekai.

So here’s the thing – I *love* writing fantasy stories, and I love slutty queens and humiliated princesses. And when I’m publishing those stories for free, I get pretty good engagement on them.

But when I actually release them as a paid book, based on current experience, they don’t sell well. “Cast A Slutty Spell”, “The Ternish Betrayal” and “The Convent of Lesba” are among my lowest-selling titles.

Now, fair enough, I don’t think Convent of Lesba is my best work. It’s weird and very extreme. And Cast a Slutty Spell is an anthology. But The Ternish Betrayal is fairly representative of my fantasy stuff and it has never done as well as a novella at that price point should do.

So yes, I’m going to keep writing fantasy and sci-fi, because I love it, but I’m doing it with some caution, because based on what I know, it’s just not going to make me as much money as e.g. an office bimbofication or brat hypnosis story will.

More religious corruption (1 response)

Bless you, religious corruption reader. I love you to bits. But I think you are the *only* religious corruption reader, because my religious corruption stuff does even worse than my fantasy. “Harlot’s Hymn” and “Jessa Stories” have never sold well in any edition despite multiple relaunches. “Small Town Values” did okay but it’s more of a bimbo / free use story than a religious one.

I’ll still write it occasionally, because corrupted purity is a kink for me, and cults are a kink for me, but it will largely be *just* for me.

I realise I didn’t put this issue in the “kinks” question of the survey, and I should have.

More body modification (1 response)

My limit for body modification is fake tits, piercings, and various microchip “implants” (usually for electroshocks or aphrodisiacs) that are basically sci-fi. And sometimes, maybe, tattoos. Anything past that is an active turnoff for me, so you’re not going to see fake butts, lip filler, or the more extreme kind of body mods you sometimes see in petplay stories.

More long stories (19 responses)
Less microfiction (3 responses)

Yes, I know you prefer the long stories. 🙂

I currently write two serial chapters a week, each with an average length of 2500 words. Realistically, that’s as fast a pace as I can sustainably deliver.

I write short stories and microfic too, partly so that there’s new content every day of the week, and partly because one-shot stories can be posted in some places where serials don’t work, so they’re good for publicity. The vast majority of these stories are less than 1000 words – and microfics are usually less than 250 – so they’re not exactly taking time out of the “writing budget” I use for serials.

Or TLDR I probably wouldn’t be able to write more serials even if I stopped writing one-shots.

I could stop writing microfiction (or “stubs”) as some people call them, but you wouldn’t get a longer story instead. The only other option would be to re-run an older story in that slot as a reblog rather than giving you a new microfic. If a long reblog instead of a short new story is something that readers would want – and particularly paid members – then let me know, and I’ll consider it.

Some of these responses specifically asked for a slower burn on stories, or for longer (novel-length) stories. I take these seriously, but:

• No matter how slow a burn the story is, something erotic, memorable and attention grabbing needs to happen in chapter 1, otherwise no one’s ever going to read chapter 2. And likewise, something erotic needs to happen in every successive chapter. Stories with a lot of flirting before anything happens often die in bed, and while they CAN work (The Silver Leash seems to be doing fine under this model), they require a higher standard of writing, and more work and emotional investment by me, in order to pull them off.
• Novels are a losing economic proposition. I sell stories of between 40K and 80K words for $7.99, and I sell novels, which can be anywhere up to 160K words, for $9.99, only a couple of dollars more. Experimentation has shown that $9.99 is a hard barrier, and readers are unwilling to pay more than that for a single book, no matter how long the book is or how good it is. I’m better off breaking a novel into two or even three smaller books and selling each at $7.99, as Pixie Isobella did with her Abigail’s Descent trilogy and as Pan is doing with Cynthia’s Diet.
• Plus the demon that’s always dogging my steps is writer’s block. If a story gets too dark before it gets near the finish, or too complex, I can get avoidant about returning to it, and the story is never finished. The longer the story, the more likely this is to happen. I’m far better off wrapping up stories in a satisfactory way around the 55K word mark than pressing on and risk never finishing at all.

