How Does an Author Make Money with their Writing Hobby?

[Imakewetspots]

I have been curious about this for a while. I am by no means an expert author but I have a million ideas in my head and now that I’m retired, I find I love writing smut.

I have no illusions that I’d make significant bucks or anything like that but I’d happily crank out 30k stories if I thought I could get some publishing house to buy them for $50 bucks a pop. I have half a dozen now that I haven’t submitted to Lit.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I can't speak about earnings that come from writing smut stories, although judging by what many people said here, it's a tough market.

But what I find amusing is that by the rates you are proposing, and in the time it would take you to write a relatively decent 30k-word story, you could earn at least five times as much flipping burgers.
Just sayin.

 

[Imakewetspots]

Oh, no doubt! Writing a quality 30k story takes a lot of time and energy, particularly in the editing and final polishing. But I enjoy it a great deal and I don’t enjoy flipping burgers!

For me, it would have zero to do with making a profit. I just thought I’d find an extra layer of satisfaction when I sent my story off and actually got paid for it. Even if it was only enough to treat myself at Starbucks.

Luckily, I’m retired with a comfortable pension so income means nothing. I can see how some might want to earn a living from it and that probably would be extremely challenging.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Luckily, I’m retired with a comfortable pension so income means nothing. I can see how some might want to earn a living from it and that probably would be extremely challenging.

If you want to make money writing erotica, you can just take one step to the side and market your stuff as "romance". Or so I hear.

-Annie

 

[mildlyaroused]

I can't speak for erotica, but there is indeed something very satisfying about being paid for a story you've written. Aside from the wonderful act of writing itself, having your story earn you money which you can use to buy real, tangible things can feel pretty surreal at first. It's amazing to think that something you've bought - say a nice hot meal on a cold, rainy day - was earned through nothing but your own imagination and internalised world.

What I would say is this: once (if) you do start earning money, even a small amount, it can be difficult not to fall into the trap of wanting more. Even if you earn nothing from writing relative to your other finances, that extra incentive can be enough to make the craft feel more like a chore, especially because writing commercially brings newfound responsibilities towards readers, publishers, etc. Just keep that in mind. It can be a double-edged sword.

 

[Imakewetspots]

That would actually be easy for me since nearly everything I write has lots of slow build up with strong romantic overtones. I’d just need to adjust a little bit of the sex detail to suit my audience.

So where does one go to market a romance story?

 

[Imakewetspots]

@mildlyaroused yes, I totally get where you’re coming from. One of my other hobbies is classic auto restoration. I’ve been wrenching on cars since I was a kid and as a teenager, I got a job rebuilding engines. The fun evaporated in about three months and luckily I found a better career before my hobby was ruined for me.

I think you hit it on the head when you described the feeling of buying a hot meal using money from nothing more than your imagination. That’s exactly what I’m shooting for. Now if a publisher locked me into a contract forcing me to crank out one or two a month for two years straight, I’d never be open to that.

I know nothing of the industry so I guess I was hoping it was possible to sell stories a la carte for pennies.

 

[Areala-chan]

The simple answer is, "You don't."

The more complicated answer is, "You don't, until you do."

The people who make money doing this, the @lovecraft68's and @KeithD's of Lit, will explain that you basically have to keep flinging your stuff at the wall until you find one that sticks, one that allows you to build an audience, and once you've done that, you have to keep publishing continuously to keep your name out in the open so that new people can find you while your core audience keeps buying what you're selling. And you have to keep pushing out new stuff so you don't get lost in the deluge of what everyone else is writing.

But the truth is, the golden age of Kindle Direct and all that which allows erotic writers to make money was a decade or more ago. The self-published market is so saturated for smut at this point that you'll be lucky to earn anything. Publishers won't offer you money for your stories unless they see dollar signs floating right behind them. Maybe you can pull an E.L. James or Cassandra Claire and write a fanfic so incredibly popular that you get offered money to file off the serial numbers and go to print. Maybe you luck out and someone trolling this or another story site is looking for exactly the type of story you wrote, and sudden you're the next Anna Todd or Abigail Gibbs. It's happened before, it can happen again.

Maybe you build up enough of a following here or somewhere else that you can start up a Patreon, or a Ko-Fi, or some other way of letting people pay you for their enjoyment of your work, but unless you hit it extremely lucky right out of the gate, or find some niche no one has yet managed to uncover with hundreds or thousands of people clamoring to consume, it takes years to reach the point people are willing to give you money in exchange for anything you produce.

