“This is a bundle of three erotic stories containing romance, adventure, vibrant worlds of fantasy, and of course, sizzling, scintillating sex with fast, muscular, powerful velociraptors.”
– Book description
The three most common types of books that I review are: cookbooks, books on picking up girls, and 50 Shade of Grey knock-offs. All in all it’s pretty harmless stuff.
Earlier today I was asked to review a fantasy novel. The book itself was completely normal and inoffensive. However, in the book’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” tab I saw the apex of weirdness. There a book titled Ravaged by the Brontosaurus*. Growing up a dinosaur nerd, I knew that the Brontosaurus was an herbivore. What kind of hack had written a book about killer dinosaurs and not even researched which ones were harmless? I clicked the link.
It turns out that Ravaged by the Brontosaurus wasn’t about people being murdered by dinosaurs, it was about people fornicating with them.
Even worse, there was a cornucopia of dinosaur-on-human themed porn books. Evidently, they’re a niche market.
Rather than merely grossing you out, I’m going to use the booming dinosaur porn business to highlight an important lesson. No matter how dumb or weird you think your idea may be, there are enough other dumb weirdos out there to buy it.
Over the past month I’ve gotten quite a few emails from people asking if I though their product or website idea would be viable. All of them have been infinitely better than “what if I wrote a novel about stegosaurus f*cking?” While I’m no expert, I am pretty sure that businesses like a website about cheese or an eBook about programming apps have a wider customer range than Ravaged by the Brontosaurus. As such, I think you’ll do alright.
* Name changed to protect the innocent.