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Publishing Erotica Part 3 – What to Write

 

Publishing Erotica Part 3 – What to Write

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 2 – What You Need

So, you have your software and you’ve decided your ready to jump into the world of hot, messy, kinky erotica. So you need something to write. There are a lot of kinks out there from the vanilla to the truly taboo. Erotica could, in broad terms, be divided into four major categories: Male/Female (bisexual women and bisexual men can slip in here), Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender (futas, gender swap, and traditional transgender). Each of these broad categories has myriad subkinks, some that can be adapted to any of the categories, while others are firmly entrenched in their respected areas.

So when writing, select one of these broad categories for the story, then choose several kinks to be explored and fantasized in it. Kinks range from BDSM, Pseudo-Incest, Cheating, Swinging, Voyeurism, Exhibitionism, ABDL, Work Sex, College, Older Man/Younger Woman, Age Play, Virgins, A2M, Pregnancy, Risky Sex, Breeding, and more. See what’s popular on Pornhub or visit Literotica.com and browse what they offer.

The truly daring can try ASSTR.org, though be warned anything is allowed to be published here, including the most extreme of kinks.

You can write a vanilla story about a guy and girl that meet, flirt, and have sex. But it won’t sell as well unless you mix in something a little naughtier. What if she’s cheating on her husband? What if her husband is watching? What if he’s a BDSM Dom and introduces her to the world of submission? What if she whips out the strap-on and decides to do the fucking? What if she’s lactating and he gets a creamy treat? There are so many kinks and subgenres to dive into. Mixing, matching, and exploring new delights are all what makes erotica great.

So where are the lines? What can get you into trouble or outright banned by one of the ebook online stores? They vary from store to store, but there is one line that none of them will allow you to cross. All characters having sex must be over the age of eighteen in erotica.

In America, it is perfectly legal to write about underage sex in graphic terms. It varies in other countries (Canada is 14+), but no ebook store will let you publish it. Once, Amazon did, and then people realized it was on there and that made Amazon look bad. They don’t like to look bad.

If you want to write that stuff, there are several free story websites that have no restriction on content (such as ASSTR.org). Post there.

If you want to make money at selling erotica, make your characters eighteen or older.

You can still write your naughty babysitter erotica—she’s just eighteen. Your cheerleaders are in college, not high school. Nubile coeds seduce their college professors, and your horny cougars are leading eighteen-year-old guys into their beds to give them an education.

Now, let’s talk about the other kinks that will get you banned from the major online stores. I’ll go over them by all the places I’m aware of that sell erotica.

Amazon: Incest is a big no-no on Amazon. You can publish Pseudo-Incest (step-daughter/step-father, etc.) but you have to be careful on how you market it or you’ll get banned. No rape or other non-consensual sex. Dubious consent is a gray area, be careful how you market your story. No blatant mind-control. No bestiality unless the creature is extinct (dinosaurs are A-OK) or mythical (your character can’t fuck a horse, but a unicorn is just fine). With werewolves and other shifters, they need to be fully human to do the nasty. No scat or watersports (watersports may be a gray area). No snuff. You can have characters die, but not for sexual gratification. Also, Amazon has another pitfall—the adult dungeon. This will be a blog post in its own right coming later.

Barnes & Noble: No underage. Barnes & Noble will allow anything else, including Incest, Bestiality, and Rape stories.

Smashword: No underage. Smashword will let anything else be published.

Apple: They are actually more prudish than Amazon. See above, but add Pseudo-Incest, and if your cover is too racy, they’ll ban that too.

Google Play: No Pseudo-Incest.

Kobo: Not really sure. They have a very small market share.

Excitica: No underage or bestiality. This is famed erotica author Selene Kitt’s ebook store. She created as a place free from Amazon and other stores censorship. I believe her caveats are because of credit card companies (they really don’t like erotica to begin with).

All Romance Ebook: No underage, bestiality, or incest. This site specializes in romance over erotica, but they will let you publish erotica on their website.

There are probably a few other extreme kinks that are not allowed to be published, but they are for such a niche market not many authors write it. The big ones are underage, incest, rape, and bestiality. If you want to write these kinks, you’re limited in where and even if you can publish them. The main things to pay attention to are Amazon’s restrictions.

