The best Erotica Fiction Writing Reference books: Reddit reviews

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There's a couple different routes you could go.

I've not used it myself, but Vellum is spoken of as the one of the nicest options. It's also quite pricey, but you could easily pay somebody to format it for you if you don't want to shell out the hundred or so bucks to have the program yourself.

Scrivener is another app that is spoken of highly. I've used neither of them personally, so take that with a grain of salt.

You could hand format it. Salacious Stories made a guide for erotica shorts, but I would imagine it would work for novels. It has the added advantage of Sal being a moderator on here who chooses to spend his free time being super goddamn helpful, and so if you have questions you can ask him directly.

The easiest route would be downloading it as a docx, ands chucking that into Kindle Create.

I'm not a formatting guru (though there are quite a few who hang out here), so I can only be of limited help, but that's the advice I'm capable of giving.

Congrats on getting your first novel done! Here's a celebratory tune I wrote just for you.

♪ Those smutbux will be coming round the mountain when they coooome ♪

♪ Those smutbux with be coming round the mountain when they coooome ♪

♪ Well enough with the chatter ♪

♪ Give me my happily ever after! ♪

♪ Those smutbux will be coming when they cooooooome ♪ ♪

It's super easy to learn, honestly I would recommend anyone who self publishes to learn this part of the process because it is best to have fine control of it.

So learn up on some basic CSS, read this book but instead of doing all the stuff she says about formatting the text in word (search and replace), copy and paste your word document into this tool and let it do allll the work for you.

Otherwise, play with different CSS on your title pages (look at other authors for ideas), learn to embed custom fonts (fancy), and learn how to code a TOC from scratch (not hard! it's basic css).

I use Sigil personally because it gives me fine control of everything. You can use Calibre as she instructs, but Sigil is XHTML and will get pissed off if you screw anything up so it's a bit safer to me.

Why hand formatting instead of just grabbing Vellum and formatting for people? Vellum doesn't teach you shit, and you'll give people a better KENP by doing handformatting. You can do all that fancy Vellum shit with handformatting, and you can squeeze more pages out of it which is what everyone wants. How many more pages?

Some more schmuck uploaded this long ass story from a word document to Amazon and got 200 pages out of it. Using proper formatting, it went to 600+ pages. That is an uncommon example, but handformatting is nearly always better.

OK, I'll start things off. I had a pretty good week - sales picked up from the previous week, and my latest stories are doing pretty well.

The most important thing though is that yesterday I successfully hand-coded an ebook! Using the great guide "A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress" as well as Guido Henkel's guide, I was able to reformat an existing book, add in all the backmatter, convert it to an epub file, upload it to Amazon and test it out on my new Kindle - and it looks great! I strongly recommend both those guides to anyone who is thinking about starting hand coding. I was helped by the fact that I'm very computer savvy, but I think anyone could get the hang of it with some practice!

So this week the goal will be to reformat a bunch of my existing books, starting with the newest books and the top sellers. Extra smutbux, here I come!

That is part of the daunting set of first questions. My recommendation is that you drop $2.99 on this book. It will walk you through the whole book-creation process, including formatting, sizing, coding, etc.

Full disclosure: I did not write this book. But I use it every time I publish one. Like, every time. Mostly that's just because I'm a forgetful ass. But also because it's good.

Assuming you're publishing on amazon, the pages appear automatically on whatever device the person reads on. I'm not sure what the alternative would be? The only other thing I could think of is endless scrolling, which as far as I know amazon doesn't do.

Where the pages happen to end for the reader is going to be contingent on things like what font type the reader is choosing, what device they are reading on, etc etc.

The wall of text people are referring to is in reference to using paragraphs effectively, which while good advice, is a separate issue to formatting in page breaks.

I'm not nearly as knowledgable about formatting as other people on here, so I'm sure somebody can step in and correct me if any of my advice is off base. But no, I don't think you need to be adding in hand formatted page breaks in the main body of 4k word short, zon should take care of that automatically.

Tangentially related advice:, if you don't know about Kindle Create, it's a free and effective application that makes formatting shorts a breeze.

If you're interested in going the hand formatting route, Salacious Stories has an excellent guide on the matter

Congratulation on getting your first title out there! Welcome to the club

Just read this book and you will be illuminated.

edit: I did not write this book, but I am a shameless shill for our very own /u/salaciousstories.

https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=filthy+book+in+a+fancy+dress&qid=1572358008&sr=8-1

Read Salacious' book A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress for details.

But basically hand formatting is using HTML code (the same code used to design websites) to design and modify your text. Then you use programs to package the html file into an .epub, which can be published on Amazon in place of a Word document.

It's a little challenging to start if you have no experience with HTML (I didn't), but once you do it once it's pretty easy to replicate and ultimately is probably even easier than doing things with Word, at least imo.

I just read <em>Naughty Ink</em> by Jamie Fuchs, which I thought was a useful little handbook for publishing erotica, and it had a few good tips for marketing, if you're interested in some general marketing tips. It's free with KU.

> A Filthy Book In a Fancy Dress, will help you format your ebooks and make them more appealing: https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC

I'm planning on buying Vellum before my next book, and I'm hoping that will take care of formatting for me. Maybe wistful thinking...

