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I started reading Welcome to Japan Ms. Elf Vol. 3. This is both an isekai and reverses isekai series. The main character, Kazuhito, has been traveling to a fantasy world that works like an MMORPG since his childhood in his dreams. Every night, he continues his adventures. One of his friends is a cute elf named Mirabella. One day while poking in a cave in the other world, the awaken a dragon.

Not happy, the dragon unleashes her flames and kill them both. Of course, for Kazuhito, when he dies in the other world, he just wakes up in his bed and will respawn the next time he falls asleep. This time, the elf girl he’s hugging wakes up with him.

Now he gets to share Japan with a cute elf girl by day, and adventure with her in a fantasy world by night! It’s a cute series with some fun action and some slice of life mixed in. Mirabella is adorable and there is a naughty MILF in this, too. But I won’t spoil who she is. 😉

I finished reading all of the Sekirei Manga this week. What a ride this story is. It has lots of harems going on as various men have groups of hot and cute women that they bond. With 108 of them, there’s plenty to go around. Musubi continues to be my favorite.

I like the ending. There’s some time spent on the wrapup and even a bonus manga that covers a bit of the time jump and gives more closure for the secondary characters.

All in all, it’s a lot of fun. I’m glad I picked it up. Fighting, great anime tits, and sexy girls abound in this series. If you get a chance, check it out in one of its incarnations!

In honor of the fourth Stormlight Archive book having a release date in November, I have started listening to The Way of Kings. at 45 hours, it’s going to keep me occupied for a while. I rather enjoy this epic fantasy series. I enjoy the magic system and the characters. If you want to really dig into a long series, this is a great one to read. Of course, we’re not even halfway through it. Brandon Sanderson said it’s 10 books, but really two five-book series.

Michael Kramer and Kate Redding bring it to life. They both are great for fantasy audiobooks.

This week at iStripper so the release of the always sexy Melena Maria Rya, who has some of the hottest cards. THis time, she’s being a naughty girl playign with her stuffed unicorn. It is one hot card. I will admit that Eva Elfie (another fav) had a hot card, too. Her NieR Automata cosplay show is naughty, but sexy Malena just edged her out.

I am busy getting ready for my Japan trip (assuming the coronavirus doesn’t cancel it) at the end of the month. My plane flight is getting emptier by the day, but my friends are committed to going! It may be a huge mistake, but we’re going to make it together!

Started writing my third fantasy series. It feels like the worst thing I’ve written. I’m like 15,000 words in and wondering if this is a mistake. If no one’s going to want to read it. The ebook market is so glutted, it’s so hard to get traction if you don’t have a fan base, and I’m second-guessing if this is the right story to even try to get one.

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My Musings

Publishing Erotica Part 14 – Promotion

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Publishing Erotica Part 14 – Promotion

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 13 – Publication

Now that you’re work is out, it’s time to promote it. But first, let’s talk Short Links. There are plenty of services that will shorten your link and then give you tracking on how many people are clicking on it. Bitly is a major one, but there are others out there. You can use this data to see where people are responding to your promotions. You can use different short links for the same book so you can tell if Facebook or Twitter or another site, like your own blog, gets you better click results.

Another type of short links is the redirect. I use Tiny.cc. Since tinkering with your book on Amazon can lead to them adult dungeoning your book because a reviewer suddenly decides he/she doesn’t like erotica, or worse bans it outright, uploading a new version of your erotica, especially edgy erotica, should be a last resort to fix something major. But you have a series and you want to link to the next book in the current. A book that hasn’t been published yet.

That’s were a link redirect is useful. When you create your ebook, you have the link pointing to a blog post that says: “Book 2 of my naughty erotica isn’t out yet, but here’s a link to my newsletter so you can keep up-to-date on my releases.” Then, when book 2 is out, you merely go to your link redirect and change what the short link points to and suddenly that link at the back of your book now goes to the next part on Amazon.

NOTE: If you do this, make sure that you’re not having a book on Amazon link to a book on Barnes & Noble or vice versa. That will only make the site your book on very angry at you. DON’T MESS THAT UP.

Since the profit on any single erotica isn’t great (remember, with short form erotica, it’s all about building the catalog so you have more visibility and get more sales), promotion can eat into that if you decide to pay for them. And there are a lot of ways you can pay for it. There are a myriad of blogs and services that will send out newsletters to their followers, promote you across Facebook groups, advertise, and more. Some authors find great success with this and others just waste their money.

In short form erotica, paid advertising is not worth it. If you’re writing Romance novellas and novels, then paid advertising can skyrocket you if you choose the right places. But that’s not what this blog is about.

It’s about publishing short form erotica.

