Not a great deal when you look at the purpose behind both. That is, to stimulate and excite the viewer or reader. However, erotica is a slightly more grey area and many erotic stories are allowed to be widely publicised whereas pornographic material is often frowned upon.

Erotica comes with a story line often written with some literary merit. It brings life and feeling into its characters and sets a scene whereas pornography is simply a basic gratification technique. Pornography will contain much cruder visual images and vulgar language and the story itself is barely there - simply a means to an end, so to speak.

Written sex stories are now widely available on line. Type sex stories into a search engine and you will get the pornographic sort. But boy, will you have a choice! The internet pornographic industry is flourishing more than any other. Feeling doubtful? Let's take a look at the statistics.

Every second of every single day sees over three thousand dollars spent on pornography. Every second of every day sees 28, 258 people viewing porn on the internet and at the same time 372 users are typing adult search terms into their computer. Some of these people will be looking for sex stories as a quick, cheap way of arousal or to inspire them into new fantasies.

The pornography industry reaps more revenue than giants like Google, Microsoft and eBay and exceeds the combined income for ABC, CBS and NBC together. In 2006, well over 75 million searches were carried out using the term 'sex', with 414 million possible results. Alarmingly, twenty per cent of those searching that term were under 18 and of the twenty three and a half million searches that were made using the term 'porn', ninety six per cent were made by men. No surprise there, then.

There are currently 4.2 million pornographic web sites giving access to images, video footage and sex stories over 420 million pages. As you can see, big business indeed!

Many people can cash in on this by submitting their own sex stories which allows them to have some involvement in the porn industry but keeps a respectable distance from doing anything personal. After all, many of the sites claim to print real life sex stories but most of them will probably be fiction. It makes no difference, the end result is the same.

Until the advent of the internet, there was still pornographic material around, including sex stories. But what was considered decent or, at the other end of the scale, immoral, were very different from today. Indeed, the Kama Sutra which is basically a sex manual on how to do it, was often discredited as indecent. This book didn't involve sex stories but rather instructions.

Animated pornography is also more and more in the forefront these days. Not as crude as the real life stuff and more on an entertainment level, these cartoons are becoming more popular. There are also some cases of poetry and romantic fiction that border on pornography but are more in the realms of soft sex stories.

Anybody with an imagination that stretches to sexual fantasy can be a writer of sex stories and many have been penned by authors who are then 'discovered' and go on to become highly paid and recognised writers within the porn industry. One way to get noticed I suppose.