New Book Day! Heat of the Harpy

Well it's been longer than I would have liked, but I finally have a new book out! Heat of the Harpy is my latest fantasy monster story, although not necessarily tied to my Temple of the Seducer books (feel free to make up your own mind about that). It's about what happens when a young man, Kev, finds himself entranced by a beautiful creature, one that's far more dangerous and lustful than she lets on. Here's an excerpt:

At last the fair man spotted Kev in the crowd and gestured for him to come forward. "And this last creature, gentles, is a true rarity, taken from the peaks of the Shattered Mountains. If you will but draw the curtain back, good lad, and keep your distance!"

Kev grinned, sure he was in no danger, and drew the curtain back. He jumped anyway when a piercing shriek sounded, and something slammed into the bars of the revealed cage with great force. Kev stumbled, and ended up falling on his backside to the amusement of the fair man. The rest of the crowd didn't seem to notice, riveted by the cage's occupant.

Kev looked at the cage, and his eyes widened. The being within appeared to be a woman, taller than any man Kev had ever met, but her skin was a bright, fiery red. She wore a sackcloth that preserved her modesty, but her bare limbs were long and well-muscled, and displayed her unnatural character fully. Her human-like legs ended just below the knee, becoming black, bird-like talons with three toes. Her hands were clenched fists gripping the bars, and the nail of each finger was a thick onyx talon, wickedly curved. 

Red and dark orange feathers sprouted from her forearms, matching the feathers that crowned her skull, giving the appearance of a thick mane of hair, and she had a pair of large wings that sprouted from her back, bound in leather straps and pinned behind her. But it was her face that drew Kev's attention.

It was human, and yet not. Her eyes were large and a luminous yellow, with inky black pupils that darted from side to side, taking in the crowd. The bones of her face were sharp, and she had a long nose that didn't quite hook at the end. Her teeth were bared in a fierce scowl, and Kev saw that her canines were long and sharply pointed.

"Behold the harpy!" the fair man shouted, raising his arms high.

The harpy's eyes fixed on Kev, and he felt his heart seize in his chest, barely hearing the fair man's patter, or the rising applause and shouts of the audience. Those luminous eyes were the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, and they seemed to draw him in, showing him a depth of suffering and sorrow that he'd never imagined. He thought of soaring through the sky, the beautiful sky he'd toiled under for so many years, and then felt the weight of chains and nets dragging him down, down onto the cold, unfeeling rock.

And there's a taste! I had a lot of fun writing this one. Aside from being a stand-alone story, it was nice to stretch a little bit in a new setting with a new creature.

Heat of the Harpy is free to read on Kindle Unlimited. If  you like it, please leave a review! Reviews gooooood. And hopefully my next story, a contemporary piece for a change, will be out sooner rather than later. Happy reading!

-Lea

At Series End, A Free Book!

IIIIT'S OVERRR!!!

As of last week my fantasy erotica series, Temple of the Seducer, is up in full on Amazon, free to read for Kindle Unlimited members, please go ahead and check it out!

This is my first time attempting to write a series... or if I'm honest, my first attempt at writing a series that got past the first part... and my first time completing a series. Temple of the Seducer also marks my tenth (10th!) published work on Kindle, so, a lot of milestones here!

I'd like to thank everyone who gave one of the books a read. Knowing that people were reading these really helped me finish the series. Honest! Thank you.

Anyway. To belatedly mark the occasion, I'll be putting Gaze of the Gorgon, the first book in the series, up for free, today only. Go ahead and give it a read, and if you like it, check out the rest of the series! I can say stuff like that now!

And with that, I'm off to my dark rest to come up with more smut to write. Moo hoo ha ha.

-Lea

Quick Thank Yous

First, proud to announce I crossed the $20 sales mark for the first time this month. Woooo! So thank you to everyone who's been buying my smut. :-)

Second, I've got this blog linked up to my Goodreads profile now, so if you friend me there you'll automatically get kept up to date on my posts.

Speaking of, thank you to whoever's been entering my books into Goodreads! I'm pretty lazy about that stuff so I really appreciate it.

Lastly, I've come out with two new books since my last post, Lust of the Lamia and Bound by the Spider Queen. These are more parts from my Temple of the Seducer series, parts five and six respectively. Part seven will wrap the series up for now, and I'm hoping to get it out next week, so stay tuned!

-Lea

Sales Report 2017

Welcome to 2018! The air is cold, the President is out of his mind in a slightly more amusing fashion, and I have officially been in business for a (calendar) year now self-publishing short smut on Amazon, as inspired by books with titles like "The All-New Six Figure Erotica Author", "How To Write Erotic Short Stories That Sell", and "A GUIDE TO MAKING $100 AN HOUR WRITING EROTICA SHORT STORIES AND SELLING THEM ONLINE"!

One would expect that I'd be rolling in the dough by now and looking at a retirement villa someplace warm! So how did I actually do?

Drumroll please...

Total books sold: 3

Total pages read: 247

Earnings: $1.57

And so ends the first year of the Great Self-Publishing Experiment. Not exactly an overnight success story. So now that I'm actually publishing erotica, what have I learned from this first year?

Publish Publish Publish: I only managed to get one book to market this year, and one book does not make money in the short smut market. So I'm not exactly surprised that I flopped out of the gate. This year I fully intend to put a LOT more stories out on KDP, so: maybe join my mailing list so I can keep you posted! Assuming Mailchimp doesn't yank it out from under me first, ha ha ha *sigh* 

Editing is Hard: Almost all of my time was spent on rewriting, rather than first drafts. If there’s one thing I need to improve on it’s getting edits done faster. These shouldn't have been hard edits to get done, but finding time to actually sit down in do them... well. Two kids and a furbaby are not exactly conducive to proper editing, is all I'll say. But I need to get better on this. 

