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Publishing Erotica Part 13 – Publication

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Publishing Erotica Part 13 – Publication

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 12 – Keywords

Today, let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of publishing. You’ve assembled all your pieces. You have your short story ready to go, it’s polished, it’s formatted, it has a sexy cover that won’t get you in trouble with Amazon, your blurb is written, and you have your keywords. Now it is time to put that all together and hit publish.

There is one last decision left to you: what to charge?

Authors have been grappling over this decision for years. There is a lot of soul searching, questioning. If I price it too much, will anyone buy it? But if I sell it for too cheap then I won’t make back the investment I put into my work? It’s a balancing act against what the consumer will pay versus what your willing to sell it for.

The indie world is not the big publishers. It’s hard to sell a full novel for too much. You can’t even put your ebook for sell on Amazon for more than $9.99, something traditional publishers don’t have a problem with. But that’s okay, because us self-published authors get a bigger chunk of the royalty pie. We don’t have a publisher taking a cut, only the site who’s selling your books. And the big one, of course, is Amazon.

Amazon has an interesting royalty payout. It differs from any other site, of course. Amazon has to do its own thing all the time. There are two different royalty plans for ebooks: one for books priced between $0.99 and $9.99 and the other for books $2.99 to $9.99. The first one is a 35% royalty. The second is a 70% royalty minus a small fee based on the size of the file. This fee amounts to a few pennies unless you have a book with lots of images. I cannot attest to how that might affect the price.

35% versus 70%. It is a huge difference in what you make. Now below $2.99 you have no choice: 35% royalty. If you’re $2.99 or more, there is no reason to select 35% unless you want to give Amazon more money. Now we are talking about short form erotica, which it typically between 4000 and 7000 words long. What should you price it at?

You might say $0.99. My book isn’t that long. Is it really worth more?

Yes, it is.

The erotica market, unlike others, will pay $2.99 for their smut. People like to get off, and they pay for quality material. $2.99 is a signal that your erotica is quality. People see prices and rate things. Why is this book $0.99. Is it not that good? This book is more expensive. It must be better quality. It’s an unconscious way our minds work.

Second, you might think people will still by the $0.99 book. I can get more sells that way because it’s more attractive price wise. Well, the way the royalty payout works you have to sell SIX books at $0.99 for every ONE book at $2.99 to make the same amount of money. Why sell your books short? If you’re in KU, you’re already taking a hit in your profits from that system.

There are times to sell a book at $0.99. Many first books of series are priced lower to entice the reader in, hoping they’ll continue on to the full price books that follow. Like KU, it can be a loss leader, a way to drive interest in your other books like having free giveaways. Another thing you’ll see at $0.99 are mega-bundles of twelve or more stories. We’ll talk about those next.

For short erotica, the market will bear $2.99, so why sell yourself short? Especially if you’re enrolled in KU. Let that system be your loss leader to drive up your sales rank and then if someone purchases it, you can make a nice royalty. You worked hard on your erotica (I know you do, all authors work hard even if readers don’t realize it).

Now once you’ve built up a catalog, it’s time to start talking bundles. Bundles are a great way to make extra money. There are customers who shop only for bundles, looking for deals, versus customers who buy individual stories looking for immediate gratification. Bundles should either be stories of a same series or a same theme. If you have a few cuckolding stories, bundle them together and sell them, get more life out of your works. Short erotica have a short shelf-life. They can burn bright for a few days, maybe a few weeks if you really hit a great kink, and then they die into coals that will simmer for the rest of their lives, giving you the occasional sale.

That’s why you need to keep writing and keep publishing to keep people looking through your back catalog.

And that’s what makes bundles so great. Your strategy as a short-form erotica author is to keep publishing, to build your catalog to the point where those simmering coals start to add up. And that gets you more and more stories which you should bundle together. I tend to do my series in divisions of threes so I can publish a bundle of 3 stories for cheaper than buying them individually. For a series of 3 $2.99 erotica, I’ll price my bundle at $4.99 and DO NOT enroll it in KU. Your singles already are in there. Keep your bundles out so you can make money, because you can’t just off pages read. If you want to bundle more than 3 stories, go for it, just adjust your pricing accordingly.

Making covers for bundles presents interesting challenges. There are a number of ways to go about it. You can do the faux-book set look, where you make a fake book box set in Photoshop or GIMP. Doing this requires advance skill with these programs. Search YouTube for tutorials, and you can make a 3D book in several different ways. Some places have templates to make it easier for you or there are way to map 2d images to 3d objects.

Another way is the split cover art method, which is what I use for the majority of my three-book bundles. This also requires more skill at Photoshop or GIMP, but not nearly as much as making a 3D book box set. You just divide your screen into thirds, and then slice up your original three cover models to fit the thirds. Another method, which is better if you have more than 3 bundles, is to shrink the original covers and take a quarter or more of the space on the bundle. This works well up to about six books.

Aphrodite Sisterhood Collection 5 angelicharemcollection5cover futanarimassagecompletecollectioncover

The simplest method is just create a normal book cover with the name of your bundle or collection. You can use a new cover image, or if you have used the same image for all the books in your series, only changing color, you can go with that method. It works. Just make sure in your title, you let people know the number of stories contained in.

Now once you have a very large catalog, it’s time to move into mega-bundles. This is where you take older titles, things you’ve had published for a year or longer and just gives you a sale or two a month, and put them into a mega-bundle. Ten or more stories, all in a large collection, sold for cheap, usually at $0.99. These bundles are sold for cheap because mega-bundles, being such great deals, can shoot up in sales ranks and bring in revenue and visibility for your catalog. And since the titles bundled in it are old, it’s not a loss to your income to sell so cheap. They’ve already had their moment in the sun, had their original bundle, and now it is time to give them one final flare of life and see if you can find a new crop of readers for your work.

And that’s how publishing short form erotica works. You build up the catalog, sell your books for a price that shows you are writing quality erotica, and then bundle them. Once you have that large catalog, start your mega-bundles. Rinse and repeat.

Click here for Part 14: Promotions!

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Publishing Erotica Part 12 – Keywords

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Publishing Erotica Part 12 – Keywords

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 11 – How to Avoid the Adult Dungeon.

Today we’re talking about keywords. Now, this will focus solely on Amazon’s keyword system. You are allowed 7 keywords (once it was separated by commas, but now it is seven fields). You might think keyword is a single word, and this is where you are wrong. You need to use all those characters to increase the visibility of your product.

