The Burning Pen: Catching Up with Erotic Author Selena Kitt

This interview of Selena Kitt by director Kay Brandt originally ran in the March 2016 issue of AVN magazine. Click here to see the digital edition. Dirty, filthy, explicit, taboo, raunchy, perverted, and totally obscene—no, I’m not talking about X-rated movies. I’m talking about books. Nasty, naughty, twisted books that travel far beyond the boundaries of cinematic porn into the vastness of sexual fantasy. Call it whatever you want—romance, erotic-romance, contemporary, new adult, fantasy—it’s smut. Blow your mind, shock your senses, make you sweat and need a cold shower type of smut. Writers of the anything-goes genre indulge their creative freedom and write whatever explicit idea comes to mind, often exploiting popular trends to the fullest. Trends like sleeping with your siblings, or with multiple breeds of shifters. How about being impregnated by Big Foot, raptors or dinosaurs? Write it and they will come. This is what authors of romance and erotica live for. Pornographers ain’t got nothin’ on the totally depraved minds of those who write smut books. And I think we should all get to know each other a little better. The divide between X-rated movies and literary porn should be erased and embraced as one hotbed of sin. Authors are well aware of porn and porn stars, but how well do we know them? One of the dirtiest minds I’ve met since I started publishing my own erotic books is the illustrious Selena Kitt. She’s a legend in erotic literature, known for her taboo stories and bestselling books, like Babysitting the Baumgartners and Under Mr. Nolan’s Bed. Her books have sold millions of copies worldwide and she is a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Selena Kitt is a savvy business woman, too, and the owner of eXcessica Publishing. She also owns Eden and Excitica, which are sanctuaries for banned books and authors who can’t sell their material through traditional distribution, like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Ms. Kitt likes to post a constant stream of naughty pictures over social media just for fun, and once a year she gets overly excited about the Academy Awards on Twitter. She’s a woman who isn’t afraid to celebrate her love of sex and sexuality, and I’m thrilled she let me ask her a few questions. Kay Brandt: It’s hard to imagine anyone not knowing who you are, but just in case, give us your personal blurb.Selena Kitt: I’m Selena Kitt—New York Times bestselling bad girl of erotic fiction! Okay, I’m not really bad—I just write that way! I’ve been writing erotica since 2006 and publishing it since 2008. In that time, I’ve published over thirty novels, and countless anthologies and stories. I’ve started a publishing company, three book promotion companies and have recently taken over as head of the Erotica Readers and Writers Association. I have five-hundred authors on my roster, many of them New York Times and USA Today bestsellers, and sometimes I look around and wonder how in the heck all of that happened? You’ve been many things. How did you go from midwife to author of very taboo erotica? I guess I’ve always followed my own path, whatever it might be. I became a doula and a midwife because I wanted to have my own babies at home and hated how medicalized we’d made birth in our culture. I became an erotica author and publisher because I looked around and couldn’t find a home for what I was writing. I knew that there was an audience for the erotica I was writing—even the uber-hot sex-in-every-chapter books and the taboo erotica—I just needed to find it. Unfortunately, erotic romance publishers were drawing the line at the taboo and weren’t interested in stories that didn’t end with a happy ever after, so I had to find my own way. That’s when I decided to just start my own publishing company! If you were a porn star for a day what would be your ideal movie to star in? Anything that involved a girl-girl-guy threesome! It’s my favorite thing to write and it would be the sort of movie I’d love to take part in. Make a sandwich out of me and I’d be a happy camper! Where do you see the ebook industry in five years? We’ll all have microchips implanted in our heads and will be able to download books straight to our brains. Ha, I’m just kidding—but five years ago, if someone had predicted that people would be reading books primarily on electronic tablets or their phones, that would have sounded crazy, too. So I won’t predict hover boards for ebooks (I know we’re all disappointed that 2015 didn’t deliver Marty McFly’s version!) but I will predict that ebooks will continue to capture more of the reading market than they currently have. I also predict that the “big five” publishers will probably be more like the “big three” by then, and while print won’t have disappeared, paperbacks and hardcovers will have a much smaller market than they do now. I also think interactive ebooks will be more popular by then. What’s your favorite porn movie? And why? I don’t watch porn. Ha, just kidding! Honestly, it’s really too hard to pick just one. It’s like trying to pick a favorite author. Why limit yourself? I have eclectic tastes when it comes to pretty much everything, so picking just one is impossible. However, I will say, for nostalgia’s sake, one of the most influential porn movies I’ve seen has to be Taboo II. Not the first one, which was more a mother/son sort of thing, but the second one, where the whole family got involved. Probably because it was one of the first adult videos I was ever exposed to, and because it appealed to that naughty side of me that’s always been drawn to taboo topics. I guess I am a bad girl after all! Kay Brandt is a writer/director of adult film, and best-selling author of romance-erotica books. Find Selena Kitt’s books on Amazon.com. Brandt is adapting Kitt's novel Babysitting the Baumgartners into an adult film for Adam & Eve Pictures that will star Anikka Albrite, Mick Blue, Sara Luvv and A.J. Applegate.