Amazon controls the market. They are where the money is to be made, so you want to stay on their good side. If you get too many books banned, they will suspend your KDP account. And they only ever allow you to have a single KDP account tied to a tax ID number (like your social security number).

But even if you stay in Amazon’s coloring lines, there are plenty of naughty kinks for you to write and explore. So have fun, get out there and “fantasize,” come up with your kinky tales, and let the passion burn across the screen. Remember if it makes you hard or wet, it’s sure to make someone else!

Next post, I’ll discuss creating your online avatar and pen name

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 4 – Your Pen Name

 

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Publishing Erotica Part 2 – What You Need

Publishing Erotica Part 2 – What You Need

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 1—Introduction.

So, you’ve decided that you have one of those perverted, deviant minds that is constantly bubbling with wicked ideas begging to be shared. Nubile women, hunky men, and explosions of bodily fluids gush through your mind. You want to be an erotica author, but what do you need to get started to publish erotica?

A computer of some sort is a good start.

I know, obvious. But even if you prefer to write with pen and paper, eventually you need to transcribe your words onto a digital document. You could write it on a desktop computer, a laptop, or even a tablet. I even write on my small Kindle from time to time. What kind of computer it is really doesn’t matter. It just needs internet access.

The internet is what makes this possible. That and ebooks.

The key to being successful as a short-form erotica author is to keep your costs low. Individual titles may not sell well enough, especially starting out, to justify the expense of hiring professionals to make covers and create your interiors. So you need to learn to do it yourself. To do that, you need software. There is really good software out there that is quite expensive. But, fortunately for you, there exists more than adequate software that is absolutely free.

Yep, free. It’s a great word.

Starting off, you need your word processor, the program you will write your erotica in. There are the paid softwares such as the Microsoft Office suite. Anything from Word 97 and on will suffice. Yep, you can go back to Word 97 if you want. You don’t need the latest version. You only need it capable of using style sheets (which I’ll touch on in a later post). There is also the excellent software Scrivner, designed for the express purpose of writing books. It’s cheaper and, while I’ve never used it myself (I’ve only recently picked it up and haven’t started playing around with it) many authors I know swear by it.

So what are the free word processors?

The two biggest are OpenOffice and LibraOffice. Both are capable of performing most of what Microsoft Office can do. And as far as writing and publishing erotica, or other genres, OpenOffice and LibraOffice can accomplish everything you need. I use OpenOffice (I’m writing this blog post in it), and have been completely happy. It can save your file as a Word 97/2003 .doc, which you can upload that file directly to Amazon for publication. OpenOffice can track changes (invaluable if you ever use an editor), leave comments, use style sheets, make PDF’s, and more.

Google Documents is another free software. Your files are automatically backed up into the cloud (see below for the importance of that), but it does not have nearly as many features that even OpenOffice has.

So, we have our writing software out of the way. Let’s take a look at graphic design. Making your own covers is a good way to save money. With tutorials on Youtube, you can learn the basics and lots of tips and tricks that can make a sexy cover (which I will detail more in a later post). The big daddy of graphic design is Photoshop CS. Now, Photoshop is not a cheap piece of software, but Adobe does offer a monthly subscription that is reasonable to use Photoshop CC.

Or, for free, there is GIMP.

You can do a lot with GIMP, and there are plenty of tutorials on Youtube to explain how to use it. It can do a lot of things that Photoshop can, but Photoshop is the more robust tool. There is a lot more support for specialized brushes and addons for Photoshop then GIMP. But you don’t need it for a terribly complicated purpose. You just need to make simple erotica covers. And GIMP will work just fine for that task.

Now that you’ve written your story, you have to assemble it into an the ebook, or a print book. This is your interior. For publishing on Amazon, you can upload a Word .doc straight to their server, but other publishers require ebooks or other formats. Or, if you want to have a more professional book (particularly if you’re writing something longer than a short story), formatting your document with an ebook creator is preferred. Scrivener is capable of making ebooks (since it was designed for writing books). Vellum is an expensive software, but it is the best at making ebooks. Sadly, it is also for Macs only. For free, I use Calibre. It can make ebooks of any format from even an OpenOffice file. In fact, I found using an .odt (OpenOffice doc) works better than a .doc.

