Wednesday, June 20, 2018

So You Want To Publish Erotica

I see so many people joining groups wanting to publish erotic shorts.  They have read articles online about these people who made thousands publishing erotic shorts.  But is that really the case?

Years ago, when kindle first started, people were making bank writing erotic shorts.  But since then, amazon has been flooded with would be authors who tried to jump on the bandwagon and get their share of the cash flowing through kindle.

The days of easy cash are over.  You can no longer publish a couple of short titles and make serious cash.  Making money by publishing erotic shorts takes a lot of work these days.  You have to be a consistent publishing machine to just make the equivalent of beer money.

In order to make decent money publishing erotic shorts, you have to have well over 100 published titles.  I know, I've done it.  It is a constant grind publishing short stories.  Most new authors burn out before they get to a point where their return is enough to make them want to continue.

So, how do you make money on kindle?  Publish novels.  Yes, the longer the book, the better it does.  It's why so many short authors create bundles of books.  If you create a story based on romance, you can still interject lots of steamy sex, but you won't get stuck in the erotica category.  That is what makes you the cash.

Take a look at the Romance category and you will see just how popular the genre is.  You can fill it with hot, steamy sex and still list it as a romance because you have a story line with character development.

I would shoot for about 50k words and a nice, romantic cover.  Look at the top sellers and try to follow their design.  Don;t copy it, just look at the layout and how it is structured.  You should be able to get something close.  If you can't do graphics, just pop over to fiverr.com and get one done for a few bucks.

Writing erotic shorts is definitely a way to cut your teeth on self publishing.  Once you get comfortable with how things work, and some practice writing, you can move on to the full length novels and really start your sales engine cranking.