So what kind of keywords should you use. They come in two types. The first type is the keywords that get you into different categories on amazon. There are a lot of subcategories for each genre. While the genre you select when publishing will get you into the main category, that might not be good enough to get you into the subcategory you want. If you’re writing gay erotica, you need to have the word gay in your keywords somewhere. If you want to be in the bisexual, the lesbian, or tansgender category, the same thing applies. Getting into subcategories is important. Often it is easier to rank higher in the lists in subcategories than the main one.

And that gets you more visibility.

Now you might be wondering which words are the right ones to get you into the various subcategories. Luckily, Amazon in their KDP help pages has a list of words and what subcategory that will place you in depending on the genre you selected for your book (Erotica, Romance, Fantasy, Women’s Lit, Children, etc). So your first order of business is figuring out what categories you want your book to be in and putting those keywords in first.

Click here to see the category lists.

There is one important thing to note about category keywords. Now while the vast majority are a single word (lesbian, gay, transgender, cowboy, billionaire, werewolf, cop, doctor, etc.) there are a few that are two words. The one most applicable to Erotica/Romance author is Alpha Male. You need to put that in its own field by its self with no other words in it.

Now that leaves you with the rest of your keywords fields to use FOr instance, you can use hot wife swinging orgy. That’s a keyword string. I’m hoping that people will be searching for hot wives swinging and having orgies and my book will then pop up. This is the second type of category of keywords. These are the keywords of what you think people will type into the amazon search bar to find the type of story you’ve written.

One way to come up with these keywords is to figure out a phrase you think people will search for. Pull out anything that isn’t a noun, adjective, or verb. Don’t worry about verb tense or plural, the amazon search algorithm doesn’t care about that. It also doesn’t care about the other words. Just nouns, verbs, adjective. Use words that describe your work. Words that people will search for.

There are a number of ways to figure out what those words are. The easiest type “hot wife” in the amazon search bar and sees what it suggest for search terms. These are all things consumers have searched for a lot on Amazon. Another way, check out porn hub and find the popular words and slangs to describe the kinks of your book. There are also websites and software out there that claim to give you good keyword suggestions to help your books shine. Learn about SEO (search engine optimization) and apply those lessons to Amazon.

You have seven fields to use. And you should use every single bit of them you can. Stuff that keyword box. And remember, anything in your title will already be part of the search. Many authors list parenthetical with the titles showing the story’s kinks (the ones safe from getting you in trouble with Amazon) to let readers know what the story is about. Those are like free keywords. But don’t go overboard with too many of them.

And here is the last thing to remember. You can be as filthy in the keywords as you want. They are not visible to the customers in any way. There is no way for a backlash for Amazon to fear, so fill free to put “step-father fucking barely legal step-daughter” in your keyword if that’s what your writing. The only words you will get in trouble putting into your keywords are: Kindle, Unlimited, and using the names of famous authors or books (50 Shades of Gray). Kindle and Unlimited will automatically apply and Amazon hates it when you put them in your keywords. They also don’t want you trying to piggy back on another author’s success.

NOTE: I have heard some authors getting banned for their keywords, so while i have no proof, you might want to tone done your keywords just to be safe.

So that is the basic of keywords. They are a complicated thing. Figuring them out is one of the things that helps sell your books. It’s what gives you the visibility so your amazing cover and awesome blurb will be noticed and people will buy your book. It is as essential as staying out of the Adult Dungeon to being successful on Amazon.

Next time we’ll get into the nuts and bolts on publication from what to charge to how to do your bundles.

Click here for Part 13: Publication

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My Musings

Publishing Erotica Part 11 – How to Avoid the Adult Dungeon

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Publishing Erotica Part 11 – How to Avoid the Adult Dungeon

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 10 – KDP Select

Whether you choose to go wide or enroll in Amazon’s KDP Select program (see part 10), you will want to publish on Amazon. It is fastest horse in the race so to say. It has the dominating market share at this moment. The only reason not to publish on Amazon if you are writing erotica that would get you banned (incest, rape, mind control, blatant non-consensual or dubious consent stories, bestiality, and other extreme kinks).

So to be successful publishing on Amazon, you need to avoid what is dubbed the “Adult Dungeon” by the writers community. Amazon, at their discretion and according to rules they do not publish or evenly enforce, can flag your book as having ADULT content. I know what your thinking: “No shit, it’s erotica. Children shouldn’t be reading what I’m writing. There’s even an age filter when you publish through KDP that automatically is set to 18+ when you choose erotica as your category. Why should I be worried?”

Simple. The adult dungeon pulls your book out of searches unless the user goes out of their way to tell Amazon to see adult items. And that option is deliberately hidden by Amazon. Your book is still visible on your Author Page if a user browses that, but they will not find it by searching for the next “Hot Wife Cheating on her Husband with Hung Black Guy” erotica to read.

This means lost sales.

Avoiding the Adult Dungeon is coloring inside the ever changing lines of Amazon’s nebulous policies. But there are rules we have learned through trial and error. The biggest way to get filtered is your cover. I talked about this in detail in Part 8: Designing Your Covers, but I will do a quick recap: nothing clearly sexual, most of the ass must be covered (no thongs or other skimpy underwear), not a lot of side or underboob, no removing of underwear, no handbras, with couples hands must be away from naughty areas, handcuffs in use about a person’s wrist (though not in use, such as in held in hand or handing from belt is fine).

The next most likely thing to get you filtered is your title and parenthetical. With erotica, you need to avoid words like familiar relations (step or otherwise, and that can also lead you to getting banned), anything that suggests sex (including sex and its derivatives sexy), virgin, behind (implies sex from behind), rear, nursing (yep, if you like having lactating stories, you can’t use that, but nurse is fine), lactation (pregnancy is A-OK), threesome, nun (don’t ask me why, but convent is fine), hard, anal, and genitals. Mind control, hypnotism, and other dubious or non-consensual words will get your book banned.

So you want to use code words. Instead of virgin use innocent, inexperienced or first time all work. For Pseudo-Incest, avoid using step-relation in the title and instead taboo or forbidden. Amazon bans some authors for using step-relations while others get away with it. It’s a gamble and I’ll explain why later. Instead of step-dad, man of the house. Step-mom, woman of the house. Step-daughter/sister use brat. Step-son, young man of the house. Lactation and adult nursing stories, use creamy treat or creamy delight along with HuCow (which stands for human cow, a subset of the genre were women are milked but it is code for any lactation story). Use menage for threesome. For nun, use convent.

Next is your blurb. You can get away with a lot more in your blurb. For instance, nun and nursing will skate by in the blurb. Amazon does not look at it too much. But if you push it too much and are too graphic, adult filtered will hit you. You’ll still want to skirt the PI issue by using the code words above instead of step-relation. And I have used sex many times in the blurb without filtering.

