Merry Christmas!

It's been a year since I started writing the code for Mall of Erotica and six months since we went live. We're still going through our growing pains and unfortunately, as Mall of Erotica is a labour of love for me it has to take a back seat to the huge demand for my programming skillset. Despite spending almost every waking minute on a huge project due this month, I've managed to release some small updates to the site, including some (mostly invisible to the user) improvements to the Forums. I've got a lot more changes sitting in development waiting for me to have the time to polish them up and promote them, but it will come!

We are still looking for content providers so come on and open a shop! We'd love to have you!

I'll blog more about what I've been up to, MoE-wise in the new year. In the event that I don't get to post again (or if the world ends on Friday), I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and all the best in 2013!

NiCheng

Writing My Own eBook

The other day I was chatting with a friend when I got an image in my head that totally aroused me. It was of a man, his wife, and a third man, and the husband was kneeling between them, pulling his wife's panties off, and offering them to the third man as a trophy.

Give the number of eBooks at Mall of Erotica I've decided to try my hand at writing and have started my first erotic novel: Cuckold Wager. It's the story of an alpha male gambling addict, who wagers his wife's panties when it seems like he's sure to win, only to find his whole position in life turned upside-down. There'll be plenty of humiliation, cuckold content, panty-sniffing, hard-core sex, some light bondage and femdom, and it actually has a pretty deep story with plot twists mixed into all that.

So far I'm up to 4,300 words and I haven't even started getting descriptive yet. I look forward to posting snippets of it in the blog and when it's ready to go, getting cover art done and having real authors review and weigh in on it.

In other Mall of Erotica news, I've started finding local people interested in modelling/acting for me in my goal to create my own erotica. I've also had several local people with experience in erotica coming forward and offering to help, which as a noob erotica producer, is incredibly welcome. It's a great experience thus far and I'm looking forward to what comes next.

Have a Happy and Erotic Halloween, everyone!

Even More eBooks!

While it's still early in the game, eBooks have surged ahead as the most popular erotic content type at Mall of Erotica. We've had two new stores added, Jaypbee Gay Short Stories and  Daniella Donati's Erotica.



Daniella Donati's The Lesbian Collection

Jaypbee is quite the prolific writer of gay erotica, with 14 short stories already up for grabs! Daniella has contributed two steamy eBooks of her own and we look forward to more entries from her.



As Mall of Erotica is a side-project on top of my day job and side-business, finding the time to update it has been frustratingly difficult as of late. However I have a few projects wrapping up in the next few weeks and then I'll finally have some time to really push ahead and take on my massive list of outstanding enhancements.

Traffic to the site isn't as good as I had hoped, though. It seems that the current way to get traffic is through affiliate programs, but I'm not 100% how to construct one that will attract good affiliates. I'll check with the wonderful folks at the Go Fuck Yourself forums who are always very helpful when it comes to noob questions.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

An Erotic Panties Story

The following is a true store. Names have been changed!

Many, many moons ago when I wore a child's clothes, my family visited neighbours down the road. One of their kids was a girl named Nissa who was one year my elder. She was pretty and had long, black hair.

I can't remember exactly how the circumstances came to be, but she was doing homework in her room (or something like that) and I either wandered in or was told to go see her and talk to her about something. She was lying on her bed and I was standing next to the bed between it and her dresser.

As we talked my eyes wandered around the room, taking in the scenery. She had the typical girls stuff and nothing really caught my attention. Nothing that is, until I looked over my left shoulder at her dresser. I guess it had been laundry day and someone (probably her mother) had left a pile of her clothes on top of the dresser to put away. At the top of the pile were a stack of her panties. White cotton and a few other soft pastel colours like blue and pink.

I quickly became excited over the fact that I was seeing Nissa's underwear...something people back then took great steps to avoid revealing. I soon realized that I had been staring a little too long and turned my head back to Nissa. She had been following my gaze and knew exactly what I had been looking at and she blushed. I probably blushed to. We finished our conversation and I left to go play with the other kids there.

The fact that I have such a strong memory back then centered around Nissa's panties just goes to show what a profound power embarassment and underwear have over me.

