Professional markets for erotica

[Rexus]

Let me put my cards on the table.

I'm a professional writer. I've made my living from various kinds of writing for the last twenty years. It's been corporate stuff in the main, but I've also done a fair amount of journalism and a little creative writing for magazines.

I've not written much erotica, at least, I've not written it down.

As we all do, I'm sure, I have a fantastical sexual narrative running in my head a lot of the time, and of late I've started to think about tapping that into some stories. I think it would give me a lot of pleasure to do that, and I'm going to share the results with you all here.

I'm also interested, though, in other writers' experience of professional erotica writing. Has anyone found that they can make money from their stories?

 

[impressive]

You can make money, yes. Can you LIVE on the income? For 95% of the published erotic authors, the answer is a big fat NO.

The most financially successful erotic e-publisher (to date) has been Ellora's Cave. Its best-selling authors might net a decent royalties check for first month sales. It drops off after that, so you gotta keep the titles coming (and that pub is notoriously slow to get stuff through its queue).

Once you've built a backlist of a dozen or so titles, you might get a healthy royalties check on a regular basis -- and that (hopefully) gets a boost with every new release as new readers seek your older work. My checks for author royalties aren't enough to live on -- by a long shot -- but they get bigger each month.

Samhain & Loose Id also sell well, but again, you gotta keep the titles coming. Unlike traditional NY publishing, there aren't typically advances on royalties. (Even if there were, making sell-through is a dicey proposition. If you don't your next advance will be smaller.)

All that said, you'll never make a penny if you don't (a) write it, and (b) submit it to a publisher or self-publish it.

Good luck!

 

[voluptuary_manque]

think of it as a hobby with benefits . . .

 

[sr71plt]

I'm finding (to my surprise) that you can make money, yes. Not like if you can get into the mainstream with national distribution, but better than trying to self-publish/sell mainstream works. Even more intriguing to me is that you can resell the same material (for minimal recompense, but multiple times)--which is rarely possible in the mainstream. You can find erotica sources that don't really care that the material is available already. Everything I have here on Lit. (except for the writing essays and contest reviews) I've sold at least twice elsewhere in some form and am busy redoing/repurposing/enhancing/retheming to sell in e-books as well.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

I'm finding (to my surprise) that you can make money, yes. Not like if you can get into the mainstream with national distribution, but better than trying to self-publish/sell mainstream works. Even more intriguing to me is that you can resell the same material (for minimal recompense, but multiple times)--which is rarely possible in the mainstream. You can find erotica sources that don't really care that the material is available already. Everything I have here on Lit. (except for the writing essays and contest reviews) I've sold at least twice elsewhere in some form and am busy redoing/repurposing/enhancing/retheming to sell in e-books as well.

And print, too, soon.