My Dad, the Pornographer (2015)

The author, Chris Offutt, is a rather enjoyable novelist in his own right. I recommend his short story collections "Kentucky Straight" and "Out of the Woods" for a start. What I find unusual is his perspective: His fiction is set in a very rural and poor environment, and clearly he had a foot in that himself once, but no longer quite fits in (A dilemma spelled out in his memoir No Heroes — and there was a battle on comment sides whether he did or did not misrepresent his native area).

Do all of you folks have NYT accounts? I’m not a subscriber and I won’t give them money and I wish people would stop submitting their links to HN.

Kind of makes you wonder how many other folks have works of art they’ve worked on for lifetimes that are either a) destroyed, b) never released, or c) lost forever.

After reading this account, I felt somewhat sorry for his father.

(2015)

Really enjoying the comments

As someone who has worked in the publishing world, including erotica and "romance" novels, a lot of the retrograde attitudes you see depicted in this article are very much alive today in the US. Perhaps not encoded in law, but it is difficult, for instance, to find a distributor for this material that also caters to a more urbane audience.

Romance / erotica books do not have to be trash, they can very much be moving works of fiction in their own right. But places like McNally Johnson won't buy this kind of stuff even though it does sell very well online. Platforms like Instagram make it difficult as well - Twitter is really the only remaining mainstream platform that will not censor images for pornographic content. You can't use payment processors like PayPal or Stripe either, at least not if you want to keep your money consistently. You have to play a war of attrition with keywords on your site so you can hit SEO thresholds but not set off any content sniffing that payment processors do.

Meanwhile, sell a book about serial killers and everything's hunky-dory. That book can even include heinous sexual transgressions depicted in gruesome detail but as long as you don't have nipples on the cover or 'erotica' in the copy Stripe will cash you out all day long

From the title I thought that this was about the "My dad wrote a porno" podcast and was hoping the next season was coming out soon.

Well it turns out there are other dads who have made pornography! Who would've thought?