The spanking writers' Golden Age: the 1980s

The latter part of the 1970s saw any number of porn merchants trying to get a slice of the Janus pie. Magazines with titles long forgotten appeared, enjoyed a brief spell on the shelves, and than vanished like the early morning dew. However two factors came together in the the very early 1980s to ensure that the monopoly was going to collapse. The first we discussed last week, and that was the feud that broke out within the Janus organisation. The second involved the willingness of the wholesalers to carry adult titles.

WH Smith had always refused to stock Janus, but that policy changed in the late 1970s. What that meant was that other publishers could use an already existing distribution system if they could get a title up and running. Until then getting Janus outside London involved a shop buying the magazine each month and waiting for those issues to arrive by parcel post. The change of policy by WH Smith meant that anybody who could guarantee a set number of sales each month could pretty much be sure of their title being carried by Smith's. The London porn merchants hastened to set up their titles.

By the early 1980s Blushes, Kane and Roue were all competing with Janus for the national fladge readership. Many provincial titles also sprang up, most using a more sophisticated version of the old duplicating technology that had produced the typescripts. They circulated in their region and by post to subscribers outside it.

You want to know about money, I can tell. Janus always paid the best, giving its hacks about £25.00 per thousand words. The other titles paid £20.00 and the provincials about £15.00. All of this was cash money, or by a cheque made out to cash, which amounted to the same thing.

By God the money rolled in! Any half decent hack who could stay sober long enough to string a sentence together could be virtually guaranteed a regular income. Janus were their usual snotty selves once they had overcome their little local difficulties, but the other titles took whatever we chose to give them and bloody well liked it. If you do the sums you can see what was going on. Hiring a model, studio and photographer cost a lot of money. Paying me a hundred quid to fill three or four pages in the rag worked out a lot cheaper - and my efforts could be used with stock photos taken from the archives - and that padded out the story to another page at least.

The situation became so ridiculous that I can remember writing a tale called The Master of Blackstone Hall for Roue, and being paid £100 for the five thousand word epic. Then I sold the same story to a Sheffield publisher who gave me £75.00 for it. Finally the story was sold yet again for £25.00 to a bloke who ran a spanking newsletter which included a story every month. Sure, I had to agree to change the story slightly and then break it down into five chapters, that then ran one a month in the newsletter, but it was still the same tale at the end of the day.

The introduction of personal computers only made the work easier. The writers discovered that a word processor package meant that a story could have names, locations and descriptions added to a manuscript to personalise it. So began the short-lived but highly lucrative trade of personalised manuscripts. The punter would supply the names that he wanted, along with some other details. Half an hour later all that had been added to the mix and a story was printed up to be posted to the punter next morning.

What could possibly happen to bring an end to this halcyon world? The internet, that's what happened. The trade in magazines just dried up as more and more people joined the computer age in the 1990s. I can remember speaking to a publisher in about 1995 with a view to writing some stories for him and he candidly admitted that the most that he could pay was a tenner per thousand words and he was only offering that for old time's sake and because he knew that I could write. He pulled all his material off the web, an activity that involved hours of plodding through the turgid prose that enthusiastic amateurs had written - but when he eventually found something decent then it could be nicked for free. The porn trade - don't you just love it?

Let's face it, we had a good run down the years and that Golden Age had to come to an end at some time. Funnily enough, I have now started blogging, an activity which combines both publishing and writing, so perhaps a new Golden Age is on the horizon? I will comment more on that in a later posting, but the next instalment of this series will look at my time as a spanking video star - check back for that!