Hi! Okay, sorry for the silly title. Couldn't help myself. I am Le Nerd. I am new here, and wanting to become a self-published author. Erotica is my style of choice. I have done some research, and I see that it is indeed a crowded field. However, I have written since I was little- albeit not erotica, of course! I was into fanfiction initially, and then fell in love with creating whole new worlds and developing believeable characters. I feel like I could have a lot to offer to this field, and have found a love for writing it. Even in erotica, I like to develop a believeable situation/characters. It's so much fun Anyway! I can see that it will be hard to break into, and I'm looking for pointers from other self-published authors. I heard that Amazon Kindle is the best way to go, that a lot of sales come from there. I did however hear that a few years ago, Amazon went on the attack and blocked a lot of erotica that were already on the shelves. Are they still doing this? What are the dealbreakers? I have heard it changes all the time. I will be doing my own photography cover art, as I am a photographer. I know not to include faces, and not to show too much skin. Are they keywords I need to avoid? What about particular subjects? Because I like sci fi/fantasy stories, those are the main genres I will be entering. At least for now. I have heard that people use different pen names for different types of genres. I feel like I would also enjoy writing werewolf/billionaire/bdsm/reluctance stuff, but I don't want to do too much at once. Now- the stories that I have been writing are long (at least 20k words), so I'm looking at placing them into the 2.99 price tag range. I also want to write a few different series, and perhaps offer the first book (basically a few chapters long) for free. Is this a good route? I have heard that people do this sometimes. And lastly- promotion. Where can I do this? I am hoping to build up a good rep online, but not quite sure how to go about it. I know I need to stand out. Should I send samples to blogs?
I don't have a lot of self-published stuff, but I have a little. Mine's mostly romance, but sometimes it crosses over into erotic romance, so I might have some insight... but you'll probably soon find, if you haven't already, that everyone's got lots of opinions about self-publishing, and it's really hard to back any of it up with any facts beyond personal experiences. So what I say will definitely be true of my experience, but it may not be any sort of ultimate truth. Most of my sales come from Amazon, for sure. I do get a few from other sites, but not that many. One advantage of other sites, like All-Romance e-books, which takes erotica, is it's easy for things to be free there. Amazon really makes you work for things to be free. The advantage of going with just Amazon is access to Kindle Unlimited. They've changed the program recently, making it less favourable to the many short story writers who are enrolled in it. Previously, authors were paid a fixed rate by download, regardless of story length. So if someone read your short story, you got paid the same as if they read your novel. A month or so ago that changed, and authors are now being paid by how many pages the downloader reads. So watch the dates on any sources you use to get numbers on KU - anything older than about a month is going to make it look like a much better deal to sell short stories there than it currently is. So, you can chose to go with Kindle Unlimited, in which case you can only sell your books on Amazon but can take advantage of their free days and have access to the KU program, or you can sell on Amazon without KU and also sell your book elsewhere. I don't know what the best strategy for erotica is - you could look and see how many erotica titles are listed just on Amazon, and that would give you some insight into what others are doing. And you're right, you do need to worry about Amazon's guidelines. They have trouble defining what they don't like, but when they decide they don't like something, they get pretty draconian. Definitely no incest - that's a big one. No exposed butts or breasts or genitals on the covers. I'm not sure what else. You could go to the kindle boards and see if they have an erotica section and get better insight there. And promo's tough. You can contact bloggers and see if they want your books for review or excerpts to post, but they might be more likely to respond to guest posts, if you can think of interesting things to say. Other than that... word of mouth? Try to figure out where erotica readers hang out online and go there and make friends? Try to connect with other erotica writers and exchange guest blogging opportunities? I don't know - I'm terrible at promo! Good luck with it, and have fun!
Hi, BayView! Thank you for all of your insight I will definitely try to figure out where erotica lovers hang out, hehe. ^.^ I did find one forum.