The other thing some responses mentioned is that they want stories to be finished faster overall – i.e. less total time between Chapter 1 and the book release.

I’ve been experimenting with that with some shorter and easier stories. I did that model with Tiffany’s Agenda, Allison’s Education, The Bradhall Academy, and The Guidance Counsellor. But I just can’t do it with every story – I need to work across a range of stories to keep my own interest engaged, and I prefer not to double down too much on a single story every week out of fear of driving away readers who aren’t into those particular kinks. I like readers to always know that if a story isn’t working for them, there’ll be something different next week.

My current aim is to reduce the total number of unfinished stories I’m working on, which should result in you getting chapters of your favourite stories more regularly, and help books get finished faster.

More watersports (1 response)
Less watersports (1 response)

I already discussed this above, but as mentioned, I’m not going to stop writing watersports but I will tag it and silo it.

Write a Choose Your Own Adventure story (1 response)

Despite being on the site CHYOA, I’ve never done this before, and I probably won’t. They’re a pain to write, and they’re inherently an inefficient way of writing content for any audience except for that one person that follows every branch. Formatting them as books presents more workload than the average PDF too.

But you never know, one day I might be in the mood.

More mind control (1 response)

As per the earlier questions, I know readers like mind control. Currently I have an external factor regulating my MC output, which is the website EMCSA. They’re one of my biggest referrers of readers. They take one story from me a week, and stories have to be at least 2,000 words, which means in an ideal world I’ll be writing 2,000 words of MC content per week, no more and no less.

In practice my MC story chapters tend to be 2500 to 3000 words, but also I don’t write quite enough to send EMCSA a story every week, so I skip the first week of every month with them. Therefore I could probably stand to have a bit more MC in my rotation.

More sexy outfits (1 response)

I didn’t get any answers saying “less sexy outfits” but I’ve regularly had anecdotal feedback from readers saying they skip over the outfit descriptions, so I think I’m just going to hold the course with this and keep doing what I do.

More pet play (2 responses)

Pet play is a sub-kink of humiliation for me (though I know it’s not necessarily for others), and it will turn up from time to time in particularly D/s oriented stories. I haven’t had a recent urge to focus on it heavily, but I may in future.

More bondage (1 response)

I don’t write detailed bondage because it’s something I do in real-life play, and I prefer to write fantasies rather than autobiography. But collars, chains, gags, cuffs, leashes and clamps will continue to make regular appearances.

More exhibitionism (1 response)

I’ll keep it in mind!

More lesbian (1 response)

Actually what this responder seems to have been asking for is more lesdom stories, with a primary female protagonist dominating other girls or forming a harem. When I write lesdom, I tend to write it where the lesbian dom is actually serving a man, or a man’s agenda (see “The Foster Girl”) but that’s not necessary for me to enjoy it. “Hellfire”, for example, is a pure lesdom story without a man pulling the strings. I’ll keep this idea in mind when starting new stories in future.

More ethical hero / protagonist (5 responses)

These responses all specifically mention “The Silver Leash”, which I am already aware is hugely popular with readers, so yes, I will absolutely be writing more stories like that.

I kind of want to get The Silver Leash to at least its Act One climax before trying more stories in a similar vein though because I don’t want to dilute what I’m doing with Silver Leash.

More celebrities (1 response)

No, sorry, I don’t write erotica about, or featuring, real people. I try to even avoid the thing of “Oh, she’s called Red Freyasdottir but it’s clearly Scarlett Johansson.” It’s dubiously ethical, and it’s a legal landmine. I’ll occasionally dabble in fanfic of fictional characters, but the “no real people” rule is a hard limit.

More fanfic (1 response)

I mostly just write fanfic for me, because I can’t sell it. The two ongoing fanfic serials – “Hellfire” and “Jasmine’s Wish” – haven’t had any interest from my long-term members for a while, and so there’s really little incentive for me to write more. I would like to finish those two stories, though.

More orgasm denial (2 responses)

I’m not hot enough for this to ever make it the central theme of a story, but you’ll probably keep seeing edging and orgasm denial for female subs about as often as you already see it.

