It’s a good time to be a fan of horny ice-hockey books. The genre, which has a large global audience of predominantly women, has jumped from the page to the screen – first with last year’s smash hit Canadian series Heated Rivalry, and now with Amazon Prime’s Off Campus.
In its first 12 days of release, Off Campus, another story of forbidden love – this time between a drama student and a star player at a fictional Boston university – has been viewed more than 36m times, making it Amazon’s third-largest debut series to date.
Now fans who have already binged the eight parts and are hungry for more have another option: an erotic audiobook featuring two of its actors.
Mika Abdalla and Stephen Kalyn are the latest celebrity signing for Quinn, the app known as “Spotify for porn” that has made its name hiring Hollywood heartthrobs to narrate steamy stories. For $7.99 a month, its hundreds of thousands of subscribers enjoy erotica read by actors such as Andrew Scott, Jesse Williams and Tom Blyth.
Quinn has hit upon a new recipe for success: capitalising on the intense viral interest in the chemistry between pairs of actors and fans eager to fill the void once they’ve exhausted re-watches. “Quinn, I will give you my lifesavings if you get Stephen Kalyn and Mika Abdalla from Off Campus in the booth narrating smut. Do it for the girlies,” pleaded one fan on Instagram ahead of the announcement.
Following the success of Heated Rivalry, Quinn signed lead actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie to narrate the audiobook Ember & Ice. The story, which has nothing to do with the narrative world of Heated Rivalry and is about two fairy princes who embark on a clandestine affair, has gone on to become the platform’s most popular series, with 39m minutes of listening.
The playbook is working again. The first two episodes of Rent Free, in which Abdalla and Kalyn play characters suspiciously similar to their fiery Off Campus roles, have almost 400,000 plays between them within days of release.
“Sometimes the appeal for an audience isn’t necessarily in an individual: they’ve resonated with a relational dynamic,” Jodi McAlister, a romance author and academic, said. “Williams and Storrie is the dynamic that got everyone talking.” Heated Rivalry launched the careers of both men, who were working as waiters before they took on the sexually explicit roles, but are now bona fide celebrities with millions of social media followers and a legion of obsessive fans.
McAlister said casting popular onscreen couples makes good business sense for Quinn but also for the actors themselves, and that she expects the platform will “continue its evolution as another vehicle through which performers, especially male performers, can cement their appeal”.
Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams playing characters Ilya Rosanov and Shane Hollander in Heated Rivalry
Quinn was founded in 2019 by Caroline Spiegel, then a final-year Stanford student wanting to produce intimate stories for women that were made by women. As Spiegel told Vogue in 2020: “It is just like being in bed with someone. It’s like, what is actually going to make this an amazing sexual experience for you? There’s a lot of diversity in our creators, to make sure we have different strokes for different folks.”
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The app generates more than $12m a year according to 2025 figures. It is one of the most popular apps of its kind, along with Dipsea and Bloom Stories, producing “smut for the senses”.
“The apps claim to be ethical, feminist and safe places to explore the erotic,” said Athena Bellas, screen studies lecturer at the University of Melbourne. “These apps want to signal that they offer so much more than just smut to get off to: they claim to offer a product that is healthy, safe, literary, and even subversively feminist.”
Content tailored to women’s pleasure is a booming industry. Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster Rivals is enjoying a revival, Gillian Anderson’s Want brought the anonymous sexual fantasies of women to audio, and Off Campus has become Amazon Prime’s most viewed debut series among women aged 18 to 34.
“There is such a massive infrastructure of horny women and women who want to have their desires being taken seriously, not degraded by male-led porn and given crumbs with poorly written stories,” Rachel Lowenstein, a cultural strategist and content creator, said. “Audio is such an intimate format… You have your imagination, and it can build the story for you.”
Photograph by Liane Hentscher/Amazon Prime Video, Sphere Abacus