So how can you promote for free? There are many ways to do it. There are plenty of blogs out there that will accept reviews for free. You can send your work to them, and if you have a good quality story, you should receive a positive review posted to Amazon, Goodreads, and any other store your story is sold at. These blogs are a great way to get you more exposure.

Building a newsletter following in another. This takes time, and I don’t mean on your part, just time for people to sign-up and grow your numbers. Put in your book (I like to put it at the end in big text) have a call to action to sign up for your newsletter. There are several services that offer free newsletters (up to a certain number of users). I use Mailchimp. It is great. Has lots of templates to customize your newsletter.

Newsletters are great ways to get your stories to your fans. To get people to sign up, you can offer a free ebook or two (maybe something that Amazon banned) to attract interest. While this does get you a larger number of subscribers, many of those subscribers only signed up to get the free ebook then won’t bother clicking through the newsletter to buy new stuff. That’s fine. It’s like any promotion, you’re giving away lots of free books to find those small percentage who will be your fans. If you don’t offer free stuff, your subscriber list takes longer to build, but those subscribers are more likely to click on the links in your newsletter.

Offer sign-up forms on your blog, there are apps to embed it in Facebook, and tweet out the link to sign-up form on twitter.

Having a blog is another great free promotional tweet. Now a blog can’t just be here’s my book. You need to create articles and content that interest readers. Try to do one blog post once every week or two (I know, that can be hard to find the time, something I struggle with). Then promote your blog posts on social media. If people like what you write, they may buy your book. Also, look out for the opportunities to do guest blogs or host guest blogs to get cross-marketing going with another author.

Then there is twitter. Now twitter has downsides. You need to tweet your stuff over and over (and over) to be noticed there. Most people who will follow you on twitter will only be on for a short while and will miss the vast majority of your tweets, so you’ll want to have tweets going out all day. And that’s not possible without some form of automation. Luckily, there are plenty of apps that let you schedule tweets. Tweetdeck, run by twitter itself, allows you to schedule tweets as well as manage multiple twitter accounts on one screen. Hootsuit and Buffer are other options. Hootsuit also remembers your tweets so it’s good for rescheduling them.

To be successful on twitter, you need to learn hashtags. You don’t want to overload your tweet with too many hashtags, that turns off people. Don’t do more than three. One hashtag could be the genre of your erotica: #BDSM #Lesbian #Futanari, etc. Then there are the ReTweet Groups. These are groups that retweet other users who use one of the hashtags. There are a lot of them for all genres of writing from #IARTG (Indie Author ReTweet Group), EARTG (Erotic Authors ReTweet Group), LPRTG (Literary Porn ReTweet Group), #SSRTG (Smart Smut ReTweet Group). The last three are great for our genre.

Then you can join a support group like #IAN1 (independent Authors Network, which requires a 1-time fee to join), #ASMSG (Author Social Media Support Group), #MRBRTG (Mr. Black ReTweet Group used by the Wicked Pen Writers group). They will also retreat your stuff, but don’t use those hashtags unless your a member out of respect.

To get more retweets, it helps to retweet other authors or members of the retweet group you participate in this. You can use Roundteam to automate retweets. They’ll do 10 retweets in a variety of ways from custom made lists of authors you want to help out to specific #hashtags.

Twitter is fine, but don’t spend too much time on it. It is not as useful as reaching readers (though you still can) as Facebook.

Facebook is great, but there are problems with the platform. They are prudish. Be careful on how sexy those pics are you share. No nudity or sexual acts allowed. Those nipples (on women) and genitalia need to be covered up. It can be a fun place. You can interact with other authors and your fans, meet new people, discover new works. You can make a special group for you and your fans to interact with and encourage them to post your work, and there are plenty of other groups for posting promos in.

Then there are Facebook parties.

There is no better free advertising tool for a writer than a Facebook party. Most are release parties. Authors with a new release will hold an all day event with 1/2 or hour slots open for you to takeover their party and promote your own books, hold contests, interact with your fans and other author fans who have come to the event. You’ll meet new people, showcase your work, earn new interest. You can make wonderful friends.

So be on the watch for those parties. Slots can fill fast. And, of course, don’t be afraid to host one of your own once you understand how they work.

Now Facebook lets you create an Author page, but those don’t get the same visibility as a personal page does (it seems every time Facebook changes their viewing algorithms, Author Pages get less and less visibility). So anything you post on your Author page share to your personal page so your friends and fans can see it.

You can also advertise on Facebook, but they will kill any add promoting erotica. Amazon, likewise, will not let you advertise your erotica with them.

So remember for free promotion: seek out free review blogs, build a newsletter, create your own blog with unique content, use twitter to tweet your book using appropriate hashtags, and get on Facebook and seek out those Facebook parties.

