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.

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.

It Took Me A Year To Write 3,000 Words And That's Okay

Yes, I'm talking about My Neighbor's Fertile Stepson. Which is still available to purchase on Amazon! Or just read, if you're signed up for Kindle Unlimited. I am not picky.

So I'm just going to come clean here. I decided back in... let's go with September of 2016 that I was going to start writing short smut for Kindle. My reasons being:

1. I need money,

2. I want to get some experience self-publishing on a bunch of different platforms and this is way faster than writing novels and novellas

3. I have a lot of smutty ideas that don't fit into another format, and

3. I really need money. (Like you don't.)

But I didn't publish anything until last week. What the hell have I been doing, one might ask?

Well, first of all, I planned to wait until January to get going no matter what, just for tax reasons. My spouse is kind of hot on anything that might make our taxes harder to deal with, and I didn't want to piss her off by starting a new business at the end of the year. Is that normal? Dunno, but it's how I dealt with things. But I was still writing stuff.

And then Trump got elected. I won't get super political, but that fucked me up for months. It's kinda hard to write when you're living in fear. Also I had a few ideas for Chuck Tingle-style White House smut that I had to nix because it turned out Trump was an actual sexual predator and it's kind of hard to write smut about a real-life predator who might also be a pedophile I don't know maybe it's just me.

Still, I got my business going in February. Registered with the state of Maryland and everything. For details check here.

And then... what? Not publishing, that's for sure. Not for months.

Well, I dealt with family life, and work life, and being scared in general. And I finished some stuff I haven't published yet, and worked on things that aren't done but might be published soon. I even threw together an essay for a contest worth five grand. And eventually I got annoyed and finished the naughty neighbor story and published it. Why not? The story was there, and it certainly wasn't doing anything for me being not published.

But it still took me awhile, just to finish editing the draft and getting it together. This book helped me quite a lot, although it was missing a few steps. And now, I'm a published author! Whoo!

Things I learned:

1. Don't be afraid to sit down and write.

2. Don't be afraid to sit down and edit.

3. Don't be afraid.

4. Go ahead and publish your smut at $2.99 because the royalties are way better.

And now back to writing. Wrapping up another one off and getting going on a trilogy that should be... heated. Mmm...

Lea

FIRST BOOK ZOMG

Please bear with me, I self-published a book for the first time yesterday and I am low-key freaking out about it.

*deep breath*

OH MY GOD I PUBLISHED A BOOK IT'S REAL PEOPLE ARE READING IT OH MY GODDDDD

*ahem*

So yeah! My first book, My Neighbor's Fertile Stepson, is now available on Amazon for you all to read. It's erotica with impregnation and ffm content, and I think it's pretty hot. The book is in the Kindle Selects program, so if you're a Kindle Unlimited member you can go ahead and read it for free, but however you get ahold of it: I appreciate reviews! Any reviews. it's real oh my god

I'm going to go finish freaking out and then get working on the next one. Might put some notes here about writing this thing later, because despite the length I've been at this since September and it's worth talking about. Okay. Bye.