Existential Smut

Existential Smut FAQ

L. von Hoffman (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin)

About the Ebook/Ebook Series

Feedback/Suggestions

Submitting Content

(For Authors) Suggesting Ebook Titles

Legal/Copyright

About the Ebook/Ebook Series

Who exactly is Hapax Legomenon? What is the history of this project?

Hapax Legomenon (a pseudonym) edits the Existential Smut series. He lives in the southern part of the USA. He began writing erotic stories after graduate school in the 1990s. He wrote all the stories for Volume 1 and Volume 2. The ebooks themselves contain the history of the project, but you also find more detail about the background and history here.

How would you describe the stories you write?

It varies. Several stories are comic or fun. Most are psychological and contemplative. The language can be sexually explicit, polite but never demeaning, laced with metaphor and wit. Many focus on private erotic feelings and the struggle to understand them. Most are told from the perspective of a young single male seeking love and exploring erotic desire. No violence, occasionally kinky, but mostly about heterosexual couples and how relationships wither or flourish. Although most stories are realistic, some are far-fetched and fantastic. Finally, the stories (and the overall story frame) are bookish and literary and raise questions about the nature of erotic fiction.

Who designed the ebook covers for Volume 1 and Volume 2?

Eugenia Loli designed the cover art for Existential Smut 1. Loli is a filmmaker and modern vintage collage artist originally from Greece and now living on the West Coast of USA. I have admired her art for a while.

James at Humble Nations designed the cover art for Existential Smut 2. He runs the GoOnWrite service which designs and sells premade book covers. This of course was not a premade cover, but one which I commissioned him to do. James has started to use AI tools like MidJourney to make incredible covers, and that is why I asked him to do this one. He has written a lot about his creative process on his blog.

Both artists are talented and superlative artists and have my highest recommendation.

Reviewers: Can I request a review copy of one of the volumes of Existential Smut?

You can use the site contact form or use this email as an alternative: hapaxlegomenon AT fastmailbox.net . Keep in mind that Existential Smut 1 can be freely downloaded here at any time.

Does the website contain explicit sexual content? How do I get this site blocked or unblocked from my Internet provider?

It’s hard to give a yes/no answer because the two ebooks do contain sexually explicit content. With the exception of samples, excerpts and screenshots, this website does not really contain much that is explicit.

The blog portion of the website frequently links to interesting essays and stories and multimedia that probably have sexually explicit content. If the external links have an undue amount of nudity or sexual language, I might add the label (NSFW). But I assume that you aren’t viewing this website from work anyway — shouldn’t you be doing your work?

I like to add illustrations for each blogpost — sometimes reproducing artistic works or photographs as decorations. I don’t avoid nudity here — and most of the artwork is what I would categorize as “museum nudity” — things that a 10 year old might typically encounter in a big city art museum. This is generally the same criteria I use for interior art in the ebooks.

Generally for the website I don’t use many graphics — this is generally a literary site for book lovers. Unlike a lot of major news and culture websites this site is ad-free. Sometimes serious journals and newspapers talk about sexually explicit content (Salon, Slate, NYT) without getting too much flak, and of course Netflix shows a lot of movies with sexual themes which most young people can access easily. This site really doesn’t shy away from using sexually explicit language

For the HTML content controlled by wordpress, I add a meta tag that says name=”rating” content=”adult” to the header of all pages. For other pages not controlled by wordpress, I use another meta tag name=”RATING” content=”RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA” . Also when I submitted this site to the Bing and Google search engines, I have marked the website as Adult content. It can be rather difficult to find this site listed in search results. Most decent content filters could use this information to determine whether it is appropriate for young children.

Personally I do not believe it is morally right or necessary to prevent people under 18 from viewing websites which discuss sexual subjects in a serious and intelligent way. Having access to this kind of material can be healthy and even enlightening. This website does not cater to children and it does not target children. On the other hand, there is no point in burdening this website with all kinds of extra restrictions simply because some irate parent wants everybody to think of the children.

Why is Volume 1 not available at Amazon or Apple or Barnes and Noble (etc., etc.,)?

It’s a strange and irritating story. Draft2Digital (which distributes to Apple and Barnes and Noble, etc. ) blocked the Existential Smut 1 ebook because there was nudity on the cover. (There is a faint outline of the woman’s buttock in the woman’s shadow — see it here). This is the kind of cretinism that I have to deal with. Never mind that the cover was designed by a renowned surrealist artist or that the buttock outline was so dark and shadowy that one needed a magnifying glass to see it or that the figure was no more explicit than what a ten year old might see at a local art museum, the sad fact is that distributors treat ebooks by indie publishers with a lot more suspicion than they do for ebooks by established publishers.

But at least Draft2Digital gave a reason. When I submitted it to Amazon, it was approved twice and then permanently blocked. I never received an explanation. And after I tried to appeal the decision, I never received any kind of explanation. (I wrote about the ordeal here).