Lastly, let’s talk about the most important thing you need—a way to backup your work. This is vital. Technology fails. Hard drives die. Devices break, get stolen, or are lost. You do not want all your work to go poof. It has happened to me. It has happened to other authors. Luckily, there are a variety of ways to backup your data.

Always have multiple copies stored in different locations. Don’t just leave your file only on your hard drive. Save it to a thumb drive or an external hard drive. You can even email it yourself as an attachment, leaving it on your mail server. These are all great solutions, but the best is backup in the cloud.

There are a plethora of services that provide cloud backup. I recommend Dropbox. The basic service, which they try hard to hide, gives you 2 GB of storage for free. Documents are small things. 2 GB will go a long way. So why Dropbox? It creates a folder on your computer. Anything in that folder is automatically backed up to the cloud the moment it is modified (assuming you have internet). If you have multiple computers, your files will be synced between them. Work on something on your laptop, save and quit, then find the file already downloaded to your desktop. Plus, you can revert the file to an older version if it isn’t older than thirty days (this saved me a few weeks ago).

You can use other backup services like Google Drive or Microsoft’s OneDrive, but I’ve found Dropbox to be far and away superior.

Every author has their own familiarity with software and access to different programs. Use what is best for you. If you want to buy the software, think of it as an investment for the future (and make sure you save that receipt for your taxes). Or you can use the free software. Supports a little harder to find, but it’s out there. Writing erotica professionally is treating it as a business. This is no longer a hobby. You need to think about your profit margins and keeping your costs down.

Well, that’s the boring stuff down. Next post, we’ll tackle just how kinky can your writing be and still get published.

Addendum: Author Isabella Belucia has brought up a sight called canva.com that is for making book covers, complete with templates and tools.

Click here for Part 3 – What to Write

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Publishing Erotica Part 1 – Introduction

Publishing Erotica Part 1 – Introduction

For the last two years, I have been a self-published erotica author. For nearly a year-and-a-half, I have been self-employed, writing erotica full time and providing for myself above what I had been at my low-paid day job. I publish as Reed James, and I want to share with you how I tackle publishing, what I’ve learned, the pitfalls I encountered and how I navigated them, and how I’ve made a moderate success as a short-form erotica author.

At the time of writing this article (March 13th, 2015) I was the #21 ranked author in the category Kindle Ebooks>Literature & Fiction>Erotica and the #45 ranked author in the category Books>Literature & Fiction>Erotica. I have over 400 books published on Amazon and another 40 on various other sites. Every other day, I post a new short erotica on Amazon. That’s a story around 4 to 6 thousand words (though I’m usually 6 to 7k these days, sometimes more). I’ve been doing this since I went full time in October 2015. It has been a rewarding experience. I make my own schedule (though I spend most of my day writing and editing). I am my own boss. I am happy and satisfied. I get to spend my time working on my passion—writing. And not just writing erotica, but on non-erotic fiction that is not nearly as successful.

Why Write Erotica?

So why should you write erotica? You may have heard it is easy money. Compared to any other form of writing, it is. But that doesn’t mean this is easy. It doesn’t mean you can sit down at your keyboard, bang out a story, post it on Amazon, and then just sit back and rake in the dough. If you are looking for a quick buck, no form of writing is that answer, not even erotica.

The money is merely the bonus. You should write erotica because your kinky, because you have dirty ideas, because you want to share your naughty fantasies. To write erotica, you need to enjoy erotica. It cannot be a chore to you. If the thought of writing graphic descriptions of sex turns you off, then you should not write in this genre.

I have known many authors who had the mentality of “I’ll just write smut even if it’s distasteful to make money.” Their prudishness shows in their writing. Your readers can sense if you don’t love what you’re doing and just going through the motions to make a quick buck. The successful erotica authors are people that want to explore the perverse, who see the world and wonder why doesn’t the hot doctor give me a “physical” or wouldn’t it be hot if my secretary had nothing on under her skirt. They’re the people that imagine having sex with a stranger at a club on the dance floor or watching their wife being fucked hard by a Black man.

