Published Erotic Fiction -- Most successful genres and subject matters?

[SimonDoom]

I've thought about trying, just for giggles, publishing some erotic fiction on another platform to see if I can make a little money, and I'm curious, for those who have tried it or know something about the market: what are the most successful genres? I assume incest is somewhat trickier to pull off in many platforms than it is here. How about "enjoyable" nonconsent? What level of explicitness tends to work best in the paying market? Is the published market more romance oriented than Literotica? Are there some good dos and don'ts in terms of content?

 

[SeraphNocturne]

It depends almost entirely on how you intend to publish and what you want to publish, Simon. There’s a market for everything out there, so long as it isn’t extremely controversial. Most places won’t even publish work like that to begin with…

I will say two things about publishing traditional mainstream erotica, though: the market is highly competitive/saturated, and you’re going to have to put in serious hours if you’re trying to make a living off of it.

My decision to publish was inspired by my readers. I really didn’t expect to make much of anything, what I have made won’t keep the lights on, buuut it’s given me enough to design novel covers and have a few extra hours to write a week, rather than dedicate that time to a different side hustle.

I think having supportive readers is really the most rewarding thing I’ve gotten from it, because I haven’t removed the stories they’ve purchased, which are available here for free. They bought it because they enjoy the work and are supportive of me as an author. I’ve gotten my direct deposit for royalties, so I can gladly check published author off my bucket list.

I have yet to move in a mainstream approach, but from what I’ve seen of more established authors on site going with a publishing company seems more trouble than it’s worth—I’ve observed earnings working with companies between $30-$60 a month. You might politely try to pick the brain of the big names on here, I’m sure they might have more positive numbers, but that probably comes with building a following at least a thousand deep.

Publishing has been experimental for me, so far, but I do intend on working my way into the mainstream world and writing outside of erotica to maximize my potential. For now, I’ve gone the self publishing route with Draft2Digital. It’s fast and easy, you retain majority profit, and they can get your work out to all sorts of platforms. You’re going to have to do your own marketing, if you self publish, but I think the extra work is worth it since you’re paying yourself and not a company.

Establishing a social media presence as an author will be helpful, and from other businesses I’ve got (chandler, jewelry maker), I know you can put up low cost advertisements over Instagram and Facebook to reach audiences. I’ve seen quite a few erotica adverts on Facebook this year.

Hope this was helpful.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

My recommendation is that you check out some of the publishers (traditional, not vanity) who handle erotic content to see what types of stories they are seeking.

One example is Nef House Publishing, whose website states:

What we’re looking for:​

• Full novel manuscripts (75,000+ words) in the genres of LitRPG, epic fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance, and erotica
• Novella manuscripts (30,000 - 50,000 words) in the romance and erotica genres
• Nef House is interested in “first rights” publishing. We are not particularly excited to see submissions of works that have been previously published unless there is considerable sales history behind the project

Examples of their romance/erotica books can be viewed here, but bear in mind that they distribute through Amazon, so the guidelines for them will also play a role in the acceptability of content.

 

[oneagainst]

Thanks for that link... will take a look. Any others worth examining?

 

[theWollstonecraftWoman]

They publish this shit and you get paid for it?

Oh, yeah, I've been doing that.

 

[NotWise]

I'm not answering from experience. I found this article from BubbleCow that claims that the most profitable genre on Amazon is "Romance/Erotica." It also ranks some Romance subgenres as "most competitive."

I don't know how much authority there is behind the article, but it's an interesting read.

 

[SimonDoom]

Thanks for the feedback so far. I'll check out the sources people have cited.

I have a few story ideas that would amount to short to mid-length novels, probably around 70,000 -90,000 words. It occurred to me that it could be fun, if I did it, to try to sell the book rather than publish here for free. One is a science fiction/erotic/fantasy story. Another is a romance. Another is an "enjoyable" nonconsent story. I have no particular expectations of success but have been thinking, why not try it?

 

[oneagainst]

I think keep the channel open... I know there are a few others going through the same thought processes at the moment. There's definitely utility in sharing approaches and potentially cross-referencing each other to try and cut through the saturation, I would think.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Thanks for the feedback so far. I'll check out the sources people have cited.

I have a few story ideas that would amount to short to mid-length novels, probably around 70,000 -90,000 words. It occurred to me that it could be fun, if I did it, to try to sell the book rather than publish here for free. One is a science fiction/erotic/fantasy story. Another is a romance. Another is an "enjoyable" nonconsent story. I have no particular expectations of success but have been thinking, why not try it?

