I was 22, and had answered an anonymous Guardian advert for an editorial assistant at an “international magazine company”. The company turned out to be Paul Raymond Publications. I’d secured the interview by captioning a photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger surrounded by half-naked women. It had almost made the team laugh, the young man conceded.

It was the early Nineties, when men’s magazines were a booming global business. I knew next to nothing about porn. Yet here I was, however shit, apparently a front-runner for a job writing it. Among the general dogsbody duties was writing the captions and stories accompanying the photographs in Mayfair, Club and Razzle and the longer ”confessions”: male fantasies told from the woman’s point of view.

He tossed a copy of Club onto my lap. I had never opened the magazine in my life. “What would you improve?” he asked. Lifting the cover gingerly, I wondered aloud whether there was room for women’s actual sexual fantasies in the magazines, as Marie Claire was beginning to publish. My interviewer flinched like I’d morphed into Andrea Dworkin. “We don’t do that here,” he said firmly.

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I was offered the job. When I graduated in 1990 there was a very deep recession and very few graduate jobs in journalism. I wasn’t going to turn this one down. As I explained to my mother, who was mortified by my new trajectory, plenty of magazine journalists had started in porn magazine publishing, including my then idol, Lynn Barber.

On my first day, the Managing Editor looked up briefly from his lightbox, hemmed in by towers of contact sheets. He was a young man, but had the world-weariness of someone who had seen it all. “If you miss a deadline, you’re sacked,” he said. He oversaw the frenetic production schedules of all the magazines, but his main job was choosing the photographs. His days were spent peering through his eyeglass, parsing the “pinkness” and “neatness” of the girls’ genitals, and the “happiness” and “filthiness” of their faces.

Mayfair was branded as “classy” with reviews of high-end cars, and even a helicopter which I got to take a ride in. Club was “cool”, aimed at a readership that would later flock to magazines like Loaded. And Razzle was the one we actually enjoyed writing for. It also had a rare intrusion of reality: “Readers’ Wives”, that much-loved institution whereby punters sent in naked photographs of their wives sprawled on the settee, against a remarkably consistent backdrop of floral wallpaper and flying ducks. The affection was tangible even if the Polaroids were terrible quality. It was the only genuine reader material and, along with the Razzle Romp, a monthly spread of naked girls splashing in pools of messy food like baked beans or mushy peas, gave Razzle its uniquely jolly appeal.

Everything else was invented by us — even the Letters. The real letters were unpublishable, and a hazard to open: barely literate, often enclosing Polaroids of the sender’s penis — and occasionally, rather touchingly, a marriage proposal to a model.

The writing of pornography was a serious and exacting discipline with a single purpose: to give a man an orgasm. A thousand words had to be exactly a thousand, with at least two sexual payoffs and the correct vocabulary for each magazine. I loved the invention and humour, especially in Razzle, and credit the work with helping make me a poet. Poetry, too, needs a climax, though usually an emotional one.

The confessions were always in women’s voices, but they expressed male fantasies. The models in the photographs were real but their names and their confessions were all invented. Raymond wanted women writers for authenticity, but no actual authenticity was allowed.

A model would arrive on my desk as a stack of photographs. I gave her a name, a biography if required, and a “confession” to fit the pictures. If readers liked her, she’d return, and I’d pick up the thread of a sex life I’d invented for someone I’d never met.

It was harder than it sounds. An editor — or sometimes the whole office — would read each story and pronounce it horny or not horny. My early efforts were humiliatingly not horny. I still blush to remember scouring my mind for an exciting new setting and plumping for the elephant enclosure at the zoo. My colleagues didn’t know I’d been a zookeeper, so thought I was not only not horny but weird.

Once I got the hang of it, I was entrusted with the popular recurring girls. One was “Ginny”, a bright and bubbly blonde girl-next-door type, and a Club favourite. The photographs in Club showed only basic nudity: a shoot would begin with that and progress all the way to hardcore sex, with different stages sent to different countries according to their obscenity laws. We only worked with Ginny’s early shots. Whatever was in the later ones, destined for countries like Denmark, I never saw.

Over the following months, Ginny, in her pictures, lost her sparkle and her eyes grew hollow. The Editor studied the bags beneath them on his lightbox and shook his head solemnly. “Drugs, probably,” he said. But if she didn’t cheer up, she would have to go. Readers would get restive: Paul Raymond girls were always happy. After just a few months gracing our pages, Ginny was gone. I never even knew her name.

The conflict between fact and fiction began to bleed into my own life. Every man I knew, including the nice ones, confessed his love of porn, assuming that because I worked at Paul Raymond I must love it too. When I insisted on a writing credit at the front of the magazine, punters rang the office and masturbated over the phone. The final straw came when a man I really liked asked me, as we were working up to sleeping together for the first time, to recite one of my confessions. When I stumbled, he seemed surprised, then irritated, as though I’d deceived him.

