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Susannah Breslin writes on http://blogs.forbes.com : Recently, I pitched a long-form journalism story to an editor. This editor is working with a new type of publication. Essentially, they are enlisting journalists to write long-form non-fiction stories which are sold as Kindle Singles. Magazines are publishing less long-form journalism nowadays, and this model gives journalists an opportunity to practice their craft and get paid for it.

As I understand it, with this particular model, journalists are paid a fee for their story. Part of it is paid upon assignment. The other part is paid upon filing the story. After that, the journalist gets 50% of his or her Singles’ sales profits.

I was intrigued. The story I pitched is a quintessential Los Angeles story. It’s about the adult movie industry, but it’s also about L.A. land battles and political corruption, the failures of the DoJ and the seediness of Hollywood, celebrity secrets and strange bedfellows. It’s “Boogie Nights” meets “Chinatown.” It was the longest pitch I’ve ever written, clocking in at 1,600 words.

A few weeks later, I received an email from the editor. He was passing on the story. The reason he gave was one I’ve heard before. He did not believe the story would sell.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this. Several years ago, I wrote a proposal for a non-fiction book about the adult movie industry. The agent I had at the time sent it out to nearly two dozen editors at New York publishing houses, and no one bought it. Several editors reasoned that because porn was free on the internet, no one would want to buy a book about porn. This confused me. The book I would write would not be porn. It would be about porn. Either way, they believed no one would pay for it.

Are they correct? It’s hard to say. Adult film star Jenna Jameson’s memoir, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, spent several weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Seven years after its original publication date, it’s the 25,825th best-selling book on Amazon and the 69th most popular memoir by an actor. Of course, Jameson’s celebrity as a sex icon helps the book’s sales, and the book is not so much about the porn industry as it is porn’s progeny.

There aren’t a lot of non-fiction books about the adult movie industry that could be described as journalism.

There are novels (Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff). There are anti-porn polemics (Pamela Paul’s Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families).

There are oral histories (Legs McNeil’s The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry). There are long-form stories. But there is no book-length version of Susan Faludi’s seminal “Waiting for Wood” (originally published in the New Yorker, it can be found in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male).

There are probably several reasons why this is the case. Writing about the adult business isn’t easy. It takes time, and porn insiders question the motivations of male journalists looking to spend copious amounts of time on adult movie sets.

It’s not a particularly glamorous business. Porn Valley is Hollywood’s twisted sister; in the Valley, tinsel and VIP rooms have been replaced by used condoms and half-empty bottles of lube. And then there is the book publishing industry itself, torn between seeing itself as an elitist institution dedicated to publishing great literature and its bottom line’s relentless demands to sell more celebrity cookbooks.

According to Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s “Hard Core“:

Pornography is now, indisputably, omnipresent: in 2007, a quarter of all Internet searches were related to pornography. Nielsen ratings showed that in January 2010, more than a quarter of Internet users in the United States, almost 60 million people, visited a pornographic Web site. That number represents nearly a fifth of all the men, women, and children in this country—and it doesn’t even take into account the incomprehensible amount of porn distributed through peer-to-peer downloading networks, shared hard drives, Internet chat rooms, and message boards.

But does it sell? In the case of my story, the question is not does porn sell, but does writing about porn sell? Clearly, people want to read writing about porn, but will they pay for it?

I think they will. Because good writing about porn isn’t about porn. It’s a window into our collective humanity. In porn, we are laid bare. Our desires revealed, ourselves are revealed. Porn is a record of who we are — our unconscious impulses, our unformed desires, our unspoken fantasies. Porn is omnipresent because we find ourselves in it. To understand porn and the porn business is to understand who we really are.