Unfortunately by the mid-1990's the general perception of underwear changed from that of "secret items of clothing that you would blush over if anyone managed to sneak a peek of " to "designer items with fancy labels designed to be displayed as a status symbol". Girls started exposing their Calvin Kleine labelled waistbands and their bras were changed to reveal lace at the neckline of their shirts. The fun and mystery of underwear was largely ruined for me.

That being said, there's still a lot of great erotic out there featuring underwear (or where underwear plays a prominent part). Take StripGameCentral, where you can see videos of girls playing all manner of everyday games and with each round the loser (or losers) remove their clothing until a loser is nude (but they spend a lot of time in their underwear). And of course I've already talked about Spandex Babes in a previous post. Sure, those videos are about spandex, but the girl always strips down to her panties (or less!) when changing. If you love panties those videos won't disappoint you.

So did I ever see more of Nissa? Unfortunately, no. She went to different schools than I did and ultimately went into the dental field and got married. C'est la vie.

I wonder if she remembers the day I saw her panties? I wonder if she blushes when she thinks about it?

eBooks Galore and more!

It's been an interesting week.

Back when I was doing my pilot project in May/June, I was approached by Rachel & Carl from Rachel's Lace E-Rotica about participating. They didn't join the pilot but I re-contacted them to see if they were interested now that we were live and had some sales and other content providers. They were interested and proceeded to create our first eBook store: Rachel's Lace: e-rotica! And while I expected them to only have a couple of books to put up, they've put up 11!

And that's not all! They also invited two other eBook authors who have begun the process of setting up shops...so the site is growing and that's great news!

I've been making little changes to the appearance of the products page and added some additional functionality to the shops page. I'll be turning my attention now to allowing multiple files associated with a product (currently it's just one). That way it will allow eBook authors to provide the popular various formats (ePub, .mobi, etc.) to the customer when they buy the item!

eBooks and More

So my first eBook content provider will be opening shop in the next day or so. It's exciting and it's been a learning experience as I've gotten some good feedback on how eBook authors would like to use the site and the sort of changes I need to make to better support eBooks.

I also got an email from an EU-based erotica producer...they had several questions that my FAQ's didn't answer which was good to get as just about all my content producers have been American and didn't require the same type of information as he did. So I've been updating the FAQ to include his questions (and the appropriate answers). Unfortunately the draconian cotent restrictions I presently have to abide by are hurting his ability to publish a lot of his content at Mall of Erotica.

One of the interesting challenges from the eBook community is the ability to have several formats of the book (epub, mobi, html, text, etc.) available for download by purchasers of a single product. I hadn't originally considered this and as such the data model is currently "one file per product". I can change it, but it will require a fair bit of recoding and data conversion, but maybe now is the time to do it, as it's early enough in the game to be making big changes like that.

Besides, it'll end up being more normalized, and normal is good.

Mistress Trish Has Arrived!

As promised, we've opened a new shop at Mall of Erotica: Mistress Trish's Domme Shop. The first product is an audio file where Mistress Trish humiliates you and your tiny cock. She declares you her slave and talks about how she's going to humiliate you.

For only $2.99 you get over 6 minutes of Mistress Trish's sexy, seductive voice putting you in your place.

Please check it out, support Mistress Trish and the Mall of Erotica!

Oh, and if you have any requests, send them to mistresstrish {at} malloferotica [dot] com.

---

The other day I was at Wal-Mart at 11:00pm (don't ask me why) when a pretty hot girl walked past me wearing a shirt/dress/miniskirt combo that was made from some knitted material. As she passed by I turned to look her over and noticed that the material allowed enough light through to see the small amount of her legs not exposed. I couldn't tell what sort of underwear she was wearing but I knew she was wearing panties because I saw her later in the store pulling them out of her butt.

Despite just being one of those pretty faces that pass you in life, never to be seen again, I couldn't help but wonder if she'd be the sort of girl who would do erotic modelling. Are girls that dress in skimpy outfits the sort of girls who don't mind taking them off in front of cameras?

Pretty soon I'll be creating my own erotica for Mall of Erotica. While I have my own ideas and fetishes that I'd like to see come to life in pictures and video, I would really like to make use of the Mall as an opportunity for my models/actors to explore their own fetishes and desires...nothing fascinates me more than learning what turns people on. It's our diversity that makes life interesting.

