Dear Tits and Sass,
Amanda Brooks: Quit completely or alter your business?
Either way, you need to start tracking down all ads and banner exchanges. Check your site stats for incoming links, Google your name, your name and city, email address, phone number, domain name and any relevant phrases from your ads. Make a list of live links. Start removing what your business doesn’t need. The rest will have to wait until you’ve retired. Most non-scraper sites will be agreeable to your request, though you may be able to badger them into removing your pictures. Most of your ads will fall off the Internet after a year or two.
Tour, whether to new cities or making new clients in the cities you most frequently work. You can probably expand your client base over the next couple months without putting yourself at risk. Expand but focus your advertising to get results, though expect this new round of advertising will yield more stolen ads you have to track down. Publicly announce your retirement date as 2-3 weeks in advance of your actual date. As soon as you take everything down, you’ll get a flurry of requests so this is the easy way to capitalize on that without running into your personal plans.
Since you seem hesitant to throw away all your hard work, altering your business is probably the best way to go. Because you’re truly concerned about escort work and your future, public retirement is wisest. Go UTR. At that point, you can do whatever you want: communicate and run your business only via your newsletter and/or TER reviews if you decide to allow them to remain (get links to ads/websites removed), create a very anonymous new persona with few or no pictures (change your reviews to that new name, or not), move up into mutli-hour minimums, raise your rates due to reduced availability (probably losing some clients), or do any number of things. Or create a whole new, more expensive, less-available persona, though building a new business is probably the last thing you want to do. Make up a story for your clients that doesn’t involve you moving to the city where you’re going to go to school. There are all sorts of ways you can twist what you currently have into something that works better for you and won’t cost you goodwill with your clients, or threaten your future.
Take a sabbatical for the first semester to see how your new life works for you and get over burnout. The time off will give you the best perspective on what to do next with your business. You may find a few tweaks are all it needs to fit into your life or you may find you’re perfectly fine without it at all.
Do not start an “anonymous” escort blog. It’s inevitable you’ll spill too much detail and someone will figure out who you are.
Yolanda: Fancy people never seem to leave their jobs; they just end up “consulting” forever, and whenever they feel like it. So no, you’re not retiring yet; you’re transitioning your business into unique arrangements with a select few clients. Before you make any changes to your advertising, let your best regulars know this is coming. You’re changing your business model to beter cater to men like them, is how they should understand it. It lets them know you’re becoming more scarce, and lets them feel special. Maybe this is an opportunity to transition some of them to long-term arrangements at a premium? When you’re ready to vanish from the internet, make a new phone number or even more discreet email address available to the regulars you want to retain. They’re already primed to understand that your availability is now limited due to the shift in your business, so they don’t need to know that you’ve moved and moved on. Welcome to consulting.
Linda: I’ve retired before (though it didn’t stick) and I can say that becoming unavailable is one of the best ways to drive up your demand for business. Why else do so many mainstream performers repeat their bogus “farewell” tours? The idea of being the last one to enjoy something that will never be offered for enjoyment for again, is a powerful motivator. With this in mind, make a huge deal out of your retirement. Post about it on message boards, write a pop-up note about it on your site so it’s the first thing visitors see, and add a few lines on your ads. If the “for a limited time only!” explicit approach isn’t your style, don’t make it read like a sales pitch. Instead, wax romantic about all the fond memories and beautiful experiences you’ve had in the past few years, and how sad you are that your time in this world is coming to an end. Thank everyone for their support and company. Email your favorite and/or most high-spending clients with a special message about how you wanted them to hear this first from you, and how you’d love to find a way to keep seeing each other for as long as you possibly can. You don’t have to tell anyone about your move, school, or new job direction. If they badger you a lot and won’t take “it was time for a change” for an answer, tell them you’re finally getting engaged and settling down. (Weirdly, most clients seem to love this. It makes them feel privy to a private aspect of your life, and confirms to them that a woman’s life is all about a man instead of being an independent and brilliant badass.)
One more thought, since you mention being paranoid about clients re: your new path. That’s smart, and you should do everything you can to erase your internet footprint, but most hookers and former hookers I know get bitten by people close to them, not their clients. Clients can actually be impressively valiant when it comes to protecting the privacy and personal life of the sex workers they see or used to see. But jealous friends, vindictive exes, shitty family members—not so much. Be careful about who you talk to about your past (and your present) when it comes to escorting. You wouldn’t want to trust the wrong classmate with that privileged information.