For most of us, the vast, overwhelming majority? You don't make money off this. It's just a hobby.

I wish you the best of luck pursuing financial compensation, and I'd love nothing more to come back to this thread in a few years' time and hear that you've turned your retirement hobby into something that throws extra cash your way every month. But your odds of getting paid are seriously better if you go buy a scratch-off lottery ticket every time you publish a new story. Those at least tend to win one out of every 4-5 times.

 

[Imakewetspots]

@Areala-chan I appreciate your no nonsense detailed reply. And every bit of it makes perfect sense.

You may have misunderstood that I was trying to generate a regular income. Something meaningful. I’m definitely not. I was only interested in the idea of getting some tiny sum as a thrill for producing something I like doing. It wouldn’t matter to me if it was only enough for a cup of coffee.

That said, I think you’re absolutely right that you do it as a hobby and leave it at that.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Judging by everything I've heard and seen here, the Patreon approach brings in the most money for us, smut writers. It requires attracting a large enough following with popular themes and tropes, and then writing extremely long chaptered stories that make readers wish for more and more. The key is not to ask much but to focus on attracting as many patrons as possible. Tefler's achievements in this sense are awe-inspiring. It does take a lot of time and dedication to get there but it's the best recipe for success that I've seen so far.

 

[Imakewetspots]

So with the Patreon approach, does one get that following in Lit? Most of my stuff is very long and lends itself well to evolving into a ten chapter story.

Making assumptions here but do I keep posting new story ideas in Lit until one hits a home run? If so, what’s the next step? Put a comment that additional chapters can be purchased in my personal store for .50? And I suppose a website link in my bio so they can find that store easier?

 

[lovecraft68]

This is my latest payment from Smaswords. I added another three hundred between amazon and a couple of other platforms. I am probably in the top percentile of straight up indy erotica authors (not romance, actual erotica in a variety of kinks, but mostly taboo on SW) so take note of the amount and take these factors into account.

1-I have been at this since 2011 and have over 225 published e-books, so a lot of work goes into getting even this amount and it takes time.
2-You're not making a living off of this.
3-For a part time source of income for 'extras' or in some cases to help ends meet, and with little to no overhead, its not a bad deal. Beats getting an actual second job.
4-If you're up to a challenge and to take your lit game to the next level where cash replaces comments and five star votes, its worth a try.
5-There is a lot of things to learn and pitfalls to avoid in the market, and the learning curve can be swift and painful when content or other issues rear their head.
6- I gave some pros and cons, but I'll leave it at there is no bigger thrill than someone spending even a couple of dollars on something you wrote. This is not lit where anyone can show up and read for free, these are sites people sign up for to pay for good content.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

So with the Patreon approach, does one get that following in Lit? Most of my stuff is very long and lends itself well to evolving into a ten chapter story.

Making assumptions here but do I keep posting new story ideas in Lit until one hits a home run? If so, what’s the next step? Put a comment that additional chapters can be purchased in my personal store for .50? And I suppose a website link in my bio so they can find that store easier?

There is no universal approach, but from what I've seen, you need stories that span over dozens and dozens of chapters, the size of very large novels, stories that aren't focused on sexual content. You would post chapter by chapter, attract the following on Lit, and then open a Patreon account and advertise it here, on your author's page. Your future patrons would get access to the next chapters of your story weeks or even months before the general readership here on Lit, and possibly some voting rights? It would take patience and a lot of work and time, and of course, decent writing.

 

[Imakewetspots]

Thanks @AwkwardlySet I consider myself a good writer but truth be told, I lack patience. Sounds like more trouble than it’s worth for the satisfaction of earning enough to buy a coffee which is really all I was after.

The route described by you and others makes sense if I was trying to earn a living but I’m not. I’ll leave that path to those folks and stay out of the way!

 

[mildlyaroused]

Tip sites like Patreon or BuyMeACoffee are probably the easiest route to go for some Starbucks bonuses, but by their nature they rely on the good will of your audience. 99.99% of people won't tip you for a story they read for free, and if you put stories behind a paywall it becomes harder to grow an audience. You could keep publishing here until you've amassed a fair following, then start releasing some exclusive content or narratives on Patreon. Just note that some topics like incest are banned, and you'd need to link your government ID to your account to publish NSFW content.