(Kobo, Google Play Books and Eden books published it without any problems).

Amazon also blocked volume 2 from its store without stating its reason and even suspended my author account as a result. Guessing that this was the work of Amazon’s AI-censor bots, I appealed this suspension until it reached an actual human who reversed the suspension and removed the block on the ebook. I am happy to report that Existential Smut 2 was eventually approved for distribution by all channels, including Amazon and Draft2Digital.

Why is the version of Existential Smut 2 on Amazon different from the version found on other stores (and on this website)?

In the past, posting even trivial revisions for Existential Smut has caused problems with Amazon. Several times, updating the content has caused Amazon to mistakenly remove the ebook from their stores and in one case resulted in the publisher’s entire account being deactivated. My best guess is that Amazon uses automated tools to check if erotically-themed ebooks violate their content standards, and that these automated tools are failing to evaluate my ebooks correctly and fairly. Unfortunately when this happens, Amazon’s appeal process is slow, opaque and inconsistent. For this reason, I will not be updating Existential Smut 2 on Amazon (although I will update the ebooks to everywhere else).

Actually, the updates made after the initial version seen on Amazon contain very small changes which are hardly noticeable. It mainly involves punctuation changes and adding a word or two accidentally omitted (Read more detail).

What is Ripe Mango Take Two Press? What is its mission?

Read more here.

Feedback /Suggestions

How do I report a typo or grammatical mistake?

First, it is possible that you are not reading the latest version of the ebook and the mistake you noticed was corrected in a later version; the version number appears on the title page and on the “About This Edition” page of your ebook. Check here to see whether you have the latest version.

Here’s the contact form. Feel free to email here: hapaxlegomenon AT fastmailbox.net

How do I report a technical issue with the ebook or this website?

See above.

Have you ever thought about doing a podcast or being interviewed for one?

I have been thinking about that. Generally though, in the current year I am reluctant to do that because I want to maintain the pseudonym and avoid making it too easy for people to figure out who I am. (Eventually I will change though). I have been interviewed for several podcasts under my real name and enjoy it. I just don’t know if the experience of hearing my voice will add anything to thoughts I could have just as easily expressed in writing.

How do I send feedback, reviews or comments?

Here’s the contact form. Feel free to email here: hapaxlegomenon AT fastmailbox.net

How do I contact the author? the Publisher?

See above.

Do you accept advertising? What about endorsements?

Generally, no, but there are exceptions to every rule. I am going to start some pages where I endorse certain products, books and services. Not ready yet, but I’ll link to it prominently from the home page when it’s ready.

Submitting Content

How do I submit a story or poem for a future Existential Smut volume?

See my submission guidelines.

I want you to mention and/or review my story or book. How do I contact you?

Starting in 2025 I will be posting semi-regular columns which review several books with sexual themes. I fully intend to read more in that genre. So feel free to contact me via the site’s contact form.

That said, my time to read and review other kinds of smut is very limited. I always love to hear about things that people have done. I like staying on top of the cool things people are doing. I just can’t promise that I’ll be able to review it. However, even if I don’t have the ability to review something, sometimes I have opportunities to feature or promote books or stories or essays which I feel is high quality.

(For Authors) Suggesting Ebook Titles

I am an author or publisher publicizing an ebook with an erotic theme. How do I let you know?

I generally enjoy reading press releases and book announcements, so I certainly would not regard your announcement as spam. I am writing reviews of erotic book titles which will be part of a quarterly newsletter. But the books covered in this newsletter will include mostly older titles, and I probably will not be reviewing many contemporary titles. (I’ll try).

For this reason, I’ll be starting and maintaining an annual list of ebooks related to sexuality and erotica. I’ll be maintaining and curating this list. The 2024-2025 list will be ready in October 2025.

If you want to suggest your own ebook for this annual list, go to this page to find out what information I want (I suggest you cut and paste the questions into the form). Then use this contact form to provide this information to me.

What is the Annual Book List? How can I get my book title on it?

Go to this page to find out more information. I’ve just started out, so I haven’t come up with hard criteria.

How do I send you an ebook Advance Review Copy?

Follow these instructions.

Legal/Copyright

How do I get permission to reproduce a story or artwork on my website or ebook?

Graphics on the website is usually identified on the page it appears on (usually with copyright info).

The copyright of each individual asset in the ebook is described in the About this Edition and the Copyright Credit & Acknowledgements section of the ebook. You can find most of the same information on this web page. Guidelines for using/republishing portions are found here.

I have a publicity/press page with links to web-friendly art and images related to the ebook series. It also offers some ideas about republish portions of the ebook on your own site.

What about the versions I find on Z-Library, Anna’s Archive, Bit Torrent, etc.?

I actually uploaded one version of Existential Smut 1 myself to Z-Library, so I am reasonably fine with it. (I will try to upload the most current version, but it may take a while).