Amazon sucks. A couple of people paid US$21.97 each for a print copy of my Arthurian novel recently. I received 91 cents from each sale. It cost about $10 for the print shop, which is fair enough, but good ol' Jeff taking the rest is a rip-off.
There are mainstream publishers who seek out and market erotic content. They are no easier to crack than publishers of any other genre, so the same processes (query letter, synopsis, etc.) need to be considered when submitting works to them.
Partner with a budding OF / Twitch pools & hot tubs creator (same thing really), have her read your stories out loud while in work uniform, split the profit 50:50
Love this @Ada Stuart - thats all I need. Tp pay for the flight and go sit on a beach for a few weeks and write!So true
But, you can also earn a good amount of money from Google Play Books, Eden Books and Apple (through Smashwords or D2D). Recently I've also started publishing directly on Kobo and the income from Kobo Plus is steadily increasing, so it looks like many readers like the subscription model.
So, yes, it's possible to earn money from your writing. Amazon is the best place to be, as long as they allow you to publish there. But they don't seem to like erotica or explicit sex scenes any more. I got kicked out of Amazon last year, but since then my readers seemed to have moved with me to Google, Eden and Smashwords instead of lurking around Amazon. So, now my income is about the same as it was before Amazon got too scared to publish my books.
Is it enough to quit my dayjob? Nope. Not yet. But it's a really nice additional income that pays for my holidays and adds to my retirement fund.
Thank you @BobbyBrandt. The publishers link is the type of direction I thought would be the most likely to actually getting some traction purely because of the marketing clout. I guess I would love to know the 50 shades of grey back story. Why does one book like this make it??
Wow keith - that is an impressive catalogue!
And thus another sad signal of Amazon's ubiquitous strategy, to be considered the traditional channel for every experience. Ahhhh!!!
My ideal is to write stories that just have quite a bit of sex in them! Chem sex, medical drug trials and tales of trouble.
yes, putting a public face on the writing would be another step! not sure thats for me at the moment or do i have any actor friends or AI voice over technology. One for the list though! and live you have made $1.16. High five to that!!!! My expectations are suitably managed and first person to five bucks buys the other a coffee. Deal!? @M_K_Babalon
Here's my marketplace erotica titles breakdown for the last eleven years. There's a significant dip in 2018, because one of my publishers went out of business and I was down to one. The big drop in 2023 is because my publisher had health problems (I did too, but it didn't keep me from writing. So, I'm sitting on a big backlog). Even though there were only three published works, that still amounted to 240,000 words. A lot of wordage is in an anthology series titled Grab Bag, which run to 100,000 words each. I'm working on Grab Bag 32. 29 Grab Bags have been published thus far. That's 3 million words right there.
It's an idea for exposure. I use elevenlabs for readback editing, and the output is fantastic (minus a few off inflections). However, I do think a voice converter software, one that would let you change your own voice into something sexy, would be far better.
In the mainstream I publish both in my real name and in a few pen names, depending on the genre.
Thus far in 2024, three erotica titles (posted to the published work threat above) have been published, with a total wordage of 143,000 words.
No, not quite. Just because only a few of us will become bestsellers doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile to try. You never know if your book will become popular or not. Just look at Fifty shades. It's not exactly well written so why should it sell at all? Well, it's because the market decides (and the reader) loves it (even if I don't, lol).
)Now, that. That is a tantalizing idea.
I was just using those as an example of a crowded market, thousands of people talking about the same thing. Youtuber A is popular and monetized, yet Youtuber B isn't, while doing the same thing.
Anyone who can make those two sexy deserves all the money they can make from it!
And then the Mark Zuckerburg Creature used his nearly convincing human hands to attempt acts of copulation with the corpulent male human of reputed African American extraction. Shortly upon commencing this act, however, his eyes twitched and he muttered something to himself about "the Harvest" before wandering off distractedly.
Soooo sexy!