Always be Marketing: The only time I got sales when I wasn’t spamming Twitter with my book was on Christmas Day, for some reason. I try not to make my Twitter feed a constant yammering of book links, but they do work, a bit. I'll need to come up with a proper strategy for marketing this year. 

Price Right: $2.99 is good for royalties, but people aren’t buying short smut at that price and my sales dropped to 0 the whole time I had my short priced at that level. Save it for collections. 

On the good news front, I've started off the year with a new book out! The Bridesmaid's Fertile Curves is up on Amazon for just 99 cents, and free with Kindle Unlimited. Please leave a review if you check it out! And I've just finished outlining a trio of tales about a hapless young Italian man, his fiancee, and her jealous twin sister that, God and my brain willing, should be out later this month. But for now I'm going to spend a bit of time looking for darling Dahlia on my Switch. 

Happy New Year! 

-Lea

Get Rich Quick Writing Short Smut

MWA HA HA YOU FOOLS, YOU HAVE FALLEN INTO MY TRAP! SIT DOWN IN THE METAL FOLD OUT CHAIRS OVER THERE AND PREPARE TO WATCH A SLIDESHOW ON MY PYRAMID SCHEME!

-ahem-

Rachel Aaron Bach (whose book 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love I am rereading right now, and highly recommend) posted a thread on Twitter about writing as a get-rich-quick scheme, and how it is absolutely 100% not that. And she's right! And I know that because I kinda-sorta started writing short smut as a get-rich-quick scheme.

Let's jump into the ol' Wayback Machine...

Maybe a year ago I was researching BDSM for my on-again, off-again urban fantasy novel featuring evil fairies, globetrotting golems and really bad relationships. (Still trunked.) I dug around for recommendations on good examples of BDSM (i.e. not 50 Shades of Grey) and picked up a Kindle book called The Theory of Attraction by Delphine Dryden, which by the way is a pretty hot BDSM romance if you're looking.

At another point I purchased a copy of Ravished by the Triceratops by Christie Sims and Alara Branwen, because God help me I needed to know what the actual fuck.

Because of this Amazon started... recommending. And because I was also reading many books on writing and publishing, it started recommending books like:

The ALL-NEW Six Figure Erotica Author, by Jade K. Scott

How to Write Erotic Short Stories That Sell: A Simple Formula by Christina Palmer

and

The Erotica Handbook (How to Write Erotica) A GUIDE TO MAKING $100 AN HOUR WRITING EROTICA SHORT STORIES AND SELLING THEM ONLINE, by Emily Baker

You may notice a common theme.

I picked one up out of curiosity, and then a couple more.* The shared gist was that there was a healthy market for short smut, and if you could publish frequently enough and cross-promote moderately well you could eventually hit a point where you'd earn a nice passive income stream.

I was intrigued. Also, broke. So I started coming up with ideas for smutty fantasy stories. And then just plain smutty stories.

It turns out that coming up with sexy little tales is a lot of fun. (And -cough- titillating on a good day.) It also seemed like a good low-investment way to test the waters of self-publishing: if I wrote a few stories under a pseudonym and things went south, no harm no foul, as long as I avoided getting sued.** Even if I didn't get any sales at all, I'd have experience actually publishing something.

There's also a personal challenge aspect to it. I'm a perfectionist who rarely manages to finish my long-form manuscripts. (Would you believe the evil fairy book came from a NaNoWriMo eight years ago? It's true!) Success writing short smut means eliminating those problems with extreme prejudice, which could only help me in other areas. So I decided to finally hang up my shingle, start self-publishing, and see if I could make any money at it. I decided that in October of last year. And folks, let me tell ya:

It's hard.

It's really fucking hard!

For one thing you have to do a ton of set up: register as a business, set up a trade name, buy domain names, open up new social media accounts, open a bank account, set up a mailing list, get registered with KDP or whatever other market you're interested in (not Barnes & Noble apparently). You have to teach yourself how to put together the actual eBook, find some cover art, teach yourself about model releases and the perils of putting faces on erotica covers, track how much you're actually spending on all this stuff...

And then you get to the bit where you actually have to write. Having been at it for almost a year, I can confirm that writing short smut is not any easier than writing anything else. You have to get the words down, you have to make yourself finish, you have to do some revisions. There are some advantages: the plots are pretty straightforward, for one, and working at short lengths means you get done faster and you generally have to do less revision. But you're by no means off the hook.

As for getting-rich-quick, well...

Maybe don't get too hyped up? (Oh shit, I got a new sale today! My Neighbor's Fertile Stepson, available now, here's a cute animal to apologize for the shill.)

See, a lot of these Write Erotica Earn GP books were written a few years back when there was a legitimate boom in short smut. Nowadays the market is a bit more glutted, potentially dying if Barnes & Noble is any indication. I might still do well, I might crash and burn... too early to tell!

Point being, writing really isn't a get-rich-quick scheme, even when you focus on the dirty stuff. But if you enjoy it, do it! Go ahead and publish, even. I spent months tied up in internal knots over getting a simple 3,000 word story just right, but now it's out there and I feel great. And I'll keep that feeling no matter what. (I would like to keep getting reads and sales tho.)

* Of the ones listed, I recommend Jade K. Scott's book, which is short, straightforward, and has been revised to take the recent market into account.

** Soviet Sex Dungeon at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. will forever remain unpublished. No matter how accurate it ends up being.