And having normal, everyday people like the girl from Wal-Mart is what I'm striving for. The Internet is full of plastic and enhanced people having sex and that's not what I'm about. I want real people to explore their real fetishes and fantasies in a safe and fun way. And it wouldn't hurt if we all made some money doing it.

Luckily for me I have help in finding actors/models. I'm actually quite uncomfortable talking to strangers in real life and no amount of rehearsing is going to prepare me to approach a strange woman and ask her if she'd like to be an erotic model. Or guys for that matter.

I do always wonder how a woman would react to such a proposal? Would be she creeped out? Would she be offended? Would she be flattered? Would she say "okay...let's do this!"?

Someday I might build up the courage to find out for myself.

Coming Soon

This week Mall of Erotica will be launching a new store exclusive to MoE: Mistress Trish's Domme Shop.

I've gotten to do the post-production of Mistress Trish's first product, an audio file where Mistress Trish humiliates and emasculates the listener. It's been a lot of fun to work on it and a good technical learning experience.

I've also been making minor updates to facilitate administering the site. I've still got a couple of big items I'd like to release to help support the shopkeepers and users in general, but I want to make sure they're working perfectly before promoting them to production.

Stay tuned for further announcements. We'll also be announcing it in Twitter, so if you aren't already, please follow us: @MallofErotica.

Who Doesn't Love Spandex?

Spandex is great. It's tight-fitting, typically quite colourful and takes up little storage space. Oh yeah, and women look so incredibly hot in it!

Even I wore spandex shorts when I was a kid. I really liked the feel of it on my skin. Unfortunately I stopped wearing it in junior high when a girl named Lisa came up to me in gym class and told me that the shorts left little to the imagination. While being slightly embarassed at the time, it suddenly occurs to me that she was checking out my package. Nice.

We have a small (but growing) collection of spadex videos at Mall of Erotica, largely provided by my friend Villain in his shop Spandex Babes, and most feature is shapely girlfriend as she works out in various tight-fitting spandex outfits.

Almost each video starts with a brief clip of her changing out of her streetclothes and into the spandex. Sometimes she stops at being topless other times she strips the panties off revealing her nice, toned ass. Here are one of my favourite pairs of panties seen thus far from this video:

 

She then proceeds to either stretch, do yoga positions or run on a treadmill while we get a high-quality, up-close view of her tight body through the spandex. In several videos her panties are slightly visible through the spandex (especially when she puts on the silver pair) so all you pantyline lovers out there are in for a treat.

This girl has an amazing body and while great pains are taken to ensure we never see her face, there's one video (I won't reveal which one!) where there's a slight slip-up and her face is briefly shown. Suffice it to say, she's lovely all around and I invite you all to check her out and enjoy it as she stretches, jogs and disrobes for you.

There's my blog entry for today! Happy Friday everyone, and as always, we welcome you to check out Mall of Erotica and see what tickles your fancy.

An Introduction

Two and a half months. That's how long Mall of Erotica has been live. It's been scary and nerve-wracking, trying to break into an industry that I really should have tried to get into 10-12 years ago and I'm hoping that this all works out.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My name is NiCheng. I am a software developer who first started programming when a forward-thinking teacher introduced me to Applesoft BASIC in 1991. Discovering an aptitude for it I excelled and quickly out-learned the teacher by the end of the school year. I begged my parents for a PC and when they finally gave in a few years later I taught myself Visual C++. I wasn't properly schooled (as "Dummies" books didn't exist yet) and I knew no one with a strong background in programming to guide me, but I muddled along. The aptitude evolved into a passion and now I can't imagine a day going by where I'm not trying to solve a problem or invent new code in my head or on a computer. It is truly my calling.

When I first got access in 1995 the Internet was a simple place. You used Lycos for searching the 14,000 or so websites in its directory and websites were largely static and put up for informational purposes only. Despite all the interesting science stuff and conspiracy theories on the early 'Net the thing that shocked me the most was all the content about sex and erotica. Best of all, the mainstream world didn't know the World Wide Web existed yet and it was all free.