Erotica isn’t about being realistic. It’s about sharing hot fantasies, forbidden lusts, deviant thoughts, and wicked desires. And it’s up to you to bring them to life for your readers enjoyment. Even if they’re impossible—futanari, witches, paranormal creatures, inhuman stamina, gushing orgasms, bucketfuls of cum. Don’t be afraid to write all the juicy, naughty details. Don’t be afraid to use words like pussy, cunt, ass, cock, dick, cum, slut, and whore. Have your characters embrace these words. A cock fucks a pussy in erotica, not a penis entering a vagina. And remember, these are fantasies. Condoms are not needed. Pregnancy is only an issue if the risk of pregnancy while having unprotected sex is what makes the story hotter. Or maybe it’s a breeding story, and the girl is begging to be knocked up and bred, to have every drop of cum pumped into her fertile cunt.

If any of that makes you uncomfortable, writing erotica is not for you. And that is okay.

If, however, you don’t have a problem with graphic, kinky sex, and you have a filthy mind just bursting with ideas to share, then the next thing you need to understand is short-form erotica is a grind.

Let me repeat that. It. Is. A. Grind.

You need to keep publishing and keep putting out new material so people keep browsing your catalog. It’s rare for any one story to be a huge hit when writing short-form erotica. But as you build your catalog, people are more likely to discover your stories. And if they like what they read, then they will browse your catalog for more of what you write. As your catalog grows, it feeds off of itself, delivering you more sales. You won’t even start to see any real success until around 30 books, and you’ll need more to make a living at it.

So that means you need to be writing a lot. You need to be prepared to commit time to this. If you want to write erotica as a hobby, that’s fine. If you want to make a career at it, you must make writing a priority. And this applies for writing any genre. You need to devote at least an hour a day.

And success won’t come right away.

My first story made me exactly $2.55 my first week and a half (I published near the end of March 2014). I had delusions of making several hundred dollars in the first day. Surely, there would be a hundred people who would by the book. That’s not a lot. A drop in the bucket.

It did not happen.

I preserved. In April, I published a second story and made $6.15. I had no idea what I was doing, but I kept at it (you’ll see in future posts). May saw me earn $13.90. I had three titles by then. It wasn’t until July that I started publishing more stories. By August, I made nearly $400 dollars. I published more. September saw me hit over $1000 dollars. I was seeing success. I kept writing. I was publishing a short ever three days by the end of September.

October, I made nearly $3000 dollars. I was making more than my day job. The decision to quit was easy. I went full time. Now, this was during the days of KU 1.0. The changes Amazon made in July of 2015 to the Kindle Unlimited borrow program hurt short-form erotica a lot. Many erotica authors dropped out. I myself took a hit to my income. But I kept the grind, and I still make a living even in the KU 2.0 days.

And so can you, if you are dedicated and want to do this. I’ll show you how over the next series of posts.

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 2 – What You Need

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On Writing: Taking Notes

Note Taking

by Reed James

Organization is so very important when it comes to writing. You may think writing is easy. You just sit down and let your fingers fly across the keyboard. But if you really want to write something meaningful (I know, a guy who writes smut is talking about writing something with meaning) you need to take notes.

Have an outline to guide you as you write. It doesn’t have to be super detailed, that’s really up to your own tastes, but you need something down to give direction, to know where your characters are going, what challenges they’ll face, and how experience will change them. I prefer to outline the major points of the story and then see where inspiration takes me as I journey to those points.

Next you should keep notes. If you have a character, say a minor cop that likes to chew a specific brand of tobacco, you should write that down in your notes. You may never even plan on using the character, but down the road you just may realize you need him/her to fulfill some part in your story and you’ll want those notes to keep the character traits consistent. Believe me, someone will spot the discrepancy. Keep notes on everything, descriptions of characters, of places, mannerisms, ticks, fears, relationships. If you do this from beginning, it will save you headaches down the road.

Have a system to find your notes. The most detailed notes in the world will not help you if you can’t locate the information. Whether you write your notes down and keep them in a filing cabinet or you have them as files on your computer, have a system. Use subfolders, consistent file naming, or whatever method you want, just be able to find those notes when you need them.