More / less misogyny (3 responses)

I haven’t divided these up between “more” and “less” because to some extent they’re the same responses. Two of them are specifically phrased in variants of “I love your misogyny content but sometimes it’s too much”, and then one goes on to say I should be more like the works of a certain third-party creator who I personally see as significantly more extreme than my own stuff.

I’ll generally just refer back to the overwhelming popularity of patriarchy kink in the enjoy/avoid questions, and then my further comments about “extreme” stories and how I might handle them.

More bestiality (2 responses)
Less bestiality (1 response)

I don’t write explicit bestiality so there’s not a lot of room to write less. It’s occasionally implied, such as in a recent chapter of Surrender, but you never (I think) see it described explicitly on-page. (Unless it’s monsters or aliens, which is a legally distinct concept from bestiality.)

Likewise, I’m not going to write more, because it’s a legally dubious area. In some countries, fictional text depictions of bestiality are criminalised, including (theoretically) my own.

So you can assume it will continue to be occasionally implied or threatened in the context of the darker degradation stories, but I’m not going further than that. If you want knotting or suchlike, you’ll be better served by an Omegaverse story or something.

More underage (1 response)

No. Even were it not likely to literally put me in jail and see me deplatformed, I’m 100% not interested in writing characters aged under 18.

More male submissives (1 response)

There is precisely one submissive male in all of my body of work, and that is Empath in the X-Men fanfic story “Hellfire”, and he plays a minor role.

I’m a hetero male dom. Male submissives do nothing for me, and I’m not going to be writing them.

(Amusingly, at kink munches I seem to always end up talking to the young male subs, presumably because my complete lack of thirst makes me seem safe or something. I give them the safety talk, point them at the dommes, and encourage them to think seriously about the question of what a woman wants from them as a sub rather than what they want from a woman as a domme.)

More trans / genderplay / enbie stories (3 responses)

As discussed above, I won’t be doing this. It’s not my kink, it’s not my brand. Complicated and erotically charged associations with femininity are deeply tied to my sexuality and it doesn’t arouse me to take a wider view of gender in my stories.

In real-life I’ve done very satisfying and intimate kink play with enbie and genderfluid folks, because interactions with real-life people are about so much more than just sex and gender, and while they have met a lot of my needs and wants, they’re not the scenes that have made me the most wildly eager to fuck. So if I’m writing what turns me on most deeply, it doesn’t involve engaging with these particular spaces.

Better content tagging (1 response)

This is insanely tricky. Just getting a set of tags that actually covers the various – and highly specific – things that people do or do not want to see is nearly impossible. Applying it in a consistent and uniform way across stories is far harder than it sounds, because stories often do not like being put into neat genre/kink boxes. Sometimes I forget that certain elements are a specific kink rather than the background noise of my stories generally.

In addition, I’ve found that my experiments in tagging stories decreased my sales. Adding tags to stories did not encourage people to buy more content because they knew what they were getting – it in fact caused them to buy less books total, presumably because they were scared off.

And given that I haven’t had any significant number of customers asking for refunds because books weren’t what they expected, I don’t *think* this represents me fraudulently scamming customers into buying books they’re not going to enjoy.

Lastly, WordPress’ native tagging system is… frustrating to use. It’s not easy or quick to apply tags to articles, and nor is there any good way (once tagged) to *exclude* stories from search or display based on tags. (So you can’t tell the site to not show you watersports stories, for example.) Plus tags feed into SEO, so the manner in which I tag articles *will* affect how Google treats me.

What I’m getting out of this survey is that there are a few *specific* kinks that really make a difference for some readers, and those are watersports, incest, hucow and extreme sadism. In terms of the first three of those, I’m going to try and put a warning at the beginning of stories if the story contains one of those themes, so you can opt out quickly if it’s not your thing. That’s based entirely on a relatively high rate of people wanting to avoid those themes, as compared to other kinks.

In terms of sadism and extremity, there are difficult definitional questions in terms of “what’s extreme”, and it differs from person to person, so tagging simply isn’t going to work, and I need to do more thinking on how to better inform readers about that.