I was raised in a relatively conservative Christian household and had limited exposure to anything sexual. The "sex talk" was a very minimal technical talk focusing on abstinance and the public sex-education at school didn't really explain a lot for me other than "insert tab A into slot B". Encountering female nudity was largely restricted to the occasional boob shot in a movie. I had no sex drive (I didn't masturbate until a girlfriend showed me how when I was 18) but was fascinated by the female body. With the new discovery that people were posting nude images of celebrities and amateurs on the Internet, I set out to see every female celebrity and ethnicity/body type/etc. nude and collect and catalogue as much of it as I could.

By 1999 I had written a custom database program running in Windows 3.1 that catalogued over 3000 photos. Finding no end to my desire to see females nude, I discovered appreciations for fetishes like light bondage, superheroines in peril and humiliated, and anything to do with what would later be known as ENF (embarssed nude female). I started expanding my image database to include these and other fetishes that piqued my interest. Over time I converted my custom software to a MySQL database and then to a Sql Express Database on my private PC where it exists to this day.

All this was done in secret given my conservative family, and for all the shame I felt about it my curiosity and desire for erotica would not abate. As the first few mainstream adult sites started popping up on the Internet I wished I could have somehow been involved. A news story in my paper about a local guy around my age who was making $10,000 a month from his website by linking to adult sites (back when you got paid-per-click) made me upset that I couldn't openly pursue it. By the time I finished my university degree, got a job and was able to move out on my own, the dot-com bubble had burst and I resigned myself to a fate of never being able to combine my love of erotica and my love of programming for anything more than a personal hobby database.

Despite the bubble pop and the start of the US financial troubles the porn industry had emerged relatively unscathed. And when I found myself out of a job and needing to find a way to make ends me, I placed one cold call to an adult website to offer to convert their static HTML site to a dynamic PHP one. They accepted and I got a contract that kept a roof over my head for the next 7 months.

The adult site I worked on was fun and the client was great. In fact, one time when I called his house to talk to him his wife (the star of the site) answered. It was quite the feather in my cap at the time.

When the project was over I started hitting up other adult websites for work. While I was never as successful as I was with my first cold call, I made some contacts in the industry and even better I learned enough about the business to believe I could build my own adult site.

In 2009 I contacted the lovely and talented graphic designer Slipperychik to collaborate with me, and at first she was on board, even knowing a girl who wanted to break into online adult modelling. I did all the research and planned everything out but life changes with Slipperychik and me prevented us from getting together to make it happen.

Then in late 2011 I was faced with some new recurring expenses in my life and found myself frustrated with the lack of money I was making at my day job and a disatisfaction of the work in general. I decided I had gotten tired of seeing other people make money off my work and it was time for me to live the dream: I was going to create an adult website.

Unfortunately my personal life is still quite conservative and the idea of finding models and becoming an out-and-out pornographer was an issue. However after talking to a few of the contacts I made in the industry I found a need for a high-quality, feature-rich online erotica website, where content producers can create shops, upload and define products, set the products price then sit back and let the site earn for them. I had the expertise to make it happen and I decided that was the sort of site I was going to make.

I called up Slipperychik (who had sadly moved 2000km away) to get her to collaborate with me again. This time she was on board and in discussions about the purpose and naming of the site I said "Well...it's kind of like a shopping mall, except it's for erotica. A mall of erotica", and thus the name "Mall of Erotica" was born.

So after a lot of coding and design work, getting a pilot group together, and going through the craziness of getting a merchant account...Mall of Erotica went live on June 15th, 2012. It's been two and a half months, and they've been quite scary and nerve-wracking. And that's where this post started.

For those who have read this introduction looking for information about started up an adult website, I would recommend the helpful people at Go Fuck Yourself. They have tons of useful articles and posts, and the huge community of adult webmasters are always willing to answer noob questions. I wish I had found them before I started Mall of Erotica...I probably would've done some things differently.

A poster on GFY recommended that to increase traffic to your site and search-engine ranking, to create a blog and post links to your site. I'm not sure if they were advocating fake blogs, but I've seen some people mention that they create blogs on behalf of some of their more popular models. To me, that feels a bit dishonest. I realize that getting traffic to your site is the way to make money, but I don't want to have to trick people or search engines into coming to me site...I want people to find it, think it's awesome, and tell their friends.

The site is still new, however, and it isn't as awesome as it will be. I recommend you check it out and maybe you'll see some erotica you'll want to buy. Maybe you'll open a shop and sell your own erotica there. Either way, my success starts with you, so c'mon down!