 

[Mike130]

Look up John Locke, the author (not the economist) on Amazon. He writes some hilarious dirty books and also wrote a book about self publishing, which might be of interest. His books are inexpensive, I think under $5 for most of them. He has several genres; Dr Box series (favorite) about a sex crazed surgeon, westerners, assassins, private detectives, etc. The books are great, haven’t read his self publishing book but he has sold millions of ebooks on Amazon so it might be worth a read.

 

[NightPorter]

Well you can sell ebooks on places like Amazon and Smashwords. Depending on how consistently you write, you can also start a Patreon or similar. I know of authors that offer perks like sample chapters, subscriber polls on book cover designs, discord access, NSWF versions of book covers. But you need to produce a LOT of content in order to justify people playing you monthly.

But again it's a real tough market, already over saturated with content. You would need to find a niche that people like and are willing to pay for and then exclusively write in that niche. Burnout would be a real problem and it would quickly become a second job without making enough for it to ever become a primary job.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

View attachment 2444818

Why on earth is the text centered? I know you don't know the answer, but that's just silly.


[about selling as a "romance" writer]

That would actually be easy for me since nearly everything I write has lots of slow build up with strong romantic overtones. I’d just need to adjust a little bit of the sex detail to suit my audience.

So where does one go to market a romance story?

I don't know, not my field. I was repeating what other writers have told me in meatlife.

If you look at Smashwords, almost all their books seem to be romance or romance-adjacent, so it might be a pretty saturated market these days.

-Annie

 

[ChloeTzang]

You can do ebooks yourself easily enough through something like Draft2Digital or Smashwords. And now D2D is getting into Print On Demand too, and print is still the biggest segment of book sales.

You'd be extremely lucky to find a publisher who would pay you for your stories, especially shorts. I got lucky and was approached by a small ebook publisher, since 2018 I've done three novels thru them and a couple of short stories in anthologies - got $50 a pop for the short stories as one offs, but the quarterly checks for the novels keep coming thru and the 1st one, from 2018, is still selling consistently. I've got 3 more novels lined up to self-publish in New Year and a couple to put thru my publisher - and I intend to publish a bit more over 2025. Be interesting to see how that goes.

The important thing tho is to build up a following of readers who like your stories enough to pay, and then build on that and then publish relatively consistently to keep yourself in front of whatever market you build up. Areala-chan and Lovecraft very much nailed it overall - there are niche markets out there, if you hit the spot and get lucky you can make some dollars - and it's fun.

 

[ChloeTzang]

If you look at Smashwords, almost all their books seem to be romance or romance-adjacent, so it might be a pretty saturated market these days.

-Annie

The thing with romance is, it's a big market segment and it's steady. Romance readers always want new romances - Harlequin still do those subscription things I think, where you get new romances every month, but even with that, Harlequin writers don't generally get rich. That's one market that will never run out of demand.

Actually, you could say that about any segment of the market. Thrillers, Si-Fi, Romance, whatever, readers always want new books - they just have to be something the reader wants to read.

 

[Erozetta]

Commissions have been most profitable for me so far.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I still believe the single biggest hurdle that writers of erotica face is their own embarrassment over what they write. Anonymity makes marketing your product difficult for most.

And let's face it, whether you're querying an agent/publisher, or simply attempting to drive readers to your stories on sites like Patreon, Smashwords, or even your own website, hiding your real name limits your reach.

I'll bring up a way to make money from your stories that I haven't seen mentioned yet:

My first story published on Lit earned me $100. It won a monthly "Readers Choice" award. There are numerous contests here with monetary prizes, so maybe you want to start by focusing on these.

Beyond that, consider that you have a digital story with multiple methods for distributing it. E-book is the most popular format, but some go the "Print-on-Demand" route with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing or Ingram Spark. Acceptance of some content isn't assured, so be prepared to tone your story down if it gets rejected. There are also those who have converted stories to audio and posted them on pay sites such as Audiomack or pay-by-click sites such as YouTube.

The investment in time and resources to market your stories can take some of the enjoyment of writing them away, so tread carefully.

 

[StillStunned]

I give private readings.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I still believe the single biggest hurdle that writers of erotica face is their own embarrassment over what they write. Anonymity makes marketing your product difficult for most.

I would add that readers likely face the same problem.

 

[kiwibat]

patreon’s been the best way for me, started one in july and have about 180 paid subscribers and counting. not enough to live off of but it’s a nice extra bit of money each month.

might try selling stories on smashwords soon too.