> https://www.amazon.com/Naughty-Ink-Erotica-Publish-Successful-ebook/dp/B00L8ERJVU

I'll read through this. I'm only in Amazon, so some of the information might not be relevant, but I always find a few gems of info. Great that it's in KU!

Thanks for the links.

Info | Details

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Amazon Product | Naughty Ink: Write Erotica. Self Publish. Make Money. Be Successful, TODAY.

>Amazon donates 0.5% of the price of your eligible AmazonSmile purchases to the charitable organization of your choice. By using the link above you get to support a chairty and help keep this bot running through affiliate programs all at zero cost to you.

For me coding is less hard than forcing myself to do a boring thing lots of times! The process goes like this:

1.) Google something like what I want to do. (Hope someone already did something similar.)

2.) Copy it. Make the changes to apply to my particular situation.

3.) It does something. Not what I wanted it to do. Cry. Swear.

4.) Google something slightly different and splice in the new information.

5.) Does it work? If so, yay! If not, go to 3. Repeat until forever.

Here's the little bit I stared at for 30 minutes until I figured out what I was doing wrong (and therefore what was right):

line = re.sub(r'<p>','<p class=first>',line) line = line.replace('</span>','') splitstring = line.partition('<span>') line = splitstring[0] + '<span class=fletter>' + splitstring[2][0] + '</span>' + splitstring[2][1:]

which basically takes a line of the document which is encased in <p><span>[words]</span></p> tags and moves the span with my first letter class around the first letter.

It is simple and silly and dumb and I yelled at it and I sent my partner angry unicorn .gifs about it and when it worked at last I got up out of my chair and did a small dance in the middle of the room.

Hat tip to "Zen of Ebook Formatting" and "A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress", the latter of which I can never ever search for ("A Naughty Book in a Pretty Dress"? "A Dirty Book in a Classy Dress"? "A Slutty Book in a Lovely Dress"?) and end up searching for BOOK DRESS FORMATTING DAMMIT until I find it.

https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC

https://www.amazon.com/Zen-eBook-Formatting-Step-step-ebook/dp/B00KJAH4HS/

EDIT: to add a closed paren. you might think I would be on the lookout for that stuff after coding all day but APPARENTLY NOT

You should totally read this book!. It's a quick, easy read and took a lot of the mystery out of it for me. :) Totally worth it. If you're enrolled in KU, there's no excuse cuz it's "free." And if not, then it's only $3.

I'm going to take a stab at it today and will let you know how it goes!

Yep. Calibre is what I use. Actually I use the process detailed in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC

I write my actual story in Scrivener, compile it into a Word document for editing, then use a program called Notepad ++ to format the text. After that I import it into Calibre. It sounds like a hard process but its really not that bad. The results are perfectly formatted ebooks. Formatting is important and bad formatting will get you bad reviews.

Why not just start with the "Further Reading" section of that Wikipedia article? If you're looking for primary sources, Bataille is fun. <em>Erotism</em> is a fairly easy read.

Hand-coding, from what I understand, gets the absolute best results. This book is supposed to be a great guide on how to do that.

Yo, check out Salacious's book from KU. A Filthy Book In A Fancy Dress.

There's a whole section in there on hand coding. Takes a bit to learn. I'm not claiming to like hand coding at all, but that book makes it a ton easier.

If you haven't read this yet, perhaps this is a good time to point out that Salicious's KENPC 2.0 went up.

Here's a link to the book I wrote on the subject. It holds your hand pretty well as you build your templates, but if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line.

>When you say "book cover only", it means I can't put the picture on the inside of the book, and when you say "in conjunction with text", it means inside of the book instead of the cover, right?

Exactly!

And cost isn't really that big a deal. I use a TON of images in this book, and the delivery cost is only $.12, which granted, is like three times the size of my text-only books. But if you have an audience who you think would buy a bunch, the delivery cost isn't really a detriment. You just have to make sure the images are properly sized and compressed.

Morgan's High Speed Stories is one of my most favorite things. She has a book too - but all the content can be found on deviant or her personal blog :)

There's an anthology called The Poetry of Sex which you might find interesting. I didn't love all of the poems in it, but there are definitely some good ones. You could also just look at the ToC and then look up the poems online/separately if you can't get the anthology.

If you're hand formatting, you can set your type using CSS and then just let the reader decide on the ultimate size of the text. It also avoids lots of other formatting pitfalls. I wrote a guide for hand formatting and rapid-workflow smut-slinging. Maybe you'd find it useful?

Oh, don't need a refund--just tried a sample. You can see the problems if you look at the Amazon preview. Here's a book all about formatting.

This is a bit of an odd one. If you're new to it then you sure as hell wouldn't know what you like yet. Personally I'd buy a couple selected ones before going for the behemoths that are collected volumes. For example if think you'd like Yeats, look for the tower or something. But DO NOT read 300 pages of his early stilted virginal stuff. It'd just wear you down. Also people tend to assimilate all of poetry to lyric love poems, which is only a subset. ''short simple and emotional'' is a tad too restrictive for your own sake I think. As for collected volumes, I'm going through the recent and really nice editions of Kenneth Koch : http://www.amazon.ca/The-Collected-Poems-Kenneth-Koch/dp/0375711198.

I found this which seems interesting, most of the rest of stuff on Amazon seems to be general compendiums. Did he write on a variety of topics?