Lastly, choosing erotica as your category does not adult filter your book.

That is a myth that it will. There are erotica authors that put their books in any other category but erotica from contemporary literature, women’s lit, fantasy, sci-fi, romance. If you’re book is focused on romance and just happens to have lots of hot sex, put it in romance. If it is a wife being gangbanged while her husband jerks off in the corner, it’s not romance. All this does is make Amazon mad because they get complaints from people about seeing your erotica in other categories. Then Amazon will force your books into erotica and maybe take a hard look at your catalog. There was a purge in 2015 where Amazon was putting authors entire catalogs into erotica. One author wrote children’s books by day and erotica by night and found her children’s book recategorized.

So how do you know if you’re book is locked away in the Adult Dungeon? There are several ways, the first is searching for your book on Amazon. Put in the exact title. If it doesn’t come up in the search, but you see a text link saying something like “adult products omitted from search,” click that and if you see your book, you were filtered. Now if you have your “see adult products enabled (clicking that link enables it for awhile)” you won’t know. Now there is a great website called Sales Express Report. It will pull up your book title and tell you all sorts of info from amazon, including if it is adult filtered. It will be obvious.

sre

As you can see, there is a big red ADULT. If it’s not, there will be a ?

Keywords do not get people adult filtered. You can be quite explicit in your keywords. They are not visible in any way to the public so Amazon does not appear to care at this time. They do care if you use Kindle, Unlimited, or try to use a famous author’s name or book to piggy back on their success in your keywords. I routinely put graphic sex acts in my keywords, things that would probably have my book outright banned if it was in the title, all the time.

Now even if you think you’re playing by the rules, you may have selected a cover model that’s showing too much cleavage and your book is adult filtered. What do you do? Simple, email title-submission@amazon.com. If you don’t know, this is KDP’s customer service. Tell them the ASIN of the title and ask why it was filtered. You will get a vague response back telling you it was your cover, title, blurb, or content. Then you’ll know what to fix, do it, re-upload, then reply to the email saying you believe you’ve complied with the results. If the person agrees, your book is unflagged. This takes a few days and results in losing that precious boost to visibility Amazon gives all new titles. If you think you know why your book was adult filtered, you could simply unpublish it and then publish it again as a completely new title, sending it through the system, and thus avoid dealing with Amazon and losing those precious first few days.

There are pros to doing this and it all goes to how the Amazon review process works. If you’ve ever wondered why some books get away with step-brother erotica or other boundary pushing titles and other authors get banned for trying to publish the same thing is simple: a real person rarely sees a new title when it is publish. Amazon uses robots to examine your title and blurb and maybe your cover. If the robot flags your book, it is sent to a human reviewer to use their judgment. If it doesn’t, your book is published. We don’t know how this robot works or how often books go before a human reviewer, but what we do know is if you make any changes to your book after it’s published it is automatically sent to a human reviewer. Authors complain a lot about making changes to their book and having it adult filtered or banned when it previously was accepted and they don’t understand why. Simple, no human saw it the first time, but when they made the change, it was sent to a human reviewer and that reviewer has no idea why your book was flagged. They don’t know if the robot thought something was off or because you fixed a single typo in your manuscript.

What’s worse about the human reviewers is it is a judgment call. Some reviewers are prudes. Sometimes you’ll email title-submission@amazon.com and that person will just say it was a mistake and your book is fine. It is believed the title-submission workers are higher in the food chain at Amazon. This is what is frustrating about Amazon. We don’t know what the rules are, we’re just punished for breaking them.

Lastly, if your book is ever banned, here is what you do. FIRST, do not resubmit it as a new file. Amazon will likely ban your book again and if you do it a few times in a row, they will suspend or terminate your KDP account. Usually, they suspend you and make you promise not to do it again. If they terminate you, you’ll lose any unpaid royalties and cannot publish with Amazon under that Tax ID code. If it’s your social security number, you’ll have to form a business and get a tax identification number from the IRS and open a new KDP account under your business.

SECOND, email title-submission@amazon.com and get specifics. Several things can happen here: 1. they could determine banning your book was a mistake (this happened to an author friend of mine, she made a change to her blurb of a very vanilla male/female erotica and was banned, but title-submission saw it was in no way banable and reversed it); 2: they can tell you it was the title, cover, blurb, or content and invite you to make changes and resubmit your file (another author I knew had to change a few lines of dialog in her book when this happened to her); or 3: your book has content that doesn’t meet their guidelines and they do not want it on their website. Amazon’s robot system will remember the content if you try to publish it again as a new title unless you change 30% of the material. If you get #3, just consider your book dead on Amazon and publish it off Amazon with blurbs “too hot for Amazon” or give it away to subscribers of your newsletter.

So now you know how to, hopefully, avoid Amazon’s Adult Dungeon. Next time, we’ll talk about keywords and why they are so important.

Click here for Part 12 – Keywords

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Publishing Erotica Part 10 – KDP Select

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Publishing Erotica Part 10 – KDP Select

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 9 – Writing Blurbs

We live in exciting times. The ability to publish your own work is changing the reading world. It’s remarkable. Spectacular. And self-publishing comes with one major question: enroll in Kindle Digital Publishing (KDP) Select or not. It is one of the hardest questions about self-publishing.

Amazon Select is a choice Amazon offers when you publish for them. It is a 90 day exclusive digital publishing contract with them. During your enrollment period, you cannot sell your work in digital form (e.g. an ebook) on another publisher’s website. On the surface, it seems a poor decision. If you sell on every website (Barnes & Noble, Smashword, iTunes, etc.), a practice called going wide, you increase your chances for sells and reaching more customers. So the advantages of Amazon exclusivity must outweigh selling on those other platforms.

So what are the advantages? First, it is getting a full 70% royalty (if your book is $2.99 or more) from smaller markets (not any of the major ones like the United States, United Kingdoms, Canada, Australia, and other European stores, but Japan, Mexico, India, Brazil, and other countries). Next is promotions. If you’re exclusive, once an enrollment period you can discount your title with a sell or give it away for free to increase visibility of your catalog.

But the real reason you choose to go exclusive is the Kindle Unlimited (KU) program.

Now, KU 1.0 was amazing. If a person read 10% of your book, you got 1 slice of the KU pot. This averaged out at $1.33. But in July of last year, the program changed to a page read program. Now this averages at $.0048 per page read. For short erotica, that means you make about $0.20 to $0.25 depending on your word count and book formatting. And that’s only if the customer reads your entire book. So while you don’t make much now, a borrow still counts towards your sales ranks whether they read much of your book at all. On Amazon, the higher your sales rank, the more visibility you get. And if you can get into the top 100 of a category, that’s even more visibility.

