Simone Francis

What Simone Francis writes

The categories are hers, taken straight from her site menu: Spanking, Sapphic, Supernatural, Dark Erotica, Horror, Erotic Ghost, Edwardian, Mature Heroines and Humour. Her Amazon bio sums the whole thing up as kinky, often steamy, but always romantic fiction. In practice that means fetish-led erotica with a romance spine, often in a historical setting, often with bisexual or sapphic leads, and often with a ghost somewhere in it.

Her home page carries her own warning about explicit sex and fetishes, which is the closest thing to a content note she publishes. She also says some of her stories draw on experiences that women have told her.

Free, paid and what sits between them

Her access model is unusually easy to describe, which in this category is a compliment. Complete short stories are free, on her site and on her Substack. Each serial opens with a free first episode and then continues for paying subscribers, and by her own description a serial runs from ten to more than twenty episodes. Once a serial is finished it is released as an ebook, so a reader who does not want a subscription can simply wait and buy the completed story.

The paid tier is $5 a month according to her Substack About page. What a serial actually costs you therefore depends on how long you stay subscribed rather than on any per-chapter price, which is the opposite of the coin economies most apps in this niche run on. If you want that comparison in general terms, our page on subscriptions against paying per story covers it. A free Substack subscription gets you email when she publishes, with no payment attached.

The books

Six titles are confirmed from a page each. The Donnington Chronicles, a BDSM romp set in the 1980s, was serialised on Substack and then published as an ebook dated 2 August 2021 on Amazon. It is the only one of her titles with a store page carrying a date, so no dates are given for the rest.

The others are reachable through the universal retailer links she uses: The Bookshop, with a bisexual heroine in Edwardian London; Painted Stripes, which ran as a sixteen-instalment serial before becoming an ebook; The Mistress' Pet Show, whose first episode is free on Substack; Teach Me; and the femdom story The Contract. One further title named on her site is not listed here because we did not read it.

How she works

She writes in public and says so. Of Painted Stripes she says the serial turned very kinky in response to readers' suggestions as it ran, which is the serial format doing what the format is for. Her site also carries a Writing Tips section of free articles about writing erotica, including one explaining how she makes her title images from composites and AI generation, a disclosure most authors do not bother with.

Her own site is the index: free short stories, the serials, the books page and those writing articles. Her Substack is where the serials run and where the newsletter comes from, and her Amazon author page lists the ebooks. She says many stories are also published on Medium, though we never captured a profile address for that.

What is not confirmed

No start year is stated anywhere we read. Substack's own description of her publication says it has thousands of subscribers without giving a figure, so we publish no number. Whether any title is in Kindle Unlimited was not checked, and the Amazon product link on her own site returned a 404 on the day we looked. She is listed as a contributor to an October 2026 anthology on another writer's blog, but her own pages were not checked for it, so it is not claimed here. She makes no bestseller or award claim on any page we read. The line on her About page about her age and earlier working life is deliberately left out.

Every writer we cover is listed on the authors hub.