The Spanking Writers

When we started publishing anthologies of “The Spanking Writers”,  we took a decision not to make them available as e-books. (For various reasons, chief of which being: “Who on earth would want one?”) Several people have since surprised us by asking about an e-book edition, and – because we don’t like disappointing anybody – we’re now thinking of making one available.

I’m not sure I quite understand the need, and I’d love it if you gave me your views on spanking e-books. A Kindle version I can understand: if you have an e-reader, you’ll want books to go on it. But if you don’t have a Kindle, is having an e-book option likely to excite you?

If you prefer e-books, is this because of privacy considerations? Shelf-space issues? Some other reason?

Would you buy a Spanking Writers anthology as a non-Kindle e-book?

EDITED TO ADD: Enough people like the idea of downloadable ebooks, that I went ahead an enabled the ebook feature for Spanking Writers 2. You can get it here.

I’m very happy to announce that, if you were waiting to get your copy of our second anthology from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, you can now do so, because “The Spanking Writers. Volume 2″ is officially amazoned.

You can also still get it from its original home (and we get to keep a few more pennies if you do that – just so you know).

However you get our book, we hope you’ll enjoy it, and come back to tell us so!

EDITED TO ADD: It’s also now available as a PDF ebook right here.

It struck me as we’ve tweeted merrily away from the FMS party this weekend that we’ve never mentioned our Twitter accounts here. In case anyone’s interested, Abel can be found as @AbelJenkins and Haron’s user name is @AdeleHaze. Catch us there!

Ladies, gentlemen and the rest of you: out of the deep recesses of our kinky minds comes our new book: “The Spanking Writers, Volume 2″ – a collection of the best entries from the blog, 2008-2009.

The blog, with its daily posts, is huge, and can be overwhelming – but we have gone through the whole archive from the two years since the previous volume came out, and picked the best and juiciest posts for your enjoyment.

As always, the book will take a few weeks to appear on Amazon, but you can get it now here, for £9.95 or the local equivalent. If you’re going to the Florida Moonshine party in June, you’ll find us in the vendors’ fair, selling a few copies, and autographing them for those who want our signatures.

A Kindle version is also coming up in the next couple of weeks.

Good news: SpankingCast, our spanking podcast, has just been accepted by iTunes for listing in their podcast directory. This means that you can subscribe through iTunes to have it delivered to you automatically every time we post a new episode. (It’s free, you know.)

Here’s how you subscribe:

1. Automatically:

- Click this iTunes link. This will open iTunes and take you straight to our page.

- Click “subscribe free”. That’s it!

2. Manually:

- Open iTunes

- Go to iTunes Store

- Type “SpankingCast” into the search tab

- When our listing shows up, click the “subscribe free” button

- Enjoy the show!

As you can see, either way is pretty easy; so enjoy your audio spanking show to your heart’s content.

(Episode 2 is coming up this weekend, and this time I’ll do all the talking. It’ll be interesting, I promise!)

We’re very excited to unveil our new project today: SpankingCast, our very own podcast on our favourite topic: spanking, spanking and more spanking.

If you don’t know what a podcast is, allow us to explain: essentially, it’s an audio blog. We record an audio track and publish it on the blog, and you can download it and listen to it on your MP3 player. It’s that simple.

We’ll notify you of new episodes here on The Spanking Writers; eventually we hope that our feed will be accepted by iTunes, which is another great way of subscribing. (We’ll let you know when that happens.)

In the meantime, we give you SpankingCast Episode 1: “Into spanking”.

Welcome to the first episode of SpankingCast, hosted by Abel and Haron, two of the web’s best-known writers of spanking erotica.

In this debut episode, Abel muses about tolerance and acceptance of kink in society, quoting Matthew Syed from The Times.

Relevant links:

“Hypocrisy is one thing. Morality is another.”

“The problem with stereotypes”

“Hot off the presses”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

We promised to let you know when Abel’s spanking story collection “The Punishment List” would appear on Amazon. Well, it’s there now.

First, you can read all about the book.

Then you can check it out on Amazon US, or Amazon UK, or Amazon DE, or wherever you live, really.

Oh yes, it’s also available for Kindle.

If you enjoy the book, please consider reviewing it on Amazon, or sending Abel some feedback – we would both really appreciate it.

Seems as though we  passed something of a milestone a few minutes ago:

OK, page load stats are misleading – they don’t include the hundreds of folks who read us on RSS, for example, or readers of Abel’s stories page. But 2.5 million hits for a blog that features the written word only, and no naughty pictures, ain’t at all bad! Sorry for the self-c0ngratulatory post, but we’re really happy!

We’d have a little drink to celebrate – had we not already had more than enough for the evening!

Good news for those of you who asked for it: Abel’s spanking story collection, “The Punishment List” is now out in its Kindle edition.

Buy it, read it, and tell your friends!

P.S. You can still buy the paperback edition, of course.

Lately, I’ve not had as much time as I’d have liked to read other blogs out there: seeing kinky friends in real life has rather taken priority over my online explorations. I’ve just about kept up-to-date with my “Spanking – Friends” category in Google Reader (that is, blogs written by people we’ve actually met, or know so well online that they class as friends even though we’ve yet to met in person).

But when I glanced at my “Spanking – General” feeds the other evening, I found a ridiculously high number of unread posts. At the same time, I noticed that a surprisingly large proportion of the blogs to which I subscribe weren’t showing any new posts at all. So I started pruning: if a blog on the list didn’t show any new activity – and had thus been dormant for the eight weeks or so since my last catch-up – then I deleted by subscription. Of course, I may have been a tad premature with some – we’re unusual in posting every day, and some may be happy posting every few months when they have something of particular interest to say. But it’s a fair guess that two months of no activity suggests the site in question isn’t exactly that active!

And guess what proportion of the 201 spanking blogs on my lists appeared to be defunct? No fewer than 97 – very nearly half – including many that had previously been pretty active.

Why is this, I wondered? Boredom or a lack of time on the writer’s behalf  - or simply running out of things to say: a sense that they’d come online to explore the ideas that had been percolating in their minds for so long, had explored them, and found nothing left to share? Perhaps their blogs have achieved their objectives (introduce myself, meet a partner, disappear happily back into the shadows)? Perhaps they just didn’t enjoy writing in this format as much as they’d thought they would.

Or maybe it’s resulted from ennui amongst their readers, leading to too few site visits or comments for writing to be worthwhile? Or (I pray not) a mass migration to Twitter? Or even a defection from blogging to the boards of the kinky social networking sites – such as Fetlife or SpankoLife (my personal favourite); I’m listed as ‘Abel’ on each, if you ever fancy saying hi!

It does make me wonder about trends in the spankosphere. I’m guessing that, a few years down the line, we’ll still see a still-smaller number of blogs – the best and most popular of those here today complemented by some new arrivals (as new folks discover the scene, pluck  up the courage to post, or reach the age at which they’re legally or practically able to set up a site). The percentage of blogs with purely commercial content (as a means to attract customers for paid sites) might increase in comparison to those of us who simply have a passion for writing about kink.

And technology will inevitably evolve: I’d love it if that involved an easy and elegant way to consolidate our blog with our stories with our tweets with our podcasts (watch this space: ’spankingcasts’ on the way soon!) – and to collaborate more on writing, ideas and conversations with others who share our enthusiasms.

Nearly four years in, we’re still buzzing with ideas, for sure. But I’m really interested to learn what others think…