Set yourself a small budget to cover various costs, don't exceed it. Decent book covers cost either money or your time - as you will quickly see if you wander through the Lit Author Books thread. Most are awful. ISBNs if you purchase them - but if you don't, someone else is legally the publisher, and your own dollar return and rights over your content rapidly move towards zero.

The likelihood of recovering your outlay budget in sales is remote to zero unless you churn out content constantly, market it constantly, and churn out more content, constantly. There's a common theme here - constant content, keeping it up to the marketplace. Good luck!

You'll make more in a garage sake, probably, selling your old paperbacks for a dollar. I know I did.

 

[SimonDoom]

These are good considerations. I don't make any money from Literotica, but on the other hand there's no expenditure of funds and it's very easy to do.

 

[theWollstonecraftWoman]

I'm not getting rich, but I don't need to. I'm enjoying write and publishing. Though, I don't do the publishing. The publisher edits them, does my covers, and post them at the sites. He pays me and keeps a percentage of the sales. I get to buy some nice things with the money I earn.

 

[ElectricBlue]

These are good considerations. I don't make any money from Literotica, but on the other hand there's no expenditure of funds and it's very easy to do.

Covers, unless you do them yourself, cost money, and you get what you pay for, or you get your own aesthetic sense (both of which can be very bad, or very good). Formatting a book properly takes a lot of time - your time, so that's a cost - and time away from writing.

ISBNs here in Oz cost $8 or $10 each. If you use the freebie ISBNs offered by D2D, Amazon, Smashwords, etc... that makes them the publisher, not you. You get royalties, but it's their product. Don't forget your taxman, the book-sellers strip taxes out on sale in the US, I think.

You know how to read contracts - read the small print. It's clear to me that most people don't.

The big thing that most people don't understand is that the "book" is the saleable product, not the content in it. They're two different things - Amazon at.al. sell books, which you can take away and own - either on a shelf or in an electronic library. You can't do that from Lit - nothing is "sold" here, therefore it can't be sold for less, somewhere else. And if you're somewhere else, having the content here on Lit doesn't mean you're selling it for nothing. You're not selling anything here, so you can't be selling it for less. It's a subtlety, but it's an important one.

TLDR, you don't need to take content down from Lit if you want to format it as a book (or ebook) and sell it. That's always the biggest piece of misinformation I see, and people keep on repeating it, blindly.

 

[theWollstonecraftWoman]

a couple of my covers.

 

[ElectricBlue]

a couple of my covers.

View attachment 2241072View attachment 2241075

You have taste and an aesthetic. Are these yours, or commissioned?

 

[theWollstonecraftWoman]

My publisher's wife does them. It doesn't cost me. She does book-covers for others, and is setting up a website where she'll sell generic ones you put your title, catch line, and pen name in. She'll do custom ones for people as well. I can get you an email if you want. PM me and I can give that to you.

 

[XerXesXu]

From very limited personal experience, erotica generates an order of magnitude less income than, say, general romance or action or crime fiction with a love interest included. The hard work is in marketing, as in any business your primary business is selling not making a product. Other than content provision, self-publishing is now the way to go for a young person who hopes to make a primary or secondary income by writing. According to Publishers Weekly, on average the median self-publishers now have higher incomes than those who publish traditionally.

PS:
Pub Week article.
I had to ask ChatGpt to find it.

 

[oneagainst]

I think you can come up with covers pretty quickly if you're inclined - I put these together for the stuff I have on Lit using google image search and a Canva account. It was a good distraction from editing and proofreading....

The Monogamists
Oxygen Games
What We Say In The Dark
When One Day We Are Gone

 

[ElectricBlue]

My publisher's wife does them. It doesn't cost me. She does book-covers for others, and is setting up a website where she'll sell generic ones you put your title, catch line, and pen name in. She'll do custom ones for people as well. I can get you an email if you want. PM me and I can give that to you.

Thanks, but I've done my vanity publishing, and there are better things I can do with my time. Besides, I did my own covers (except one tailored generic cover which cost far too much), and had fun doing them.

 

[CJLahrainn]

For taboo (a word here meaning incest) erotica, you'll be limited to Smashwords. Amazon won't accept it, nor noncon, and it will delete your one-and-only-one-ever-in-your-lifetime account without even thinking about it. So, not Amazon.

Don't pay for a cover. Many use depositphotos and canva for covers.

If you're only going to publish ebooks, an ISBN isn't needed.

