Here or there. Literotica v/s Amazon.

It is no secret, but there is some extremely good writing appearing regularly here on Literotica. Nearly everyone knows that!

But to me, it seems that some of it is good enough to be accepted by Amazon and, frankly, be paid, sometimes handsomely! for their efforts.

But obviously, many choose to not do that.

So, the question is "Why?"

Why publish an excellent piece of writing in Literotica and not get a penny for it, when the same story would be a success on Amazon and the author would be paid for his/her work.

There is probably a very simple explanation, but it escapes me!!!

Your insight appreciated.

Cost vs reward, probably. The time and cost it would take to market content, the cost of presentation - ebook covers and have you priced print costs? Which are all direct dollar costs, versus the likelihood of a good return on that outlay.

Plus the need for endless content, which seems to be the fundamental requirement for any kind of worthwhile earnings, based on the advice of the commercial authors here (who churn content a damn sight faster than I do).

Whereas Lit - costs nothing but my time and my content gets read in the first week.

Having said that, I'm investigating all of this for a vanity publish of my latest work. I can't see that I'd ever cover the costs I'm seeing, though

Nr1cowgirl said:

It is no secret, but there is some extremely good writing appearing regularly here on Literotica. Nearly everyone knows that!

But to me, it seems that some of it is good enough to be accepted by Amazon and, frankly, be paid, sometimes handsomely! for their efforts.

But obviously, many choose to not do that.

So, the question is "Why?"

Why publish an excellent piece of writing in Literotica and not get a penny for it, when the same story would be a success on Amazon and the author would be paid for his/her work.

There is probably a very simple explanation, but it escapes me!!!

Your insight appreciated.

Click to expand...

I sell most of my full books through actual publishers. As others have pointed out, this takes a long time. Years isn't unusual and anything niche groups or interests can take even longer and even more work.

I have some stuff I've thrown up on Amazon myself, usually because I wanted to control everything about the project for one reason or another and that's not possible even with indie publishers. Or because it was something with a decent base of appeal but not enough for a publisher to care about.

The stuff I do here and on my tumblr is pure fun for me. I don't have to worry about sales figures, editors, agents, slush piles, reviews, submitting over and over, rejection letters, etc. I can write something that is purely what I feel like writing about, make it as wild and out there as I want and a thousand views or reads can happen in a week or two. People might buy Purple Infinity on Amazon, but I'd rather have more readers and fun right now than the money.

electricblue66 said:

Cost vs reward, probably. The time and cost it would take to market content, the cost of presentation - ebook covers and have you priced print costs? Which are all direct dollar costs, versus the likelihood of a good return on that outlay.

Plus the need for endless content, which seems to be the fundamental requirement for any kind of worthwhile earnings, based on the advice of the commercial authors here (who churn content a damn sight faster than I do).

Whereas Lit - costs nothing but my time and my content gets read in the first week.

Having said that, I'm investigating all of this for a vanity publish of my latest work. I can't see that I'd ever cover the costs I'm seeing, though

Click to expand...

Robert Patterson is a good example... Although, he really hasn't written a full novel in a long time, he uses ghost writers. You should also notice that more and more of his books now include the ghost writers name as co-author.

Or you could do like I have done. I just published mine as ebooks on several sites, Amazon, Smashwords, etc. Did a little advertising via a blog, then just sat back and ever month collected a royalty checks. Nothing huge, but I think I paid for what I did.

I started doing that back in 2011, I'm still getting paid today. Not enough to quit my day job...oh wait, I'm retired.

It's actually quite a lot of work to market even the most well-written story. If you just stick it up on Amazon with no marketing effort chances are you won't move many copies. I suppose a lot of people just want their stories to be read, and to write more stories, without the stress and effort or making them commercially successful.

The problem with Amazon, is they are currently filtering out indi-erotica authors out of any search. So unless someone knows you have published there, they will never find you.

Nr1cowgirl said:

Why publish an excellent piece of writing in Literotica and not get a penny for it, when the same story would be a success on Amazon and the author would be paid for his/her work.

Click to expand...

Writing is a terrible way to make money. There's a tiny group of best-selling authors who get rich out of it, but the vast majority of pro authors don't earn enough through their living to buy groceries. Jeff Bezos didn't become the richest man in the world by paying authors handsomely!

Many of us do publish in more than one forum; I put my stories up on Literotica and I also sell some of them on Smashwords.

My first story here took me about a year to write, probably more than 200 hours of work. Not long after I posted it here, I published it on Smashwords. It sold 40 copies and netted me about $160, pre-tax.

Could I have made more from that story? Absolutely. I could've put it up on Amazon as well, and I could've worked a lot harder to promote it. Maybe I could've earned $2000 from it?

$2k for 200 hours work is well below minimum wage. I wouldn't be writing at all if that was the main reward for it. But here on Literotica, that same story has about 45,000 reads (counting people who made it to the last chapter) and almost 700 comments. Reaching thousands of people makes it worthwhile, and the money is just a small bonus on that.

Publishing via Amazon also means dealing with their policies, which are often more restrictive than Literotica; it's not an issue for me since I'm not very interested in the relevant genres, but a lot of other Literotica authors find that their stories are either forbidden by Amazon's rules or hard to market there.