Anne Wills, a typical doting mother of four, active in her community set in picturesque rural Virginia, had a steamy other life, a secret identity that would have shocked even the Harper Valley P T A.
She also wrote kinky erotica books as Bethany Burke and was known to make low budget spanking movies. She wrote them and on times directed them. - "Okay, give me intense as you swing that paddle! Good, good. One more spank!"
She truly was an early entrepreneur of online erotica and her spanking website, Bethany's Woodshed brought in a good revenue. She also took time to mentor many erotica authors, publishing them through her Blushing Books Company and soon many of these authors were seeing royalties of ten of thousands of dollars a year.
Now many of these writers are biting the hand that spanked them, sorry fed them, and their complaints against Blushing Books has become a big story in publishing circles.
ARE YOU READY TO BE RESTRAINED, STIMULATED, AND SEDUCED…
'She owns you,' Barbara LaPointe, a retired social worker told the New York Times. She writes erotic romance under the name Stevie McFarlane and, like many other authors, she is currently fighting Blushing Books for the rights to the work she did for them, but is finding that she is held in a real bondage knot regarding the rights to her own work.
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| Anne Wills, owner Blushing Books |
In other interviews with newspapers, more than a dozen Blushing Books authors described a haphazardly run business that frequently failed to pay authors on time, and threatened them with lower royalties and lawsuits for breach of contract if they defected to another publisher.
Many authors even claimed that they were not being paid for audio versions of their books and some discovered that their contracts gave Blushing Books sole rights to their books and their pen names.
The Romance Writers of America, a trade group, announced that, following an ethics investigation, it had suspended the publisher’s membership for three years and barred Blushing from attending its conferences. The Authors Guild, an advocacy group, is representing 30 writers seeking to reclaim rights to their work from Blushing. So far, one of those authors has stopped Blushing from selling her books after filing copyright-infringement notices with retailers, showing that Blushing did not hold contracts for them.
'Much of Blushing's contracts go against industry standards and raise many red flags.' Umair Kazi, director of Policy, The Author's Guild.
The Romance/Erotica book industry in the US alone is worth 1.5 billion dollars a year and if worldwide sales are added then the figure is truly enormous. Erotica sales have exploded since the huge success of Fifty Shades of Grey brought literary sadomasochism from the fringes and into the mainstream.
According to NPD BookScan. Around 60,000 romance and erotica books were published in 2020, up from nearly 35,000 a decade earlier.
It seems readers do like jolly good spanking!
Miss Wills, starting publishing erotica eBooks in 2001, long before Amazon came to dominate digital books and her success was at first small but it soon exploded when eBooks made shopping for kinky literature a simply task, something that could be done one handed.
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| The spanking Addison Cain |
Under the terms of Blushing's contracts, authors were forbidden from talking about the publisher by a nondisclosure agreement, but author, Addison Cain, one of the company's bestsellers, had enough of the financial spanking and went to the press with claims of missing royalties and all sorts of shady deals.
This started when Cain discovered that many of her books were being plagiarised, and to add insult she then found out that Blushing had never copyrighted her books which is a standard service that most publishers provide. This meant that she was powerless to stop other author's repackaging her work and selling it as their own. Now, that truly does stink.
Undaunted, Cain joined forces with several other unhappy Blushing authors and they hired a lawyer to confront Ms Willis and Blushing Books.
Shortly afterwards the conflict went supernova when some routine financial paperwork sent to authors was seen to have been altered by Miss Wills. One author, Zoe Blake claimed that her sales figures had been altered to lower her actual earnings. This resulted in Wills admitting that she had altered the paperwork and sales figures but she claimed this had been done to make the complicated document easier to understand.
The conflict continues with the New York Times recently reporting that an employee of Blushing Books had been arrested with Miss Wills claiming that authors royalties had been embezzled by the unnamed employee.
Following the arrest many Blushing authors joined a private Facebook group, Out of the Woodshed where they continue in their fight with Miss Wills to regain the rights to their kinky masterpieces.
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