NSFW warning: this newsletter is about underwhelming stepsibling porn
If you Google my full name, Hattie Jean Hayes, you’ll find my website and lots of my literary writing – short stories, poems, essays – along with some old links to comedy projects. If you Google first and last name, most of the first few results are from my journalism career. But on that first page of Google, there’s also an Amazon link, and if you click that link, you’ll find a bunch of erotica.
The other Hattie Hayes has not varied her subject matter much across fourteen Kindle-exclusive titles, a few of which are anthologies. Readers can choose from Sorry, Daddy! A Taboo Stepfather and Stepdaughter Story, Daddy's Brat (same subtitle), Spin the Bottle: A Taboo Stepbrother and Stepsider Erotic Story, and a mold-breaking recent release, The Stepsisters: Taboo First Time Lesbian Erotica.
Let me be clear: I have nothing against erotica. Stepfamily kinks aren’t exactly my favorite, but who am I to yuck another person’s yum? If you go through my browser bookmarks, you will find no fewer than three erotic fanfiction stories1, each at least 25k words, that I’ve read multiple times.
My primary problem, having read a few of these stories, is that they are not good. I’ve read enough porn that I can tell the great from the good from the mediocre. My sole annoyance is that the person writing these books under my name isn’t a good writer.
The Other Hattie’s books aren’t even bad enough to be fun. The writing is boring. In places, it’s lifted directly from other, free erotica online; I’m not sure if Other Hattie Hayes is self-plagiarizing her previous work, committing actual theft, or fatally uncreative. The orgasms are written by someone who has never orgasmed. Bodily fluids operate outside contemporary understandings of physics. Since the prose isn’t well-crafted, the actual sex is more clumsy than inventive. They aren’t really sexy. There’s coercion. There are too many uses of the phrase “She was dry as sandpaper.” One of the books ends on a disturbing cliffhanger mention of a curling iron.
Nevertheless, she (Other Hattie) persisted. And she persists – this stranger is still publishing. The generous thing to do would be to assume someone else has been using the name Hattie Hayes because it is just a cool name. It would be easiest to decide this person’s career does not have anything to do with me. I tried to operate under that idea for a while, but from the beginning, I’ve been a little suspicious.
Since the start, the timing of Other Hattie’s publications has been…weird. In May of 2020, I had spent two months guzzling from the fear/boredom punchbowl. That year, for fun, I cleaned up the 30 poems I’d written in April for National Poetry Writing Month and published the collection as an ebook2 on Amazon. I shared the link on Facebook, I tweeted about it, I sent the PDF to people who were interested, and I felt good about finally letting people read my work.
Within days, the first erotic novel appeared. If you searched my name on Amazon, an entry to the “erotic stepsibling stories” was just under my cutesy chapbook. They both had covers clearly created in Canva. One had my name under a chain of daisies, and the other had it in neon bubble letters underneath a blonde woman in a mesh bra.
Over the following months, more erotic titles kept popping up. Often, their publication dates coincided with my placing a poem or story in a literary journal, or being nominated for a prize. A Goodreads author page for my name appeared – it listed the sexy titles, my poetry, and (weirdly enough) a Karl Urban coloring book. A few well-meaning people reached out to me, worried that I was somehow getting scammed. My dad texted, “Never Googling your name again.”
In October of 2021, I found out two of my poems had been accepted to an exciting anthology project. In all likelihood, the book would be listed on Amazon – and there was a chance my author page, riddled with sloppy erotica, would be connected to the listing.
I turned to Twitter to try and crowdsource some solutions from existing Kindle authors. None of the solutions panned out, but I was grateful for the hivemind anyway. A representative from Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing team told me I would need to spend $39.99 to sign up for a “seller account” in order to submit an inquiry. A copyright claim I submitted (on the basis of writing one of the books contained that was plagiarized from an existing website) went unreviewed. The Goodreads team made Hattie Jean Hayes a separate author page, but that was the closest I came to a real solution. I decided not to worry about it.
Within two weeks of posting my question to Twitter, five new erotica books had been published by the other Hattie Hayes.
Reddit’s Legal Advice, Kindle Direct Publishing, and Erotic Author boards were enlightening, if not helpful. Several people in the Erotic Author subreddit accused me of trying to “ruin another writer’s career,” which did change my perspective. If this person is truly a stranger to me, and picked the name Hattie Hayes because it is (again) a cool-ass name, then I want the best for her. Other Hattie, if you’re out there, and you’re making an income off $2.99 erotica novels, I don’t want to impede that.
But there are other things that make me think this isn’t a coincidence. A few of these stories use the names of people I know. That’s the other aspect of this scenario that makes me suspicious, and the major thing I take umbrage with. Though it’s inconsistent, several of the names used across these titles are close friends or even people in my family. While I was communicating with Amazon, I discovered a few of the books used names of people in my family who were minors at the time of writing. I did not care for that.
Timing remains a major factor, too. The Other Hattie Hayes only publishes when I’m doing something. After I talked about this publicly, and the author released a spate of titles, she didn’t publish again for over a year. Days after I launched my paid Substack, she released two new anthologies.
I do see how this could be a coincidence of timing, a perceived intention that was established early on and has colored my view of the entire scenario. When the Other Hattie first started publishing, I had just started publishing. Now (not to brag), my writing is published much more frequently, and I promote it often. There are plenty of opportunities for her writing and mine to sync up. Maybe she’s a well-meaning digital content creator trying to coast behind the slipstream of my meager SEO. Who knows!
If it is someone I know, if Other Hattie is trying to goad Original Hattie for some reason, that’s the real bee in my bonnet. If this is some nefarious plot against me, well: I’m pretty sure I know who’s doing it.
The writing style, the content, and the coattail-riding timing all fall within the well-worn playbook of an ex-classmate. I hadn’t thought about her in years until this began. She’s targeted other friends with much more serious harassment, so I feel lucky to be the focus of one of her relatively tame campaigns. And, if it’s her, then I really don’t care. I’m glad she found a project she could be consistent with. I like the fonts she picked for the covers.
But then again, it could be anyone.
I’ll likely never know who Other Hattie actually is. Ultimately, Amazon and Kindle support told me that “only the author” could have the books removed from the Amazon store. Since I am not the author, I can’t do anything. And I think I’m going to stop trying. At this point, I have too much writing of my own to give it any more energy.
So, Other Hattie, if you’re reading this: goodbye. I hope someday, my writing makes me so successful that you can pretend to be me at bars, and get free drinks, or at least free books at bookstores. And I hope your books make you a lot of money! They aren’t my cup of tea, but it seems like you found your audience.
Still, if you ever meet someone new, and you introduce yourself as Hattie Hayes, I hope you have to follow up with, “Oh no, haha, I’m the other one.”
Hannibal Lecter x Will Graham; Betty Cooper x Veronica Lodge; alternate-universe Tony Stark x Steve Rogers
I removed the self-published ebook from the web after I started revising the poems and submitting them to journals
Wow! That's quite the story Hattie (and Other Hattie). Sounds like a great premise for a Netflix series, or at least an episode of any number of their shows. I've never Googled my name, and I don't think I will ... Ignorance is bliss, in my case. Oh, BTW, your post titles kick ass!