Alison Tyler (born 1969) is the pen name of an American erotica author, editor, and publisher in Northern California whose fiction keeps returning to female submission, spanking, bondage, bisexuality, and group sex. She has written more than twenty explicit novels, hundreds of short stories, and edited more than sixty erotic anthologies. She runs Pretty Things Press—“Pretty on the outside, dirty on the inside.” Tired of being confused with the porn actress of the same name, she now blogs on Patreon as Alison Trollop. For kink readers she is not a crossover romance brand. She is the woman who sold spanking and restraint stories to Penthouse Variations in her twenties and later turned a sixteen-month public memoir of a former BDSM relationship into the novel Dark Secret Love.
Blue Moon at 23, Masquerade, Black Lace
Tyler began writing professionally in the 1990s, selling stories to Penthouse Variations and Playgirl. Blue Moon published her first novel when she was twenty-three. She wrote twelve novels for Masquerade Books, then moved in 1999 to Virgin’s Black Lace and later Cheek imprints. Short fiction has appeared in anthologies edited by Violet Blue, Stephen Elliott, Maxim Jakubowski, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Tristan Taormino, Zane, and Tyler herself. She has edited stacks of collections for Cleis Press and for her own house. The voice is intimate and semi-autobiographical: a narrator who sounds as if she is telling you what happened last night, not reciting a costume catalog.
Early Masquerade and Rosebud titles include 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). For Black Lace she published Learning to Love It (2000), Strictly Confidential (2001), Sweet Thing (2002), Sticky Fingers (2003), and Something About Workmen (2003). Magic Carpet Books issued Blue Valentine and The ESP Affair in 2002. Under Cheek came Rumours (2005), Tiffany Twisted (2006), With or Without You (2006), and Melt With You (2008). The story collections that matter most are Blue Sky Sideways (1996), Bad Girl (Pretty Things Press, 2002), and Exposed: The Erotic Fiction of Alison Tyler (Cleis, 2006).
The Guardian Blog, Trollop with a Laptop
In August 2006 Tyler began blogging hard about a former BDSM relationship. The Guardian called it “a sulphurous personal memoir of past sexual activities which put Belle de Jour’s timid exploits in the shade.” She had meant to confess daily for a month. She kept going for sixteen months and built a broad, loyal daily readership. East Bay Express dubbed her a “trollop with a laptop.” She still blogs, uses the platform to talk to readers, and runs competitive “Smut Marathons” that showcase emerging writers. In 2013 Cleis published the first novel of a trilogy drawn from those diaries and blog entries. Marketed as “a work of autobiographical fiction, a meta-novel with reality at the core,” Dark Secret Love: A Story of Submission takes its title from William Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose.”
Non-fiction includes Never Have the Same Sex Twice: A Guide for Couples (also issued as an edited Cleis volume in 2008) and the then-forthcoming Never Say Never. Her work has been translated into several languages. She is an upbeat defender of non-mainstream sexualities, erotic fiction, and pornography: “People try to make you feel bad by saying, ‘You write porn.’ But I won’t feel bad for it.”
The Bondage and Fetish Anthologies
As an editor she built a second career out of themed kink books, especially for Cleis. The volumes that map onto this site’s interests 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), the alphabet run that produced B Is for Bondage, F Is for Fetish, H Is for Hardcore, and K Is for Kinky (2007–2008), plus Hurts So Good: Unrestrained Erotica (2008), Pleasure Bound: True Bondage Stories (2009), and The Big Book of Bondage (2013). Pretty Things Press issued Naughty Stories from A to Z, Down and Dirty, the His/Hers pair co-edited with Thomas S. Roche, Naked Erotica, and the later Smart Ass, Bad Ass, Kiss My Ass trilogy. She also co-edited voyeur and exhibitionist books with Rachel Kramer Bussel (Caught Looking, later reissued as Hide and Seek).
What to Read First
If you want the spanking-and-submission novels rather than the editorial brand, start with the Black Lace and Cheek run: Learning to Love It, Strictly Confidential, Sweet Thing, Sticky Fingers, Something About Workmen, then Rumours, Tiffany Twisted, With or Without You, and Melt With You. The Masquerade shelf behind them—Dark Room, Dial L for Loveless, Venus Online, The Silver Key—is where she learned to write finishing-school and phone-sex frames at novel length after Blue Moon took her at twenty-three. Dark Secret Love (Cleis, 2013, ISBN 1573449563) is the book that metabolizes the 2006–2007 blog: sixteen months of daily confession about a former BDSM relationship, the piece The Guardian set next to Belle de Jour and found more sulphurous. Blake’s poem sits in the subtitle because she wanted the meta-novel to admit it was built on a real diary, not on a costume.
The editorial career is how a lot of other people’s bondage stories reached print. Best Bondage Erotica, Slave to Love, Pleasure Bound, and The Big Book of Bondage are the clearest restraint anthologies; B Is for Bondage, F Is for Fetish, K Is for Kinky, and Hurts So Good carry the same brief under different titles. Pretty Things Press—her own shop—issued the A-to-Z smut books, the His and Hers pair with Thomas S. Roche, and the later ass-trilogy. She has also edited office-sex, sudden-sex, couples, and taboo volumes for Cleis, and voyeur/exhibitionist books with Rachel Kramer Bussel. Short work of her own is collected in Blue Sky Sideways, Bad Girl, and Exposed. The non-fiction note is Never Have the Same Sex Twice, with Never Say Never listed as forthcoming in the source. Translations exist; the English shelf is already large enough for a kink library.
The through-line is consistent from the Blue Moon debut to the Patreon: women who want to be spanked, tied, shared, or put in their place, written without the polite fade-to-black that mainstream “spicy” fiction uses as a fig leaf. Tyler’s value for a BDSM library is that volume and that refusal to apologize. 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 power-exchange relationship had felt from the inside. “People try to make you feel bad by saying, ‘You write porn.’ But I won’t feel bad for it.”