Did he really believe the fantasies I wrote were my own? I was a writer who had learned to make men ejaculate with just my words; after which I went home, curled up in my leg warmers and watched Cheers. Wanting — or, worse, needing — me to embody my fabrications made him into a punter, just like those who rang me at the office, or propositioned a model. When you have glimpsed the punter in your boyfriend there is no going back. I knew I would have to leave the job, or I would be unable to have a relationship with a man without the punter intruding and ruining it all. Before the year was out, I left as a honed writer who could stare down any deadline, but one who could no longer maintain the required pretence.

The magazine pornography of my time at Paul Raymond is of course a universe away from what is now available online. I could never have imagined, when I left Paul Raymond, what pornography would become. A man who once had to brave a newsagent to buy Razzle can now watch an almost limitless succession of graphic sex acts on his phone, in complete privacy. The internet has taken him into the later stages of those photographic shoots I never saw, and far beyond. Yet one thing has not really changed much at all. The old promise has simply been supercharged beyond all imaginings: these women are real, and they really want it.

Ginny was a real person, but everything the magazine claimed about her I had invented. When her face no longer fitted the fiction, she was discarded from our pages. Online, the acts are more extreme, the women even more readily replaced. But though today’s videos show us far more than those old photographs, they tell us no more about what a woman actually wants. And the fantasy still follows the customer home — I’d already encountered that punter in my boyfriend.

Meanwhile, in Oxford, women are queuing down the street to buy books from shelves marked “Monster Smut” and “Unhinged” at Bad Girl Books. Here pornography has taken another direction entirely: into words, with no photographs at all. The fantasies are not necessarily gentle ones, encompassing domination, coercion and sexual violence, sometimes involving monsters, sometimes frighteningly human men. In Navessa Allen’s Lights Out, for instance, a trauma nurse imagines a masked man breaking into her house. After reading her comments online, he decides to oblige. Her fantasy becomes reality within the novel, but nobody reading it is asked to believe it actually happened.

More than 30 years later, I have my answer to the question I asked at my interview: was there room in the industry for women’s sexual fantasies? At Paul Raymond, I put men’s fantasies into women’s mouths and passed them off as real. Now women are writing and buying their own, however outrageous, without pretending any of it is true — or demanding others play along.

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The new pornography legislation coming into force tomorrow draws this distinction, restricting certain extreme pornographic images that appear real, but leaving written fiction alone. Under the Crime and Policing Act, possessing or publishing explicit pornographic images of strangulation or suffocation, among other acts, will become an offence in England and Wales if a reasonable viewer would think the people depicted were real — even if AI-generated. The Online Safety Act also requires platforms to take steps to prevent UK users encountering such images.

Yet the new offences don’t touch written fiction, however disturbing or violent, nor images that are plainly fantastical, including some anime and hentai, which often use monsters or fantasy creatures in pornographic scenarios. The government’s aim is to prevent the normalisation of harmful sexual behaviour through images that look real. There is no attempt to outlaw extreme fantasies themselves.

Bad Girl Books in Oxford sells T-shirts proclaiming “I Heart Fictional Men”. The books may not be my cup of tea, but I’m getting the T-shirt. That doesn’t mean I approve of every fantasy, or would enjoy writing it. But I did love the invention and skill of my writing at Paul Raymond. My trouble with porn began with the insistence that it was real — and that I had to live it myself.

New Bedford has come for the publishing industry — for its “Big Five” publishers and its MFA-trained fiction writers — in the form of Romantasy, a new genre rewriting all the rules, perhaps for the better. The portmanteau term, for the uninitiated, means “any fantasy novel that has romance as the main plot or a strong side-plot”, according to Katie Cunningham, owner of Kiss & Tale books in Collingswood, NJ. The books also tend to be hashtag-friendly, include explicit sex scenes, and wildly sample from the folkloric palate of tropes and subgenres established by previous narratives: Hades and Persephone, love triangles, friends-to-enemies, shapeshifters, slavery, Greek Gods, dragons, and vampires, to name just a few.

The combination of romance and fantasy isn’t new, of course. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, published in 2005, was a breakout success that mainstream publishing has strived in vain to replicate ever since. But it wasn’t until TikTok that readers got together and demonstrated through their choices and enthusiasms just where the sweet spot lay.

The numbers speak for themselves. Five of the top-10 best-selling titles of 2024 were written by the category’s two most prominent authors, Sarah J. Mass and Rebecca Yarros, according to Publisher’s Weekly statistics from October. Bloomberg estimates that in 2024, Romantasy books achieved $610 million in sales, up from $454 million in 2023. The category is juicing the statistics on overall book sales, which are in decline, and has contributed to a boom in romance-focused bookstores in the United States.

“It has been amazing and crazy to me how busy we’ve been,” says Cunningham. Katie Steele, the Romantasy expert at A Novel Romance, a Kentucky bookstore, says that demand was so high the owners moved to a new space “10 times the size” after only a year in operation. Steele’s other topic areas are manga, danmei (Chinese novels with male-male, or MM, romance), and queer.