So KU is now a loss leader program for anyone who isn’t writing long novels. But is it worth it?

I can’t honestly answer that. But Amazon’s market share is so huge, that going wide (selling in every store) may not make you the same amount of money as you’ll make from KU. And that’s not counting how the increased sales ranks from borrows may affect actual sales of your titles or others in your catalog.

Another tactic is to publish first on Amazon, take advantage of the 90 day enrollment period then go out of Select and publish your work wide. This way you can reach more customers, but only after taking advantage of promotions and KU to increase both your Author rank and your sales rank during those crucial first hours of release on Amazon.

There is another thing to consider about going wide—time. Publishing on different sites means filling out their forms. It requires different formatting of your ebook. You often need to have different file types of your product. All of this takes time, but it may be worth it.

But if you can potentially make more money being exclusive, why wouldn’t you? Simple, you are not entirely in Amazon’s hands. Right now, they are the big name in the game, but things can change. Amazon could decide to ban erotica from their store. They can make KU even worse so that it’s not even worth being in it. And if that happens, you are already in place in others stores with, hopefully, a fanbase buying your works. You’ll be ahead of the game.

So whether to go exclusive is a decision that every author needs to make for themselves. There is no easy answers here. You need to look at all the information and decide what is best for you.

Click here to read Part 11: How to Avoid the Adult Dungeon

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Publishing Erotica Part 9 – Writing Blurbs

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Publishing Erotica Part 9 – Writing Blurbs

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 8 – Designing Your Cover

If covers are the most important marketing tool, then blurbs on the next most important. After your sexy cover has lured the reader in, it is your blurb they will read to find out what your story’s about. So it better be hot and passionate, brimming with all sorts of naughty possibility. You want your reader to be wowed, to get so wet or hard they have to read your story.

And that is why writing blurbs sucks!

They are terrible. So much is riding on a few paragraphs. The smallest amount of writing and yet so vastly important. You may have written the sexiest, steamiest, and dirtiest erotica in the history of mankind, but if your blurb sucks how would they know and why would they bother reading it?

Blurbs have to be punchy. Exciting. Short sentences, action verbs, enticing adjectives. No passive voice. Clear, concise thoughts explaining why your story is sexy. You have a few paragraphs to sketch out the bones of your erotica and what it is about. What are the kinks? Who are the characters? What is the situation they find themselves in? All of that needs to be in the blurb. Don’t hold back because you want the sex scene to be a surprise.

The sex is the point of the story. If your readers do not know what’s in the book, they won’t know if it will make them hot.

This is hard to do. You need to be careful. Start with a single sentence telling what the barebones of the story is. If it is a shifter story, “A hot, naughty librarian discovers primal passion in the arms of a werewolf!” or “The alpha werewolf takes the innocent librarian hard for the first time!” With your opening sentence, you establish the kink (werewolf, sexy librarian, and virgin with the second one). You know who’s fucking whom. This sentence is its own paragraph. It will be at the top of the blurb, standing out, the first thing read.

The hook to get them to read more.

Now in the next paragraph, set the stage. Who is the librarian? Give a bit about her circumstances. Why does she need to be taken hard by her werewolf? Who is the werewolf? Tease the reader with the initial events leading back to that first statement. I usually do two paragraphs, often with a single sentence between them or at the end, always punchy. You’re trying to bring your story to life and show your reader these are two (or more) characters whose sex will be blistering hot.

Sex they have to read.

Lastly, end on a call to action. Another exciting, punchy sentence. Maybe it’s a roadblock to them fucking. Maybe it’s a tease of what the fucking is. As I mentioned in Formatting Your Interior, tell them the story is so hot they should Look Inside (an Amazon feature, but most ebook vendors have a way to read a sample) and see just how passionate the story is. That is why you have a hot snippet of the action as a the sneak peak right after your copyright page.

Now my very last paragraph is a list of kinks and how many words the story is. I put everything I can think of and won’t get me in trouble with amazon. You can get away with using words in the blurb that you can’t in the title. Is there oral sex, included, anal, yep. Ass to mouth, well throw the A2M in your kink list. Fisting, pegging, sex toys, exhibitionism, voyeurism, masturbation, public sex, group sex, double penetration (DP), creampie, spanking, bondage, and more. Let your reader know just what’s in there. If it’s a kink they find hot, they’re more likely to read it. And if it is a kink they don’t, then you won’t disappoint or offend your reader leading to returns, complaints, and nasty reviews.

One last note, if you’re writing an extreme kink, let your readers know in someway. Most things, girl-on-girl, anal, oral, exhibitionism, sex toys, spanking, light bondage, etc. won’t offend the average reader. But if you sell your book as a lesbian tale and then it turns out one of the girls is transgender and still has a cock, a person into lesbians and not transgenders could have all eroticism sucked out. Plus, the person into transgender doesn’t know that’s what your story is about. Pegging, gender-swap, extreme BDSM (edge play, heavy masochism/sadism), bisexual (MM not FF), cheating/cuckolding, and monster are examples you want to let your readers know that’s what your story is about.

It’s all about marketing your book to the people who want to read that kink. If they don’t know it’s in there, how can they read it? Your twist that the heroine’s new boss is really a demon tentacle monster and she’s going to discover the joys of being wrapped up and fucked with tentacle-dicks is a shocking surprise, but the fans of tentacles won’t know about it if you don’t advertise it.

Lastly, for those who publish on Amazon, they allow limited forms of HTML coding. I would recommend only using <strong>YOUR TEXT</strong> to make bold and <em>YOUR TEXT</em> to make italicized. You can use the <h1>YOUR TEXT</h1> to make headers on your first sentence, but Amazon made a change to their display format that cut in half the amount of your blurb seen by readers without clicking the read more button. Since headers make your text bigger, don’t bother with that tag.

To make use of HTML tags, if you don’t know how, just put your text in between the tags exactly as I have them above. I always bold my first sentence, then I pick words or sentences out of the rest of the blurb to bold, like references to the kinky sex, to make them jump out to the reader. I only use <em>italics</em> for the word innocent (my code for virgin). I think italics are less effective than bolds for making text stand out.

Remember, blurbs suck but are vital. Short, punch sentences. Action verbs. No passive voice. Be as sultry in describing your erotica while skirting your publisher’s (Amazon probably) censorship rules.

