In WordPress blog posts, before you add a title, there’s just a gray placeholder that says ‘title,’ and honestly, that was as good a name as any for this.

I love titles. Titles for stories are the first thing that can tell you if a story is going to be good or bad. I lucked out in a lot of ways when I started writing erotica, not the least of which with the title of ‘Being More Social.’ It was vague enough to not refer to the actual sex that was had, yet just specific enough to hint towards the themes of the story, and drew people in, as well as being catchy. This isn’t just to pat my own back, I swear, I’m getting to a point here.

Some of the more famous online sex stories have these kinds of titles. A Game of Inches. She Is The One. A New Day, a New Me. They all display with subtlety the themes of their stories, yet don’t give away what actually happens in them. They’re all catchy. Most importantly, they don’t refer to the sex that’s going on. No joke of a lie, if one wants to create a memorable story, the title should not mention sex. Why? Because it’s overused and no one is going to remember your story when a billion other stories with similar titles come out in the subsequent month. To have some fun and prove a point, at the time of writing this blog post I’m going to log on to sexstories.com and look at the most popular ‘last 30 days’ category and see how many have overt titles (such as ‘banging my sister’ or ‘I fucked the neighbor’ or what-have-you).

Seven. Seven stories. Special shout-out to ‘My Girlfriend and I Have Sex in Front of Her Sister,’ I wonder what happens in that story. I would say that it’s a shame the story is titled that way in case it’s good, but I’m also going to guess it’s not a very story-based story and the author doesn’t expect that story to get honored by the annals of time. Which, as I’ve said before, is fine. I write these blogs to advocate for story-based sex stories but that doesn’t mean a stroke story isn’t valid if that’s what you want. I just definitely don’t want that.

There were a few story names that jumped out at me. Movie Night. A Run on the Beach. Rescued from the Rain. I haven’t read any of these stories (except for Rescued From the Rain, and the only reason I didn’t like it is because it contained child corruption and near-incestuous themes, that doesn’t change the fact that Katie Werner writes well) but their names jump out at me. I bet a few jump out at you too. A title goes a surprisingly long way for a story. Sometimes an idea for a title inspires a story, which hopefully you all will see soon with the nearly-completed Only If You Want.

Needless to say, I lucked out with Being More Social as a title. My later titles weren’t amazing. Panopticon? Too high-brow. Amy’s Fantasy? Sex-themed, probably gets buried in other similar titles. Not memorable enough. The Good, The Bad and The Molly? Cheesy, not that fluid, doesn’t really roll off the tongue. Sometimes writers luck out on their titles, and sometimes they know what they’re doing. Obviously, I’m in the camp of the former, not the latter, but hey, this is a learning experience for everyone. I’ll talk to you all next week.