More bonus content (4 responses)

People wanted more exclusive or bonus content to appear in e-book releases. I agree, and I’m going to try and make sure that every e-book release or re-release going forward has at least some exclusive or bonus content.

More realism (1 response)

Specifically this reader asked for “more details, more reflection, more doubt”. Effectively that’s just a slower burn, and I 100% agree that a slower burn story can be very hot, but also (as above) it can be difficult to sell a story if there isn’t some extremely quick burn right there in the first chapter. It’s a balancing exercise, and I suspect you’re going to continue to see the kind of balance in this space that you already see in the range of stories I’m writing.

Use Master instead of Sir (1 response)

The full text of this response is:

“Use “Master” title more. Like in Selling Brielle. She’s been explicitly owned by the guy and should call him “Master” instead of “Sir”.”

Look, I used to be very into “Master” as a title. I played with it in real-life for a bit. I found that it connoted a level of 24/7 engagement and responsibility that I didn’t necessarily want in most of my relationships, and also that it was, for lack of a better word, trying a bit too hard.

I’ve personally settled into “Sir” as a preferred title in real-life because it’s a bit more subtle, a bit less thirsty, a bit more confident, and it more accurately reflects the level of commitment I’m offering to (and expecting from) most of the girls I play with.

That said, these are fantasies, not real life, and “Master” may well be the correct word in some of these relationships. Plus it’s obviously hot to many readers in the way it was once hot to me. So I’m going to look out for appropriate places to use it.

(Astute readers will notice I’ve already acted on this suggestion in the most recent chapter of “The Bonuses” released to paid ATR members.)

Explore new kinks (1 response)

A reader urges me to identify and explore new kinks that I’ve never explored.

Unfortunately, dear reader, I am very uninhibited, and I do not have a secret chest of hidden desires that I have never dared explore in fiction. What you see on the page is pretty much the full spectrum of my sexuality.

Very occasionally I see a piece of media, or read a story, that gives me a new kink. Most recently, Pan convinced me I could enjoy breaking a girl’s body image (at least in fantasy) in his book “Cynthia’s Discipline”, which had previously been outside the limits of what I enjoyed in degradation play.

If I discover new kinks, I promise you I will write about them.

But for those hoping I’m going to wake up one day and want to write an M/M story, or a sissification story, or gore, I can pretty much promise you that’s not going to happen.

More interaction with All These Roadworks (1 response)

This response suggested a forum that readers could talk to me on, or a suggestion box of story ideas for paying members.

I’ve thought about hosting a forum (or a Discord) and discarded it because I don’t want the risks, responsibilities or workload that come with moderating that space. But all readers – whether paying or otherwise – are welcome and encouraged to message me on any platform I’m on, or email me! Please do NOT send unsolicited images or unsolicited story ideas, and please be aware that I’m not interested in sexting or erotic roleplay with readers. (Respectful flirting is fine.)

I already take story requests from long-term Premium Members (currently those who were Premium Members in October 2022 and are still Premium Members today). That generates me more than eight requests a month – which is to say, more serial chapters than I write per month – so I don’t really have space or need for other story requests, and I prefer to prioritise my longest-term paying members in deciding whose tastes to please.

And finally… a specific concern about the use of the word “deadname” (1 response)

One reader raised a concern about my use of the word “deadname” in a couple of bimbofication stories to refer to the pre-bimbo identity of the female protagonist. They recognised my good faith intentions, but felt this was inappropriate and icky.

My intentions *were* in good faith, and I’d thought it was sufficiently satirical to be enjoyed in that spirit by everyone. However, I can understand how it might have been offensive or distasteful even within the concept of a dystopian erotic fantasy.

Intentions ultimately don’t matter. I’m a skilled writer and I can think of other ways to arouse people that don’t cause this issue. I apologise for any offence caused, and I’m not going to use that particular trope in future. I’ll think of something even hotter instead, and I’ll try and remember to edit those particular stories next time they’re republished.

Thanks for raising the issue, reader.

===

Next time, in the final survey breakdown, I’m going to look at the mental health questions, the issue of payment options, and the question of politics.

• All These Roadworks
  26 November 2024