Click here for Part 10: KDP Select

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Publishing Erotica Part 8 – Designing Your Cover

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Publishing Erotica Part 8 – Designing Your Cover

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 7 – Formatting the Interior

Covers are the single most important marketing tool you have. It is what people are going to see first when they’re browsing on Amazon or other retail sights. Your cover is what will first spark their interest. In erotica, that means having hot, sexy, sultry covers. Sex sells, and, after all, you’re writing sex, so use it.

But there is a caveat. Don’t make your covers too sexy or you’ll find yourself locked up in Amazon’s adult dungeon. And that will impact your sales. So you will want to avoid it. There are certain guidelines you need to follow.

  • Lingerie, panties, bras, bikinis are all perfectly okay to have on your model, but beware for showing too much cleavage, especially underboob and side boob.
  • Your model’s ass should be covered. The fact she’s wearing a thong or even a narrow bikini won’t matter. If too much butt-cheek is showing, it’ll get you filtered. If she’s not wearing a tight skirt, jeans, etc, don’t let her ass appear. Show her from the waist up.
  • Beware mesh clothing. When you’re browsing stock photos, they’re small and it’s can be hard to realize that those panties she’s wearing are sheer and when it’s blown up, you can see it all (this happened to me and Amazon pulled my book and had me redo the cover).
  • Model cannot be undressing their underwear. Unbuttoned shirts and blouses are fine, men’s bare chests A-ok, but a bra’s strap slipping off her shoulder or her fingers are just pushing down the waistline of her panties, you are looking at a filter.
  • Couples can be kissing and embracing, just make sure their hands are away from each other’s naughty places.
  • Hand bras (the woman is covering her tits with her hands) or other objects are hiding her nudity but it’s pretty clear she’s naked or topless, will also adult filter. Now, you can show a naked back so if the model’s turned away, and her ass isn’t showing, you should be fine.

Follow these guidelines and it, hopefully, won’t be your cover that gets you adult filtered. If you ever have a question about your stock photo, ask other erotica authors there opinion. Join an erotica author group on Facebook or Reddit. I’m a member of the Erotic Writers Collective. You’ll always find someone willing to answer your question in that group.

Now that you know what you’re looking for, where do you go to get stock photos. You have three options:

  1. Hirer your own models and either photograph them yourself or pay someone to do it.
  2. Scrounge image sights for Creative Commons License photos cleared for Commercial Use. Flickr is a great place for that (their search allows you to specify commercial use) and there are other websites and databases out there. Make sure you can use the photo and give it the proper attribution.
  3. Use a Stock Photo Site. I recommend Depositphoto.com since they allow their stock photos to be used for erotica (not all stock photo sites will). It’s probably best to cover the model’s eyes to make it harder to identify her. This way, people won’t know the model’s on your step-father/step-daughter breeding erotica.
  4. Hirer an artist to draw your cover. I do not recommend this one for erotica. Use real people over a drawn image.

Out of the three options, number 1 is the most expensive, with number 2 only costing you time (potentially lots of time as you struggle to find something sexy and usable on Amazon). Option 3 is what I use. Now buying a stock photo by itself is not cheap. You have to buy credits from the sites and usually if you want a decent size on the photo, you’re looking at ten dollars for the image (if not more). That will cut into your profit margin.

You can buy the lowest quality stock photo. Believe it or not scaling those photos up in GIMP and Photoshop will yield quality pictures that do not look terrible on a cover. They are not pixalated. Those softwares have algorithms to scale them properly. Then you’re only paying a few dollars. But this still isn’t the cheapest way per stock image.

Stock photo sites have subscription services that allow you to get a lot of stock photos. Depositphoto had a number of plans. You want the Daily Subscription plan. Currently [as of May 9, 2016], their cheapest plan is $99.00. That gives you 10 stock images a day for a 30 day period. That’s $0.33 an image. Now I know getting 300 stock images is a lot, but if you want to get in the game of making money at short form erotica, you will use those photos over the next two or so years. It’s an investment. For that same $99.00 if you bought your stock photos individually you could get probably 10 high quality photos or 50 low quality photos. With the subscription, you get those high quality photos and a lot of them.

If you do go this route, make sure you select your 10 photos everyday. THEY DO NOT CARRY OVER. Download every image you’ll think you’ll need for a cover. Sexy women in various outfits (cover your bases, schoolgirl, nurses, bikers, cowgirls, party dresses, etc) and hot men for gay or romance covers. If you think you’ll get into writing any shifter erotica, snag nature pics of wolves, bears, lions, and other animals. Need banners and logos for branding, see what they got. Spend time searching their site before committing to the subscription. Add pics to favorites, be organized. Going the subscription plan is an investment.

Now there is another way to get stock photos cheap. There is a sight called App Sumo. A few times a year they have a special offer to get 100 credits (1 credit gets you a high quality stock photo) from Depositphoto for $50. The great thing about credits is they don’t ever expire so you can use them as you need them and they still let you get the same quality photo as the subscription plan.

(On another note, App Sumo often has sales to get other software, including Scrinver, for cheap, so it’s worth it to be signed up for the newsletter. Further, I have no business relation with either Depositphoto or App Sumo).

I have used both the daily subscription from Depositphoto and the App Sumo deal.

Addendum: I have been informed by Jessie Ash since posting that Canva has $1 for a finished cover and there is something called 99designs.com. I can’t vouch for these services, but you can check them out and see if they work for you.

However you choose to get your cover photos or image, you need to put it together. You can go to fiverr.com and higher someone for $5 to make a cover for you. It will look polished and professional. I use a graphic artist I met on fiverr.com who now runs her own website, Silverheart Publishing, that does all my novella covers for me. But paying someone to make your cover cuts into your profit margin.

You can make your own covers yourself. In Part 2 – What You Need, I talked about software that can make your cover. There are websites that have simple cover designers or you can use GIMP for free or get Photoshop. Either way, you want to go on Youtube and watch tutorials. You want to learn about layers, you want to learn about how to manipulate text. You want to learn about how to outline your text and make drop shadows or blurs. You’ll want to know how to manipulate an image (scaling will be your friend). Learn about layer masking and layer modes, and how to recolor images. There’s a lot to learn to make good covers.

Next you want to find fonts. The ones on your computer are rubbish. They suck. Don’t use them. Goggle for good fonts to use for cover. I would recommend this article which has over 300 different font suggestions that are free to use and for a lot of genres. Find fonts you think look good. Experiment.