Do not rely on your memory. If you haven’t written a character in a while, you’re liable to grow fuzzy on some the details. Read your notes, that’s why you wrote them down to begin with. You’re only human and human memory is mutable. It changes, shifts, distorts with time. Maybe you’re that rare person that can hold all those details in your head. Good for you. But I bet the vast majority of us (yes us, I have made this very sin before) just are not capable of doing that.

Readers love consistency. It shows that you care enough to put hard work into your writing. So do the best you can, be the best you can. Whether your writing a novel exploring the myriad aspects of the human spirit or smut, put your all into it. It may be what separates you from the thousands of other writers out there.

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On Writing – Facing Fears

Writing is never easy, and writing erotica can be even more daunting. You’re taking your fantasies and sharing them for the entire world to read. Maybe you’re ashamed of them, or maybe you’re just afraid of what your friends and family will think if they find out just the sort of kinky things you’re into. Fear was my number one hurdle. And not just fear that my mom would find out what I was writing (the woman has a very anti-porn stance and kicked me out of the house when she found my own porn collections). I was afraid of criticism.

I was afraid to share even my non-erotic writing with friends and family. What if they don’t like it? What if they hate it? Could my self-esteem survive the crushing, vitriolic hate that I feared I would get? It took me years to overcome that fear. I started by posting anonymously on the internet, finally sharing my writing instead of letting sit on my hard drive for years (or even decades, and trust me you don’t want to read the stuff that’s been there for decades).

“Why don’t you shove a pineapple up your ass,” was one of the first comment someone posted on my writing.

I learned something—I could take vitriolic hate. I had thicker skin than I thought. I was even tempted to write a witty comment back like, “I did, and it felt great, I have a cactus that’s ready to be shoved up yours.” I didn’t. No sense in feeding the trolls. And then the positive comments came and I started to realize just how much I wasted my twenties. I could have been writing, getting better, sharing my works, for all these years.

Writing has been my dream since junior high school. It was my dream and yet I let fear keep me from pursuing it. So if it’s your dream to write, to paint, or sculpt or to do anything else—pursue it. Don’t let your fears or small minded, hateful comments, like the pineapple one, hold you back. If the criticism isn’t constructive, discard it, otherwise take it as an opportunity to learn, to grow, to get better. If someone is negative, but not hateful, think about what they said. Maybe there completely off based, but maybe there is something that you could improve. No one’s perfect and everyone can get better. I strive everyday to improve my writing, I welcome any criticisms so that I can improve my craft.

Life is too short and too precious to waste it on fear. Live to your fullest and follow your dreams, else you’ll soon be old and filled with regrets.

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My Experience Self-Publishing!

First time Self-Publishing

Hey everyone, I thought I’d share my thoughts on self-publishing.

After putting a lot of hard work into writing my first short story, Roleplay Gone Wrong, part of the Naughty Wives Series I plan on writing, I had the daunting task of self-publishing. I knew I would have to make a cover, and I had know idea how to do that and not to have it look like complete garbage. So I turned to Google.

I found a post: Create Your Own Ebook Covers, Step by Step, With Pictures by William King. From him I learned of image libraries. Websites with thousands and thousands of photos that you can buy the license for commercial use for relatively cheap. If you’re poor like me, it’s a great solution. My cover art for Roleplay Gone Wrong cost me about $14 from Dreamstime. Another image library I found is iStock.

So now I had the image and William King recommended a 3×4 aspect ration for the image size such as 600×800 pixels. I opened up gimp a free, and fairly robust, graphic editor. A poor man’s Photoshop. I shrank my picture down to 600×800, banged my head against gimps text editor, then I accidentally lost all my work just when I had it all finished. Sigh. Finally, an hour and a half later, I had the best cover I could produce with my limited gimp knowledge.

naughtywife1cover

I had my cover, I had my text. I had to combined them into an ebook somehow. Google was my friend again and I learned all about calibre. Another free software that could edit an ebook. It’s a clunky, poorly laid out piece of free software that took me a few minutes just to figure out how to do anything, like adding the document I planed to turn into an ebook.

