WTF How Do Marketing?

I'm in a weird position right now where I have a short story on Amazon that I'm not marketing at all because I wrote it for a contest, and I intend to do a full-blown marketing blitz once I know the results, but I don't know the results yet so I'm keeping my mouth shut about it until the results come out, which might happen next Monday if there aren't any more delays. Maybe. You'll be the first to hear about it, whenever something happens that qualifies as "it".

And this non-marketed book is still somehow the best-selling thing I've got on Amazon!

 If you'd like to help me rectify that last, my new story Gaze of the Gorgon is now live on Amazon as well. It's an erotic fantasy story that I'm hoping to turn into a series kick-off, although how fast that happens depends on how well this first story does, m'yeah?

In other news I am drunk and not as good as I thought I'd be at Dragon Ball FighterZ.

- 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