Now before you get into all your promotion, let’s talk how you can make money promoting your own book and others—Amazon Associates. This is a service Amazon offers to pay you to advertise their products on your blog and other platforms. You sign-up with your regular Amazon account and if they approve you (you will need a blog to get approval), then you will get the ability to create unique Amazon links with a tag in it. If anyone clicks on these links (say to your book your promoting) and then buys anything on Amazon (including your book) for the next hour or so, you get a small percentage of the sale paid to you as a referral. Since you’re going to be promoting your book, linking to your back catalog, and maybe even helping other authors promote their work, you can start to make money with your own advertising.

Now it’s not a lot of money. When I started out doing this, it took me three months to hit the threshold of a payout ($30). But there is no downside to me. I would have promoted those links with or without having an Amazon Associate Account. These days, I make as much on advertising as I do from the smaller Amazon Marketplaces (not the big ones US, UK, AU, CA, DE, yes Germany buys a lot of English erotica vying for third place with AU and CA).

If you feel you need to pay for advertising, just research before you do. Talk to other authors, find out what has worked and did not work for them in the past. Don’t just trust that a random blog charging you $30 to be in their newsletter will do anything to generate you sales.

Click here for the final part: The Business Side.

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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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My Musings

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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My Musings

Publishing Erotica Part 5 – Writing Erotica

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Publishing Erotica Part 5 – Writing Erotica

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 4 – Pen Name

So now you have your pen name, your software, you understand what you can and cannot write and still publish on the major vendors, it’s time to get to the nitty gritty and start writing your kinky, nasty, filthy erotica. Let’s stat out small with short form erotica. So that’s a story between four thousand (4k) and seven thousand (7k) words. You can go over, of course, but don’t go under. 4k is enough to get a basic story and a hot sex scene in place. I shoot for between 6k to 7k with my futa stories, and 7k to 8k on my serials, but those are story driven.

First, you’ll need inspiration. Luckily, there are a lot of ways to get it. Watch porn, ready other dirty stories, and close your eyes and imagine. Find out what other people like and enjoy. Go on Pornhub and see what’s popular in the searches, or check out free erotic story sites like Literotica and see what other people write. You can get a Kindle Unlimited account and read erotica off Amazon for $9.99 a month to check out the competition. Understand the kinks you want to write and what makes them sexy.

Then add your twist to them.

Don’t be afraid of getting turned on by your ideas. That’s a good thing. If your fantasy doesn’t excite you, how can you excite someone else. Brainstorming breaks are very important. And by brainstorming, I mean masturbation.

Author, you need to love yourself. Let all those dark, dirty fantasies boil to the surface. Explore them, follow where they go for inspiration to your story. Capture the feelings bursting inside of you as you plot your erotica.

Then get ready to write it down.

Now before you start, you need to do a little prep work. Notes. You’re going to have only a few characters in an erotica. Generally, in short form, you write from a single person’s POV, usually the woman, but don’t feel you have to. The man’s POV can be just as hot and if you’re writing in bisexual or gay, well, you’re writing as the man anyways. So determine first who the story is about. Who is the person experience and being acted on? Whose fantasy is being played out? That should be the person you write about.

So create notes. Jot down your characters names, their physical characteristics, any personality traits or background info that will be necessary. You don’t need a lot, just enough to make them feel like a real person. Then you should outline your story. You should know how your characters are going to get into the sexy times. What are the circumstances leading up to it. How are you going to build to the climax (which will be literally in the case of erotica).

Write a short outline. I recommend this at first. You may find you don’t need an outline. I don’t to write most short-form erotica. I’ve written enough to have a feel for when I need to move the story to the various stages and bringing it in at my word goal. But starting out, you might not. Plus, it will help you to have direction and make sure your story is going somewhere. Have an idea for the kinks you want the characters to experience and the various sexual positions they will employ. Will there be foreplay (always a good idea) and how should it go. Should you have toys or props. Should there be a change in the power dynamic between the couple (or the threesome) and when should that happen.

Knowing this ahead of time will help smooth the acutely writing and, hopefully, make it go a lot faster so you can get your work written, edited, uploaded, and making you money.

Now here is the next important thing—you should set aside at least an hour everyday to write. I know this can be a challenging proposition. I found it very hard when I decided to write seriously. You have a life, a job, probably a significant other, and maybe you have kids or pets. All these put demands on your time. Adding another hour seems impossible.

If you want to be a writer, you have to find the time to write. This goes for whatever genre you’re writing in. If you want to be successful, writing has to be a priority for you. So carve out the time. Force yourself to write. It’s a discipline that can take you a while to develop.