Victoria Gerken, the publisher of Podium Entertainment, a digital-first publisher that has moved into print distribution on the wings of Romantasy, believes the genre has been so successful because it “provides entertainment for its audience that’s not available in any other format”. This entertainment is a form of escapism that allows women whose daily lives have little magic in them to imagine themselves as bold and powerful, starring in an exciting adventure and having great sex. Perhaps it’s the chick version of the thrill that men get from video games. It’s also worth noting that the magical framing allows women to perform girl-power and to be swept off their feet by men (or male beings) who are unapologetically dominant and boast castles and domains, too. Between the genre’s unique pleasures and an audience Gerken describes as “voracious”, she says “it’s a little bit of a perfect storm. The demand has always been there, but nobody harnessed it.”

Just how a multibillion-dollar industry devoted to selling books managed to miss the demand is an interesting question, but it’s clear that the category is being driven by authors and fans, with little distinction between mainstream and self-published titles.

The first breakout Romantasy title was the conventionally published Sarah J. Mass series A Court of Thrones and Roses (#ACOTAR), a young-adult fantasy romance in which a young woman falls in love with a Lord of the Fae. The series began publication in 2015 but blew up online during the pandemic, around the same time its publisher, Bloomsbury, reclassified it as an adult due to its increasingly graphic sexual content.

Yet sales are also being driven by the proliferation of self-publishing platforms, with authors increasingly winning a following as self-published audiobooks, e-books, or print-on-demand, and only later making deals with the corporates. One of the current best-selling titles, Quicksilver, another Fae romance, just appeared in print through Forever, an imprint of Hachette, in December 2024. Author Callie Hart had published several previous series as e-books or print-on-demand through Amazon’s CreateSpace, and it was only after Quicksilver’s success online that she teamed up with the French giant. Podium Entertainment’s Gerken says that “the vast majority” of Podium’s title acquisitions are independently published first.

A January 2025 story in The New Yorker on a copyright infringement lawsuit against publisher Entangled and author Tracy Wolff, the creator of best-selling Alaska-based vampire-romance series Crave, contained a quote that generated some pearl-clutching by writers online. An anonymous writer who’d had dealings with Entangled told The New Yorker that its publisher and CEO, Liz Pelletier, said to her that “the problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be”. From a traditional viewpoint, that sounds like the death of creativity and a loss of authorial control.

The New Yorker story also reports on several other objections to the genre. It’s allegedly not diverse (often written by socially conservative and photogenic white women with good social-media skills); it moves very quickly, sometimes forcing writers to adhere to brutal delivery dates with little time for polishing their work; and it can be relentlessly formulaic, with the huge volume of titles contributing to the problem.

From a different viewpoint, however, the trend is empowering authors who are able to build their own fan base. Companies like Podium and Bloom Books, a new independent romance imprint that launched during the pandemic, offer the kind of hybrid rights deals traditionally forbidden by major publishers. Bloom’s star client is E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Gray was originally published as an e-book and print-on-demand title in 2011. It’s one of a growing number of publishers whose business model is to scoop up successful self-published authors, often allowing them to keep their lucrative e-book and audiobook rights, while supplying the kind of print distribution and brand-building muscle that independent writers find difficult to achieve. Authors working with such publishers can sometimes retain creative control of cover design and marketing strategy. And they can reap dream benefits, such as the publisher’s ability to send out expensive influencer boxes or put their work out in gorgeous deluxe or collectible editions, another publishing trend that has synergy with the Romantasy market.

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A perusal of popular Romantasy titles reveals perhaps even more groundbreaking developments. Blue Box Press co-founder Liz Berry, speaking to Publishers Weekly, says of star author Jennifer Armentrout that “she has a capability to drive the plot and romance forward, while mixing character development with high-concept plotting, that few people have”. I found this type of clean forward motion — a grasp of the essentials of storytelling — in all the highly recommended titles I tried. I also found tight writing and world-building, atmospheric and fun detail, crisp conflicts, exciting high stakes, and two engines of narrative pleasure — a romance plot and fantasy-adventure plot — for the price of one.

There’s a common opinion in writing and publishing circles that the reason for declining book sales is that the readers are uninterested in or unable to appreciate great work. However, in the mega-hits of this unusually reader-selected genre, there were few of the errors that make bad mass-market fiction so bad, such as inconsistent characters with unclear motivations, convoluted plotting, unnecessary detail or description, and clunky dialogue. The knack for keeping the finger on the pulse of the story tends to cut away such dross, and the readers, it turns out, can recognize it.

The readers don’t care, however, about most of the rules of good writing. The Romantasy characters I encountered were psychologically consistent, but not necessarily complex or psychologically real. The prose was sometimes laden with clichés. Every broomstick offers an echo of Harry Potter, every magical wall taps Game of Thrones. And the narrative voices are quite simply contemporary, regardless of where in time or space the books are set. Characters in Medieval-ish settings have thoughts such as “painkillers are awesome”. They use the magical equivalent of the internet, love fashion and shopping, have anxiety attacks, and display modern values like girl-power and casual promiscuity.

Romantasy writers are the lawless “bumpkin dandies” found in Melville’s New Bedford, for sure, but they can tell a great story, and I found something liberating in their freedom. If more writers were trying to grab readers directly, literature would be better off.