My first attempt to turn my open office (poor man’s Microsoft Word) file into an ebook was a disaster. The formatting of the text was all screwed up, there were no paragraphs, just huge chunks of text. I tried to edit it. Ebooks apparently run a modified html code that I could make absolutely zero sense of.

Back to Google, and the discovery of style sheets. I had always ignored the formatting selection on Open Office, opting to manually do it and, worse, use tab for indents. Turns out to get paragraphs in an ebook you need automatic indents from a style sheet (Styles and Formatting or F11 in Open Office). Chapter titles need the heading format so the ebook creator will recognize them as the start of chapters. My next attempt was far better. It looked like an ebook. Elated, I felt like I was ready to upload to Amazon and Smashwords.

Amazon was definitely the easier of the two. The only hitch: I made my cover 600 x 800 pixels and Amazon required at least 1000 pixels tall cover. So I scaled my cover up and was relieved to see it still looked crisp. I uploaded it and passed their text scan. If you want to post erotica on Amazon, be prepared to never mention a characters family (other than a spouse, and that means no mother-in-laws or sister-in-laws or any other -in-laws) or use the words boy or girl to often (even in sorotity girl or frat boy). No jobs traditionally held by high school students (no cheerleaders or babysitters even if they’re over eighteen), no living animals (extinct animals are okay), and no nuns (don’t ask, I couldn’t tell you why).

Smashwords was next, and the headache began in earnest.

The cover was again a problem. Smashwords requires the width (not the length, but the shorter, top side) to be at least 1400 pixels. Again I stretched my cover, hoping it would still look crisp and sharp. Relief swept through me—it did. I was afraid that I would have had to recreate my cover from the original image.

It was time for me to face the Smashwords ebook creator—the meat grinder. I used Open Office, so I had to first convert my file into a .doc (the only format they accept). Then I submitted it. The meat grinder did not approve. I had tab errors, copyright page errors, and paragraph indent errors. Because I had foolishly used tabs to indent as I wrote (they didn’t teach style sheets when I learned typing), I had to go through and take them all out. Then I had to modify my copyright page to something Smashwords approved. I read through their Style Guide, and I set up style sheets with the recommended .3” first line indent.

Resubmitted. Paragraph error. Improper indents.

Resubmitted after making sure all the indents were in fact .3”. Paragraph error. Improper indents.

Took out the indents. Accepted. But it looked terrible. Block paragraphs with only a tiny separation between them. Unacceptable to me.

Now I was thinking I had to shell out a hundred dollars to get Microsoft Office, money I didn’t really have. I dug deeper, reading through the Style Guide Faq, and I realized what was wrong. The Autovetter message used this phrase: “If you want to use first line paragraph indents, then remove the “before/after” space you have coded into your paragraph style.” I didn’t understand what that meant. Luckily their FAQ explained things in simple terms that my pounding head could understand. My style sheet put an extra space .1” between the paragraphs when I saved it as a .doc file, and that had caused all the issues. Smashwords will let you indent paragraphs or have spaces between paragraphs, but not both. I removed the space and suddenly…

I was approved!

I shot my fist up into the air, as triumphant as a Greek hero completing some seemingly impossible task. I slew the Hydra, skinned the Nemean lion, navigated Scylla and Charybdis, and used far too much hyperbole in describing my elation just now! I survived the meat grinder, and its strange messages that made little sense.

I few days later, I passed their manual inspection. I was on the premium content list!

So for those out there looking to self-publish, remember these lessons. Make your cover width at least 1400 pixels if you want to post on Smashwords or 1000 pixels tall if you want to post on Amazon. Before you start writing, read Smashwords Style Guide and set your formatting up ahead of time. It will help to make any ebook, not just one for posting on Smashwords, and save you hours of formatting headaches.

Check out Roleplay Gone Wrong available on Smashwords and Amazon for the low price of $0.99. It’s a hot read about a married couple who get more than they bargained for with some roleplay when a Black cop catches them at their fun. Cheating, Cuckold, Wife Watching, Spanking, and Bondage. See how Frank and Evie’s relationship changes forever!

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