For smut, passive marketing is essential. Title, cover, blurb and keywords. People look for smut by kink, so hit the kink hard and make it obvious that your book hits it hard. Research is kind of key here.

As for smut vs. romance, romance wins by a mile. Several miles. But! Romance has its own beats that readers expect (a word here meaning demand). If you don't hit the beats, you won't make sales. Looking at Amazon's top paid 100 under the general erotica category, they're mostly dark romance, which has been really popular for quite a while. These are the alpha billionaire mafia enemies to lovers romances. Women can't get enough of them, and it's an overwhelmingly female readership.

Smut, otoh, really leans into a particular kink. Only one kink per pen name, please. You're not selling stories as much as selling orgasms. This is why so many smut writers rely on shorts. People really like having orgasms, it would seem, and 4-5 shorts a month keeps the money rolling in.

And, as always, visit the eroticauthors subreddit and pay close attention to the dataporn posts.

BOL.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

From my experience and from what I have witnessed with other writers:

Unless you want to self-publish on Smashwords, Amazon, D2D, or similar sites, your options are vanity publishers (you pay for everything), small press publishers (who typically distribute through Amazon), or getting an agent to represent your work with the larger publishers (most won’t deal directly with writers).

Self-publishing is easy to do, but comes with the reality that you alone are responsible for the marketing and promotion of your work, and this is typically the single factor that will limit an author’s success. Since so many writers of erotica utilize pseudonyms, this makes their promotional efforts challenging to accomplish without revealing their true name. Most also discover that writing a novel-length story is much easier than writing a promotional blurb, a story summary, or a synopsis about that story.

If you have a story that you believe has the potential to sell, and you want to explore options other than self-publishing, one of the first things you should do is learn how to “query”, either a publisher or an agent. The QueryTracker website is a good resource for finding agents or publishers seeking material in the genres that your story might fall in. There are some excellent YouTube videos that discuss how best to navigate the query process, but I recommend starting with this site: https://www.youtube.com/@BookEndsLiterary

If you are serious about mainstream publication, the one thing that you need, sometimes even more than a good story, is patience. Unless you have a referral from someone already established in the industry, no one is sitting idly by waiting to read your query or consider your work for publication. You need to get their attention, or wait for them to get around to you. I submitted a query for a middle-grade adventure story and received a contract offer from a publisher within two days, but that is very rare.

Now, if you are among what agents and publisher consider "marginalized" members of society, or your story focuses upon that segment, you currently stand a higher chance of getting their attention. BIOPIC, LGBTQIA+, indigenous and other under-represented topics are hot right now.

 

[KeithD]

Light lesbian mysteries have done the best for me. And GM does well, especially extreme. Male-perspective bisexual does well but not as well as other two. For all of these mystery plots have done the best.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

My slight awareness of self-pub in science fiction is that some writers who have advanced to the point of moderate success in traditional publishing have done well in self-pub. Of course, one hears from writers who have done well; those who haven’t, not so much.

At SF conventions I have attended recently, self-pubbing writers use the venue to retail their works, in dealers’ rooms. In their sales space they often set up what I call roll-up signs. The sign is something like a portable projection screen, but the housing rests on the floor, and one pulls up the sign to unroll it, and then prop it at the top to keep it unrolled and visible. The sign usually shows an enlarged image of the writer’s book cover (or covers, if there’s a series). This may be an efficient way to grab attention in a large open space.

This is certainly irrelevant to marketing erotic fiction, but I mentioned it to set up An Observation about self-pub. Henri Mancini, who might seem to have been very successful, was quoted as saying that the only way to make money in the music business is to sell band uniforms. I now wonder if the only way to make money in self-publishing is to sell roll-up signs.

 

[Duleigh]

Does anyone have experience with publishing fan fiction? Some of my best work always seems to happen in someone elses' world.

 

[SimonDoom]

Does anyone have experience with publishing fan fiction? Some of my best work always seems to happen in someone elses' world.

I think you'd have to be careful with that, if you were making money from it. I don't see how you would defend against claims of copyright infringement. Fanfiction seems to be tolerated, for the most part, as long as it takes place online where no money is being made. You would incur a much bigger risk if you were making money from it.

 

[theWollstonecraftWoman]

Does anyone have experience with publishing fan fiction? Some of my best work always seems to happen in someone elses' world.

If you do Fan Fiction for publication and sale, you must first secure rights from the copyright holder. Blacklist has allowed some published fan fiction. Star Trek licenses works of fiction.