Once you have fonts, you want to make a template for your stories. Your image should be made at 1400×2100 or a multiplication of that size. But 1400×2100 makes it big enough to meet the image minimum size for every place you will publish and has a nice aspect ratio. Your template is important. You want to be able to change the title, series, and slap your new cover image without changing anything else. Templates are great. They make it faster to make a cover and provide a way to brand your work. That’s important. You want people to look at the cover and know it’s one of your covers. When you’re in the template stage, show it to other authors, get feedback.

I’ve talked about branding before and it’s important. On the covers I make myself, I have my author name and logo in the same spot on all my covers. My various series have different cover templates, but they all spring off the original. Branding is important. Your author name is the first piece of your branding, make sure it’s noticeable.

Look at what other authors, successful ones, use for their colors and fonts. Don’t copy them, but just pay attention. Reds, Purples, Pinks, Black, White are all great colors for erotica fonts and their shadows our outlines. When you make your covers, make sure it’s readable when its a small image.

Here are a few of my series to see the different templates I use:

futabacchanal1cover
Aphrodite Sisterhood Template
batteredlamp1cover
Battered Lamp Series Template
succubuscafe-bdsm1cover
Succubus Cafe Series Template
A Futa and Her Dragon Series Template
futasubmissivetraining1cover
The World of Futas Template
thewerewolfsharem1cover
The Werewolf’s Harem Series Template

 

As you can see,  only the Battered Lamp Template doesn’t have my author name in quite the same spot. It’s one of my first templates. Both it and the Aphrodite Sisterhood templates use a different ration of 1400×1867, a ratio I used when I first started out. The Aphrodite Sisterhood Stories are the only things I still use with that aspect ratio.

Click here for Part 9 – Writing Blurbs

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Publishing Erotica Part 7 – Formatting the Interior

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Publishing Erotica Part 7 – Formatting the Interior

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 6 – Rewrites and Editing

So you’ve brainstormed (masturbated enough) to come up with a hot, filthy, kinky erotica that will melt every eReader that downloads it, you written it, you’ve edited, and you are ready to publish. Now you face the dreaded formatting the interior.

Now you might be asking what’s the interior? Well, it’s everything between the covers. Your book. But it’s a lot more than just your story, there’s your front matter (title page, copyright page, acknowledgments, lists of other works) and your back matter (sneak previews of other stories, a list of your catalog, a call to action to sign your newsletter, and your author bio). Sandwiched in between those is your story.

A story you have to format. Your book won’t magically look amazing on an eReader if you don’t format it properly. And to do that you need to learn Style Sheets. Now not every word processor program has style sheets (I believe Google Docs does not) so at some point you need to use a program that does (see earlier blog post on What You Need for a list). Style sheets are amazing. They can make your life so much easier if you know how to use them.

A style sheet applies formating to your text that ebook creators will recognize when creating your ebook (which is really just a webpage using HTML and CSS programming). It handles the paragraph indenting, the space between lines, the space between paragraphs, etc. Most word processors have a style and formatting section. You want to be in the paragraph styles, which your program should default to. You will notice defaults like Heading 1, Heading 2, First line indent, Text body, etc. These are all defaults that you can use to build with.

Now with books there are two ways to handle your basic paragraph formatting. Method 1: You can have your paragraphs indents and then have no extra space between paragraphs. Method 2: You can have no indents and have extra space between paragraphs. Method 1 is preferred for fiction and Method 2 for none fiction. Both methods should have single-spaced text. But you can go with what you chose. Just stick with it.

I use Method 1 with the first paragraph without indent (a common formatting style, just open any professional book [and there are plenty of indie books I would count as this] and you’ll see the start of a new chapter or scene is not indented, then subsequent paragraphs are]. And I find it very useful to have my style sheets set up before I ever start writing. So I have a style sheet called First Paragraph.

firstparagraph1

As you can see on the screen, there are five boxes that you can put in a measurement in inches. Before Text will indent every line that number. Typically leave this at 0.0 unless you want to have a paragraph indent in to make it stand out in text. After Text will indent the paragraph on the right margin, shrinking the amount of space it takes up on the page. I would avoid using this on ebooks but it could be useful for a print book. First Line will indent the first line of the paragraph. This is how you make a paragraph be indented without hitting tab. I have it 0.0” because this is the first paragraph of a section. Above Paragraph and Below Paragraph are how you control the spacing above and below the text. I find this useful for my Headings and Scene Break styles. If you go with Method 2, you would want to have a value in one of those boxes, probably Below Paragraph to create the extra between your paragraphs. When I finish typing my first paragraph and hit enter (return on Macs, I think), I have my style sheets set up to start my main paragraph format.

firstparagraph2

So if you notice at the top of the screen there are various tabs to allow you to do other forms of formatting. You can set the font and font style (bold, italic) the justification (left, right, center, etc), and other specialized functions. The tab Organizer (Now this is probably different in Word, but I don’t own that program) has four boxes. The first, Name, is the style’s name (in this case First Paragraph). Beneath that is a box Next Style. This box will default to the current style sheet. But if you changed it, like I have on First Paragraph, to another style (My Text). When you hit enter, your next paragraph will automatically start that format.

This is useful. I have my Scene Break style sheet set to go to my First Paragraph style sheet which leads to My Text style sheet. For chapter titles, I use Heading 2 set at 14 pt Times New Romans. I have Heading 1 for my book title at 16 pts Times New Romans (the font doesn’t matter for ebooks, the eReader sets the font used for the text and can be changed by the reader). But different font sizes does transition. You want to use the Style Sheets labeled Heading 1 for book titles and Heading 2 for chapters. The table of contents is generated by searching your text for those specific style sheets, including the NIX table of contents on an eReader.

Formatting as you write saves you so much time. Now if you’re wondering about good amounts to set your paragraph indents and other formatting numbers (I use 0.3” for my indents) check out the Smashword Style Guide. It’s a free ebook that is invaluable for nuances of formatting.

If you don’t format as you go, you have to go through your text and change style sheets. This is annoying because italics or bolds will often be deleted. You’ll lose any centered text, etc. So if you have it all ready to go, you can save yourself so much heartache and have a faster publishing.

Once you have your text formatted, you need to add in your Front Matter. First is your title page, have the book title, a series or any subtitles, and your name on this page. Then put in a page break (holding ctrl enter) to start a second page. Then comes your copyright page. You need to have a standard boiler plate. I use:

Copyright © 2016 by Reed James

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Published in the United States of America, 2016

All characters depicted in this work of fiction are over the age of eighteen (18).

I included the age disclaim because writing erotica. All your copyright page has to say is who owns the copyright and that you’ve reserved all rights. For people outside of America publishing in other countries, you may have to do something different. You can Google for other examples of copyright blurb. Also on this page, I have a list of my social media, attributions to my cover designer, my photo license information for my stock photo.

