Alison Tyler is the pen name of an American erotica author, editor, and publisher in Northern California, born in 1969. Tired of being confused with the porn actress of the same name, she now blogs on Patreon as Alison Trollop. Her fiction keeps returning to female submission, spanking, bondage, bisexuality, and group sex — intimate, semi-autobiographical prose about women who want to be spanked, tied, shared, or put in their place. She refuses the polite fade-to-black that mainstream “spicy” fiction uses, and she has built a whole kink shelf on volume and that refusal to apologize.
She began writing professionally in the 1990s. Blue Moon published her first novel when she was twenty-three. She wrote twelve books for Masquerade Books, including The Blue Rose (1995), Dark Room (1995), Dial L for Loveless (1996), Venus Online (1997), and The Silver Key: Madame Victoria’s Finishing School (1998) — early work that locked in finishing-school and phone-sex frames. In 1999 she moved to Virgin’s Black Lace imprint, later Cheek, and published Learning to Love It (2000), Strictly Confidential (2001), Sweet Thing (2002), Sticky Fingers (2003), and Something About Workmen (2003). Under Cheek came Rumours (2005), Tiffany Twisted (2006), With or Without You (2006), and Melt With You (2008). Magic Carpet Books issued Blue Valentine and The ESP Affair in 2002. Short fiction has appeared in anthologies edited by Violet Blue, Stephen Elliott, Maxim Jakubowski, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Tristan Taormino, Zane, and Tyler herself.
Story collections include Blue Sky Sideways (1996), Bad Girl (Pretty Things Press, 2002), and Exposed: The Erotic Fiction of Alison Tyler (Cleis, 2006). In August 2006 she began blogging hard about a former BDSM relationship. She had meant to confess daily for a month; she kept going for sixteen months and built a broad daily readership. East Bay Express dubbed her a “trollop with a laptop.” That run became the novel Dark Secret Love: A Story of Submission (Cleis, 2013), titled from William Blake’s “The Sick Rose” and marketed as autobiographical fiction — a meta-novel with reality at the core, built on a real diary rather than a costume. The Guardian called the blog a sulphurous personal memoir of past sexual activities that put Belle de Jour’s timid exploits in the shade. Non-fiction includes Never Have the Same Sex Twice: A Guide for Couples (also a Cleis volume in 2008) and the then-forthcoming Never Say Never. Her work has been translated into several languages.
Editing is her second career, especially themed kink books for Cleis. Titles that map onto bondage and restraint include Best Bondage Erotica (2003), Luscious: Stories of Anal Eroticism (2006), Slave to Love: Sexy Tales of Erotic Restraint (2006), Love at First Sting (2007), Hurts So Good: Unrestrained Erotica (2008), Pleasure Bound: True Bondage Stories (2009), and The Big Book of Bondage (2013), plus the alphabet run B Is for Bondage, F Is for Fetish, H Is for Hardcore, and K Is for Kinky (2007–2008). With Rachel Kramer Bussel she co-edited Caught Looking (later reissued as Hide and Seek) on voyeurism and exhibitionism. Her own Pretty Things Press issued Naughty Stories from A to Z, Down and Dirty, Naked Erotica, the Smart Ass / Bad Ass / Kiss My Ass trilogy, and the His/Hers pair co-edited with Thomas S. Roche.
From the Blue Moon debut to the Patreon as Alison Trollop, the through-line holds. She defends erotic fiction and pornography outright: “People try to make you feel bad by saying, ‘You write porn.’ But I won’t feel bad for it.” Readers who want the spanking-and-submission novels can start with the Black Lace and Cheek run through Melt With You; Dark Secret Love is the book that tells a power-exchange relationship from the inside after sixteen months of daily confession. She still talks to readers on the blog and runs competitive “Smut Marathons” that showcase emerging writers. She did not write one famous novel of submission. She wrote a shelf of them, then spent a year and a third telling the internet how a real BDSM relationship had felt.
