If you ever wanted to know how to make money writing erotica, it turns out to be moderately lucrative, but the market is weirdly distorted by Amazon.

The things I learned:

• It’s really hard work for a meager living.

  Johnson himself has been writing erotica for four years, publishing over a thousand stories under more than 50 pen names. He puts in ten-hour days; if he really pushes himself, he can write two 4,000-word short stories or a 10,000-word novella in a day.

• Amazon has arbitrary rules for what they’ll publish. Incest isn’t allowed, for instance, so there are stories about step-siblings fooling around. And why all the dinosaur stories?

  Despite what you may have read about dinosaur erotica, Johnson says there’s not actually much of a market out there for authors like Chuck Tingle (moderately famous for absurdist classics like “My Ass is Haunted by the Gay Unicorn Colonel,” “Slammed in the Butthole by My Concept of Linear Time,” and the newly Hugo-nominated “Space Raptor Butt Invasion.”) Johnson says there is indeed such a thing as dinosaur porn—apparently a genre created to evade Amazon’s ban on bestiality, which only applies to living species—but it doesn’t have a lot of readers.

  So fictional extinct animals are fair game, but fictional living species are off-limits?

• Amazon has a near-monopoly.

  Apple and Barnes & Noble do sell some independently published e-books, but the AuthorEarnings site owner estimates that 85 percent of e-book sales—in all genres, not just erotica—come from Amazon. The company has cornered the market partly by requiring authors to sell exclusively through it if they want to be included in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s Netflix-style subscription service.

• Authors are at the mercy of Amazon’s arbitrary decisions. They can change the rules for payments, as well as limiting what content can be sold.

  Skyes said it seems like online sellers are willing to profit from erotica but not to stand behind authors when they get complaints about stories they find unsavory. “Retailers are happy to throw erotica writers under the bus by claiming to have not known what content was being uploaded to their storefronts,” Skyes said. “I never know if the next insane email I wake up to is going to be the one that means yesterday was my last day of writing for a living.”

• I guess unsurprisingly, there is quite a bit of gender discrimination if you’re writing books about sex.

  Incidentally, Cooper is a guy writing under a female pen name, something that’s extremely common since female readers seem mostly disinclined to buy writing published under a male name.

• Explicit erotica is for a narrow niche market — the real money is in less-explicit romance novels.

  Romance has a much larger readership than erotica, and with Amazon’s new pay structure, Enne said, it’s far easier to make good money in the genre, particularly if you’ve already built up an audience. “Erotica is now the baby step to romance,” she said.

At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that becoming a biologist through years of training, negotiating a dicey job market, and putting in 10 hour days 6-7 days a week wasn’t actually as stupid a decision as I thought. Especially since Amazon wouldn’t have let me publish my freaky stories of Architeuthis clutch mates getting wild with each other.

The Great American Satan is writing about role-playing games, and it’s enlightening for someone who played these games 25-30 years ago. Erotic and romantic role-play? Never heard of it. We were nerds. We didn’t know what sex was, and no way were we going to game it, since that would have just meant exposing our ignorance.

So I have a solution for G.A. Satan: only let virgins play. Solves everything.

On my flight to Korea, I indulged in some light reading: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. I liked it just for the title: a “fingersmith” is a Victorian pickpocket, and the word develops a few other meanings as the story progresses. It’s an incredibly twisty story about a young woman who is brought in to an elaborate con job of a rich young heiress who is the ward of a perverse older collector of Victorian erotica. But the story just keeps getting weirder and darker and more complicated, and it never goes where you expect it to. That’s what I like in my reading: surprises.

And now I learn it’s being made into a movie! And a movie by the perfect director for this story, Park Chan-Wook, who previously made a series of revenge movies, including Oldboy. It’s called The Handmaiden, which is OK and also suggestive, if not as good as Fingersmith, and it’s being translated to Colonial Era Korea rather than Victorian England. There are apparently a lot of things being added that weren’t in the book, as well.

And that’s just the beginning of the surprises. Sook-hee’s narrative doesn’t go at all the way you think it might. Nor does Hideko’s, and unlike most movies telling the same story from different points of views, it actually deepens and enriches everything we’ve already learned. We see her bizarre upbringing; learn the real, perverse reason for those “reading lessons;” discover the true nature of her relationship with The Count. It would be cruel to spoil the many, many surprises that remain, but just know that there are mid-air sex demonstrations with a wooden mannequin; liquid opium; hidden moats; a prominent octopus; constantly shifting alliances; and, of course — this is Park Chan-Wook we’re talking about — at least one person getting appendages cut off. Plus, the switch to Colonial Era Korea from Victorian England adds a fascinating layer of Korean-Japanese ethnic strife, and all the subtle class issues that entails.

They had me at “a prominent octopus”.

Now the only question is…where can I see it? I can’t quite imagine this appearing at the Morris Theater.