Next I have my table of contents for the book. OpenOffice, Word, and other robust word processor programs will allow you to create a table of contents. It will search your book for all Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. in your book and create hypertext links to them. If you’re making a print book, disable the hypertext links since, obviously, it’s not a digital copy and won’t work. This is why you need your book title, your chapter titles, on Heading style sheets. You can mess with the settings to delete the page count, and other settings to make it work right for your purpose.

Next, and this is important for erotica, is a short excerpt of the sexy parts of the story. This is for the look inside on Amazon. People can see the erotic parts and have an idea of your style and if the goodies are worth reading. Other genres should do this as well and have an exciting part of the book to hook readers in.

My last page before the story I have a short list of related books either in the series or similar themes, a mini-bibliography. These links are all hypertext links that when licked on will lead to the Amazon book store.

Then you have your text itself. For short stories, I like to have the title of the short story as a Heading 2 centered before the first paragraph to let the reader know the story itself has begun. At the end of my text, on the same page, I include usually two links. One is a link to the next story in the series. I use a redirect site, Tiny Links, to make a short link that initially leads to my blog. When I publish the next story in the series, I can go to the sight and change where the short link leads to (the next book on Amazon) without having to change the short link in the book. This way I don’t have to re-upload a new copy and run Amazon’s review gauntlet and risk getting adult filtered or banned. My second link is a call to action to sign up for my newsletter. Both links are at the end of the text and use large text to be noticeable.

Now we’re into the back matter. I typically have a preview of a related story with a link to Amazon to buy it, then a list of my other works that would be of interest to anyone that read this story, then I end with my Author bio.

Once you’ve had your book put together, you need to make an ebook. Now depending on where you’re publishing, you can simply save your book as a Word 97 or higher .DOC or a .DOCX and upload it to Amazon or Smashword. For shorts, the .DOC is just fine for Amazon. But if you are publishing a longer work with multiple, you should make it into a .mobi ebook first before uploading it. This way you can have a NIX table of contents. Uploading the .DOC to Amazon won’t generate one, but for an erotic short it’s not necessary. See my previous article on What You Need for a list of software to make ebooks with.

I talk about links inside the book. Interior links are a great marketing tool. Readers can easily find more stories of yours for them to read and getting them to sign up to your newsletter is a way to directly market to people who enjoy your work. You should make an Amazon Associate Account and then those interior links can also generate you ad revenue. It’s not a lot of money, but if someone clicks on your link and buys your book, Amazon will give you a small referral fee for doing what you would be anyways—advertising your book. I make between $30 and $40 a month just from advertising for Amazon as part of my own promotion.

There is a second form of interior formatting, and that is for print book. That is an entirely different beast from an ebook. You will need to get into page formatting, footers, learning about the gutter margin, choosing your fonts wisely, spacing, it’s a beast and outside the scope of publishing short erotica. If people are interested in learning about publishing on Createspace or other print-on-demand companies, comment below and I’ll write an article on what I’ve learned from print books.

Click here for Part 8 – Designing Your Covers!

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Publishing Erotica Part 6 – Rewrites and Editing

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Publishing Erotica Part 6 – Rewrites and Editing

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 5 – Writing Erotica

So, still hanging in with me? Good, writing erotica is the fun part. No were heading into the tedious area—rewrites and editing. Now this is the most important step in any writing. Your rough draft is called rough for a reason. It will be littered with grammar and spelling errors. You have all sorts of bad habits that will show through in your text and while you can unlearn them, they love to sneak in.

First off, rewriting is the polishing of the story. Grammar is secondary in this stage. Don’t ignore the grammar. If you spot a mistake, correct it, but your primary concern is the story flow, does it make sense, and will people understand what you are saying.

That one is important.

You know what you’re saying, but do others. Let’s take the example of two women having sex. Amy and Miranda. They’re fooling around, and now things have progressed to cunnilingus. “Amy licked and nuzzled at her pussy, licking through the pink folds, savoring her excitement flooding out.” You know that Amy is not licking her own pussy, but because you used Amy followed by the pronoun her, it muddies the water. Is Amy licking her own pussy? The reader can figure out the context, probably, but it might take them a moment to blink and reread what you wrote.

And that will take them out of the story.

Concise, clear text is important. Make sure your pronouns are right. Make sure what you’re writing is anatomically correct or possible. Pay attention to your dialog tags. Ask yourself if the reader should be able to figure out who is talking. If not, put an “Amy said” in it.

Polishing your story is what you’re doing with your rewrites. Making it say what you want and how you want it. But try not to spend too much time on this stage. You’re writing erotica, not a literary masterpiece. Now don’t be offended. I love writing erotica. I put effort into creating engaging characters and scenario, but I don’t delude myself that I’m nothing more than a pulp writer.

But that’s okay. You’re here to entertain not philosophize.

If you let your doubts or your perfectionism overtake you, you might never get out of the rewrite, editing stage. Spending hours and hours tweaking your story won’t matter if no one reads it because you are not satisfied with its perfection. And erotica readers are far more forgiving of minor mistakes (not major ones) than other genres (like romance). If you have someone who can read over the manuscript for free, a beta reader, and can correct little mistakes, great. Beta readers are wonderful. They get to read your hot erotica, and you get a free set of eyes to look over your manuscript.

It’s a win-win.

No you’re probably wondering why that’s important. “I know my grammar,” you say. “I’m an English major with a filthy imagination. I know the rules inside and out.” And you probably do. But there are limits on self-editing. Thanks to a wonderful phenomenon called pareidolia.

Are brains are amazing. They are powerful pattern recognition computers. They take what are eyes see (a series of still images) and translate that information into a seamless, moving world. Your brain fills in a lot of gaps. It makes assumptions, logical assumptions, about what it sees. Because your brain is a pattern recognition machine, it sees shapes in random noise: clouds, a stain, patterns of a tortilla chip.

It is also what lets us read. Our brain doesn’t actual “read” every letter in a word, often just figuring out the word by the first and last letters then guessing on the context to supply the correct word. You can remove all the vowels and still probably read what is written. Your brain can even miss doubled up words (the the) and only see the word written once. And its worse when you’re the author of the work. You know what you meant to write was “their” instead of “there” so your brain will read what you meant not what you wrote.

The key to self-editing is to combat pareidolia. To shake your brain out of the familiar. There are a number of tactics you can use.