Another problem you might face is lack of motivation. Sometimes you don’t feel like writing. You have the time set aside and you know you should be writing, but you’re feeling lazy. Or maybe you’re not sure what to write. You might tell yourself, I’ll just take a break today. And then tomorrow comes and maybe you take another break. That is a mistake. If you want to be successful, writing must be a job. And you know what, how many times have you felt zero motivation to go to work.

A lot.

It will happen with writing. That doesn’t matter. You need to sit down in front of your keyboard or with your notepad and force those words to flow. If you’re stuck, go take a quick walk around the block. Think about what you want to write. Ideas often come when you do activities like walking, bike riding, showering, gardening, or driving. If you don’t like the project you’re working on, take a break by writing something else.

Just. Write. Something.

Keep it up. Don’t let yourself stop. Don’t let yourself make excuses. You don’t have a boss breathing down your neck to keep you doing your job. You are your own boss. So you need to be a hardass and keep yourself in line if you want to be successful.

Writing is not the easiest job in the world. Writers do not lounge around all morning sipping cocktails on the beach then popping into their office to spend a few moments writing down a few chapters of their book. The reality is so far from that. It is hard work.

It requires toil and sweat, dedication and determination, motivation and perseverance. Those that find success do so because they treated their writing as a job. They kept their focus. They kept working. They kept producing more and more words. When they get writers block, they keep on writing anyways. They put something down on the page. It might be terrible. That’s fine. Rewrites and editing are for polishing your manuscript.

Right now, you just need a manuscript to polish. So get it written. Churn out your first short. Then write the next one and so on.

Next time, we’ll talk about rewrites and editing.

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 6!

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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

BDSM Writer’s Con Everette 2016 Review

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11988315_894338203952853_307428669419708508_nBDSM Writer’s Con Everette 2016 Review

From March 31st to April 3rd of 2016 I attended BDSM Writers Con first ever West Coast venue at the Holiday Inn Express in Everett Washington. When I learned my great internet friend, Naughty Book Snitch Mindy planned on attending a con in my own backyard, I had to go. So Thursday morning (the 31st) I braved Seattle traffic and made the two hours drive to Everett excited to attend my first writers con (especially one for such a naughty kink) and to meet Mindy. Here are my thoughts about the entire event.

tumblr_o4rb826KyU1umqpg9o1_540First off, meeting Mindy and her friend C. was a blast. It was great to hang out with both ladies over the course of the weekend. Mindy was as much fun in person as she is to interact with on the internet and she kept me from hiding in the corner afraid of the other people.

I am not a fan of meeting new people. I’m an introvert. The idea of attending a convention with people I don’t know absolutely terrifies me. But Mindy attended and was a great help. While I wasn’t as social as I hoped to be (I did try) I managed to have a more than a few great conversations with people I met. It was a very friendly and welcoming group. Being a convention for people who write kinky things, you could find yourself having conversations about the most taboo things over lunch.

tumblr_o5986rgkNL1v3lw9jo1_500The con was put on by Dr. Charley Ferrer. She did a great job organizing classes and speakers. There was always two classes to choose from. They started out with the basics, working through a lot of the less written about aspects of BDSM, namely safety. The conference had a huge emphasis on capturing how to do BDSM safety, especially when interacting with strangers. As the weekend went on, the classes became more and more practical until they were demonstrating actual BDSM on volunteers for the classes.

Now classes aren’t my thing. I hate school. I did my best to pay attention, but my ADD sometimes got the better of me. There is a reason I dropped out of community college. But the speakers were informative and did their best to entertain as well as instruct. I thought some of the classes were a little too long (an hour and a half is just too much for me to take) but I was the exception. Most people were engaged and eager to hear the speakers talk.

tumblr_o4y9vhzTeT1u7izb8o1_500I did learn a lot. I had planned writhing a futa series this week when I got back about a wife wanting to be her futa’s sex slave and get into BDSM. I finished writing the series today, Futa Submissive Training (expect it to be published second week of May) and incorporated many things that I had learned over the weekend. So while my attention may have wandered from time to time, I did absorb lots of new stuff.

Saturday night, they put on a public dungeon with all kinds of kinks on display from suspension, whipping, flogging, spanking, violet wand, caning, and even knife play. It was an eye opening experience wandering around witnessing actual BDSM practitioners at play. And, yes, play is the word to describe it because there was lots of laughing in between the screaming.

tumblr_o57gpiJlYi1uswp8qo1_1280So, if you are an author that writes any amount of BDSM, from just light spanking to full on S/M, or only interest in seeing it first hand and in a safe environment, then you should definitely attend. There is a conference in New York City in August of this year. You’ll learn everything from the history of BDSM and kinky sex to subsets of the lifestyle that you probably didn’t even know exist.

You might even discover new things about yourself!

If you’re interested, click here to learn more!

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