How can I make money out of my stories?

[sweetnessuk]

I write erotic stories ranging from 500 words to 2000 words. My work started as Porn and borderline erotica, but it's starting to form into more an erotica format. All my stories involve people aged 18 and above. They are mainly about (couples, MMF, MF, FFM, MMFF, orgies, gangbangs, swinging, voyeurism, exhibitionism)

I have submitted my work on literotica, storiesonline for feedback and volunteer editors. I have received a lot of good feedback and have many happy readers. I also submitted my work on adultwork where I have had a few people pay to read my stories. I now want to find more sites and other avenues as to how I can get paid for my work as I very much enjoy writing.

Any advice would be great x

 

[sr71plt]

Put them together in anthologies and submit them to e-publishers and/or self-publish them on Smashwords/Kindle/B&N.com, etc. Directions on how to do so are on the various publish sites. If you want a very basic guide on what needs done for that, PM me with an e-mail adress and I'll send it to you as a Word attachment.

 

[BONNIEBREA]

Smashwords is a great outlet. I have a seven story series I'd published and had up here for a while, and I finally took the stories down in favor of publishing on Smashwords (under a different pen name). I'm happy with how they've done there.

The nice thing about Smashwords is that if your file/ToC is formatted correctly (and it's not that hard to do even for a computer dunce like myself) your work will be included on the list they send to other retailers (kindle, apple store, sony reader, etc.), so your stories will get much wider exposure than just the Smashwords site.

As far as e-publishers are concerned based on my experience it's just not worth the bother on two counts.

First, it's a hell of a lot of trouble. A very few are willing to accept any manuscript that is neatly formatted and readable, but most have their own very particular requirements regarding margins, typeface, paragraph indents, line spacing, and the like. So you end up having to reformat your manuscripts for each submission, and that involves a heck of a lot of time and trouble.

The second matter is what sort of stories you write. Any E-publishers will claim they publish 'erotic literature', but that's not the case. They want and need narratives themed to a particular sexual orientation, practice or fetish. Your story might get accepted and published if you happen to write 'bondage stories' and the publisher in question happens to need some new titles for their 'bondage' e-bin. The same is true for any other theme: 'BDSM stories', 'cross-dressing stories', 'gay male stories', 'lesbian stories', 'lesbian vampire stories', 'shapeshifting lesbian vampire stories'. You get the idea. Erotica publishers just don't have a 'literature' e-bin.

If you write those kind of narratives, then fine, you might get some interest. But I write literary stories that just happen to have a lot of sexual/erotic subject matter and themes. And e-publishers just have no use or place for well-written contemporary literary stories that explore erotic themes or themes of adult sexuality. They need stories that are 'about' something.

I went through the rounds of wasting my time submitting to e-publishers some time ago. Three publishers made offers to publish, but I ended up having to turn all of them down. One offered a royalty rate significantly below industry standards. The other two wanted me to make the stories 'about' something (bondage, or S&M, etc), rather than just publishing them as high-level prose literary stories with a great deal of sexual/erotic subject matter, and I wasn't willing to change the nature of my stories or dumb them down in the way the publishers wanted. Essentially my stories are too much about things like characters and plot and literary themes, rather than some narrowly-defined orientation/practice/fetish.

I was also shocked at the absurd and half-baked ideas they had for the stories, although I realize that was just a product of editors skimming a few pages and then thinking they have a grasp of what the story is about. The upshot is that I came away from the exercise completely unimpressed with the expertise of the editors and publishers I had contact with.

Anyway, hope the information is helpful, and best wishes as you move forward.

 

[Ldy_Sea]

Thanks for those sites. I have been hinking about trying to get into mainsteream writing, short stories and maybe even a Novel, but had no idea of people would e willing to pay for my work. I might try these and see if I make any money.

 

[KlaytonFrost]

I'd second Smashwords as a pretty excellent outlet for short stories like yours. As you can see from my sig I've got a few stories up there and they're doing pretty well at the moment. Aultwork is a new one to me though, and I'll have to check it out.