    1. Word Search: The more you write, the more you learn the same mistakes you do over and over. Thanks to modern technology, you can search for every instance of “there” in your manuscript and double-check if it should be “their” or “they’re.”
    2. Reading Backwards: Start at the last paragraph of your story and read it through from the beginning. Then move up to the next and so on. This breaks up the story and helps you see the structure.
    3. Changing the Font: If you change the font from what you type in to a differnet font, something that might even be hard to read, it again disrupts the familiar and makes it easier to read.
    4. Print the Manuscript: Reading it on paper is different than reading it on the computer screen. I also have found reading it on my Kindle fire is helpful for editing versus on my computer screen.
    5. Voice-to-Text: Listen to your story being read out by a computer. This one I find the most useful for me, personally. Hearing the text being read helps me to spot missing words (there should be a “the” there or an “a”). It also helps you know if you have commas in the right spot, because the voice should pause there or not. There are funny quirks that happens, but you’ll learn to adapt. I use Natural Reader Free on my PC. Every 1000 words or so (I haven’t quite figured out the exact amount) it pops up an add asking you to buy the full software. But you can click it away.
    6. Grammar Programs: I have used ProWritingAide.com on my longer works (my novellas) to help clean up my writing. There are other sites like Grammarly and Hemingway App that do the same. The programs will identify passive voice, adverbs, redundant words, cliches, poor diction, missing quotes, missing punctuation, inconsistence capitalization of words, and more. It makes mistakes, so make judgment calls on all its suggestions, but it can help you improve your writing and stop making the same mistakes you didn’t even realize you made.

The last thing you need to do is learn your grammar. When do you use commas, how to use semicolons (try not to), the difference between affect vs effect, everyday vs every day, anymore vs any more, on to vs onto, in to vs into, lay vs laid (this is a fun one), then vs than, etc. There are lots of great grammar sites out there. Read their articles, absorb the rules and the shortcuts to remember them. Work on one problem at a time. Maybe you use too many adverbs, so work on that for a while until you think you’re better. Then move onto another problem. Join writing groups, post in forums, ask questions.

Never be afraid to ask a question. No one will think you’re an idiot. Every writer has made mistakes. English grammar and language is a complex beast.

You’re writing will improve as you create more and more erotica (or other writings). To be successful at short-form erotica will necessitate a lot of writing. So you will have lots of time to improve your craft. Do the best you can and know that erotica readers are there for the hot story and not for perfect grammar. But if you do publish anything longer than, say, 10k, spend more work on the editing and rewrites.

Click here for Part 7 – Formatting the Interior

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Publishing Erotica Part 4 – Your Pen Name

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Publishing Erotica Part 4 – Your Pen Name

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 3 – What to Write

If you are like most erotica or erotic romance authors you don’t want to use your real name to publish your kinky stories. There are a lot of reasons for this from not wanting your friends and family to discover what you’re doing to the fact you might write more mainstream stories under your real name. Even authors who write mainstream, non-erotic fiction use pen names for their own privacy. J.K. Rowling doesn’t even have a middle name in real life. She threw that in to make her name more authorial.

So odds are you want a pen name.

You can choose whatever you want, though I recommend performing Google searches on your chosen pen name. There are two major reasons to do this. One, what if another author is already publishing under that pen name? You don’t want your books mixed up with his. I can’t publish under my real name even if I wanted to because someone already has beat me to it.

The second reason is a little more specific to erotica authors. This happened to someone where her pen name was the same as a sixteen-year-old girl’s. When said girl’s mother found out, she threatened to sue the erotica author. So, make sure if you are using a more common name that there are lot of people with that name.

Some authors in the erotica field like to make perverted puns or use alternate spelling of naughty words. You can have a lot of fun with your pen name and get creative, letting people subtly know that you are writing perverted things. Or you can just be boring like me.

Remember, your pen name is your brand. Don’t have a brand easily confused with someone else.

One last thing, writing erotica under a male pen name. There is often a perceived bias among erotica and romance readers against male authors. Now this doesn’t mean you can’t be successful writing under a male name, but I know more than a few “female” erotica and romance authors that aren’t quite so “female” in real life. The choice is yours.

Now that you have your pen name in hand, you’ll need to let people know about you, particularly other authors. Your fellow authors, unless their dicks (and those do exist), are your best allies. Many will be more than happy to give you advise and maybe a little free promotion. But first you have to meet them. So where do you do that?

Social media.

You’re going to need at least a Facebook and Twitter account under your pen name. Twitter is great place to meet other authors. There are plenty of hashtags you’ll see out there for tweeting about erotica books: #amwriting #erotica #EARTG #LPRTG #SSRTG are great places to start. Look at who’s tweeting under these hashtags. Follow them. On Friday, put out #FF (Fan Friday) tweets tagging authors is a great way to get their attention. On Wednesday do the same with #WW (Writers Wednesday) to get recognition. Follow everyone who follows you.

On Facebook, friend those authors you found on twitter. Many will have links to their other social media. Comment on their posts and make your own. Talk about what you plan on writing. Post sexy pictures (within Facebooks guidelines of no genitals or female nipples), interact with readers, bloggers and other writers. Join writing groups for erotica and romance (there’s quite a bit of overlap between these groups). The more you interact, the more people will notice you. Be polite and supportive. You’ll find yourself starting to make friends.

I’ve made some great friends that have helped me with my writing on social media. It is a great tool for reaching your audiences. Once you start publishing, try to get involved in Facebook parties to promote your writhing.

Reddit is another great place. Head on over to /r/eroticauthors. This reddit group is public and you can learn a lot about publishing. People will answer your questions, but watch out for the trolls. They exist so don’t trust any quick rich schemes or ways to game Amazon for money. You’re building a future, not trying to earn a quick buck that will get your in Amazon’s doghouse.

There are other social media sights you can use. Google+ has groups you can post in and Goodreads has lots of author resources and a great place to find beta and ARC readers. On Pintrest you can create image boards to attract people’s attention. You can blog on Tumblr and share even more explicit pictures.

The last component of your pen name and online avatar is your branding. This is important. Your pen name is your brand. Everything you do is a reflection of that brand. You want to make yourself stand out, but you also don’t want to ruin your reputation. Erotica is great because you can post naughty images without it being a bad thing.

Invest in making your own logos, something you can use on anything you do from your Twitter profile to Facebook page. People will see it and remember it. Use your branding on your covers so your fans will be able to stop your work from among the crowd. Catch phrases, logos, banners can make you be noticed.

With your pen name, online profile, and your brand sorted out, you’re ready to dive into the actual writing process. All this work won’t matter if you don’t have a story to publish when the time comes. Next time, we’ll talk about the writing process itself.

Click here for Part 5 – Writing Erotica

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My Musings

Publishing Erotica Part 3 – What to Write

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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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