If you walk into any coffee shop in a college town, you’ll hear the sound of typing. At the tables, students stare intently at their laptop screens. Some are drafting papers. Some are scrolling the internet. And some — like Claire, a student at Columbia Basin College — are writing smut.
Claire is a second-year communications major at her community college in Washington state — and she’s wildly popular on the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (more often recognized as AO3). Her writing has also helped her gain over 20,000 followers on social media. “I want people to follow my work because they like my perspective,” she says, “whether that’s through my social media or through my fanfiction.”
In recent years, smut content has become increasingly popular — especially with Gen Z. According to Lovehoney, searches on TikTok for “smut books” increased by 78% in 2025, indicating an increasing interest in (and demand for) steamy romance novels. According to Goodreads, Rebecca Yarros’s steamy Onyx Storm and Emily Henry’s romantic Great Big Beautiful Life were among the top five most popular books of 2025. And in 2022, romance novels were bringing in more than $1.44 million annually, making romance the highest-earning fiction genre.
Similar to Claire, University of Texas student Ashley Marais found success publishing erotica on the internet. While Marais thought she would end up writing cleaner, closed-door paranormal romance, her first brush with dark erotica on Wattpad changed the trajectory of her writing career. She began posting chapters of her first book on Wattpad, Deal With The Devil, in 2018 — and after three months of publishing daily, people started to read. “All I can remember is waking up one morning and refreshing my notifications to see that people were actually commenting on my book,” she says. “I remember feeling so happy and warm inside that I had to write another chapter right then and there. So, I locked my bedroom door and went to work.”
Since then, Marais has amassed more than 266,000 followers across social media — with 227,000 coming from Wattpad. Overall, Marais’s work has garnered over 27 million reads on Wattpad, where she’s written 12 stories in the dark romance genre. “If you love mafia romance with psychological elements that’ll get you thinking deeper,” she says, “you may have just found your new favorite author.”
While smut, erotica, and romance writing definitely have an audience, writers can still face negativity from folks outside of the community. Traditional critics often dismiss erotica as lacking true “literary merit,” and erotica writers can also face backlash for writing stories centered around sexual themes — especially from those with more conservative or puritanical viewpoints.
Because of these stigmas, and despite her popularity online, Marais has struggled with how others may perceive her based on her work. “As a teenager, I didn’t [attach] my face [to my work] much at all,” she says. “I just let my words speak for me because I was worried that people would judge me — that they wouldn’t understand.”
However, with time, Marais says that she’s grown to embrace her writing. “It took me a while to feel comfortable being open about what I write, especially given the genre, but the people closest to me have been supportive once they understood how much of myself I actually pour into it,” she says. “I’m still selective about who I share the day-to-day writing process with because that part still feels personal, but I’ve had friends and classmates reach out over social media to let me know that they’re proud.”
Aside from feeling “a bit weary” about sharing her unfinished works with others, Claire says she’s confident in the stories she publishes despite the genre. “I’m very much the type of person who doesn’t care what others think,” she says. “I’ve never had any issues or embarrassment surrounding my work in regard to social pressure or stigma.” In her words, “At the end of the day, it’s genuinely not that serious.”
Continually updating stories along with balancing a college workload can feel pretty serious. However, both Marais and Claire say that being in college has actually helped their writing. “Taking more English classes has definitely given me better tools and techniques to be able to improve,” Claire says. And as a psychology major, Marais says that her education helps her with the actual content of her stories. “Studying it gave me language for things I was already doing instinctively in my writing, like motive, defense mechanisms, attachment patterns,” she says. “It didn’t change what I write about, but it deepened how precisely I can write it.”
Heading into her senior year, Marais says that balancing her writing career and her academics has helped her become more intentional with her writing. “I’ve had to get disciplined about writing in smaller, tighter windows instead of waiting for big blocks of free time that don’t exist anymore,” she says.
Ultimately, both writers believe that sharing their writing is important — not just for themselves to write, but for others to read. “Being a full-time student and writer isn’t easy at all: In fact, I have given up before,” Marais says. “But when I walked away, I felt this void — like, there’s more I had to say.”
And, for Claire, sharing her writing is just another way for her to empower others to embrace their passions, hobbies, and interests — despite what others may think of them. “Do what makes you happy,” she says. “Ignore people trying to shove a different rhetoric down your throat.”