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

Getting Sexy with SEO

(Note: not a tutorial! But I'll throw in some links to a few tutorials I've been using.)

So I've been a bit frantic (for me) over the past week, releasing THREE (count 'em) new stories in the Temple of the Seducer series on Amazon, which are totally free to read on Kindle Unlimited. If you enjoy sexy stories featuring monsters and adventurers getting down and dirty in dungeons, you will probably enjoy these.

The first book, Gaze of the Gorgon, is still up, and I'll go ahead and link the other three right here:

The Ice Spirit's Embrace: When young alchemist Tomas and his adventuring companions seek shelter in a cave, Tomas is separated and trapped in the tomb of an icy apparition. She may be beautiful and lustful, but her touch means a quick, frozen death.

Tomas isn't a fighter, and he isn't a mage, but he does have a few concoctions up his sleeve to warm the ice spirit's frosty soul. But the ghost isn't satisfied with a simple embrace, and Tomas may not be equipped to fill her needs...

Bewitching the Abomination: Salome Spellweaver: adventurer. Mistress of the dark arts. A beauty worth dying for, with arrogance to match.

When a pitched dungeon battle goes wrong, Salome finds herself held captive. Shackled and powerless, she's locked in a cell with a flesh golem: an enormous necromantic construct, built in the form of a hulking brute of man.

Luckily, Salome knows how to handle herself around big, strong men. But even if she can charm the beast, she might find he's too much for her to handle...

The Mummy's Resurrection: Don't split the party! Oops, too late...

Pieter Goldeye, professional thief, isn't sure why he let himself get talked into this dungeon raiding nonsense in the first place. So when things turn bad, he bolts as quick as he can. Too bad he didn't see the pit trap...

Ankhanafer, ancient priestess of the Seducer God Qa'asp, has lain asleep for uncounted millennia. Now a thief has disturbed her repose. He'll be dealt with, but Ankhanafer still has a use for his life essence, and she knows exactly how to get it.

Maybe Pieter will even enjoy it. He always wanted to go out with a bang...

I'm in the middle of editing the next two books in the series, with more to come. Along the way I'll also be indulging in a bit of sexy, sexy search engine optimization (not actually sexy to me, but if it's your kink enjoy and well wishes!).

Looking over Amazon I found out about erotica keywords, which seem like kind of a big deal. (I knew about keywords :-P just not these keywords.) I've also been reading up about a few tips and tricks to make my books easier to find on Amazon, so I'll be tweaking some of my blurbs and keywords to see what happens.

I've also been looking around at new fonts that might work well for covers. Always love new fonts! Allura looks pretty nifty, as does Great Vibes . This guide also has some pretty nice fonts (shout out to Optimus Princeps!).

Beyond that I'll be reading up on the subject, but most of the books I've found so far are... a bit more technical than I'd like? If you have any good recommendations, feel free to post 'em up in the comments.

And that's about it! If you'd like to keep up to date with me, I'll be posting the releases on Twitter @leabravowriter, along with general life updates and smutty pictures from other people.

Alternatively, feel free to sign up for my mailing list! I'll be posting new releases there as they come (not more often than weekly - you don't want spam and I don't want to write spam), along with any deals I run on my work.

I do have a Tumblr page as well... it is a bit bare bones right now because I'm still learning the app, but I expect interesting stuff to start appearing there soon. I'll let you know as my grip on social media tightens. (Mua ha ha ha.)

-Lea

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

Tenses

Let's talk about... tenses. (Mmm. Sexy word.)

My writing process is... I'd call it haphazard but that's lending it too much dignity. I write in notepads, in Scrivener, in email drafts, whatever I have in hand when the mood strikes, which is not often. (Pro Tip #1: Don't wait to write until the mood strikes.) I jump around between different scenes, I rarely start at the beginning, and I certainly never wrap things up at the end. (That's a lie, sometimes I do.)

And eventually I have to assemble the mess into one location (Scrivener) and start editing it. I'm doing that now with a story about a busty bridesmaid, and I'm learning I had some trouble with... tenses.

The story opens in third person, past tense. The next scene is present tense. The scene after that opens with past tense, but switches to present halfway through. That happens in two scenes. Then around scene five, I suddenly jump into first person present. Which IIRC is the first scene I actually wrote.

This makes editing a challenge, which leads me to more Pro Tips:

Pro Tip #2: Read the last thing you wrote before you start the next scene. Not all of it, just a few sentences. Remind yourself what you're writing.

Pro Tip #3: Read the whole story before you start your first editing pass. I rewrote a bunch of scenes into third person present before I got to the first person present scene and decided I liked it more. I can't afford that sort of wasted work!

And now back to it. Got to fix those... tenses. *shiver*

Addendum To A Footnote On Getting Rich Quick Writing Short Smut

...God DAMN it Fakku.