What are /r/eroticauthors' favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I don't know if Passionflix make porn or actual movies, but let's assume it's actual movies with scripted scenes and some artistic merit.

I used the Screenwriter's Legal Guide when I was doing screenwriting (although I also studied law, so that helps). But it's a pretty great book that gives you a good grounding in what kind of questions you should be asking and what you should be looking out for. ( https://www.amazon.com/Screenwriters-Legal-Guide-Stephen-Breimer/dp/158115352X )

Beyond that:
1) Money up front, in advance, at signing, whether the movie gets made or not.
2) Expiry date on the option - if they don't commence principal photography within X years the rights revert to you, and they revert to you anyway in Y years.
3) Right to be identified as the author, in opening and closing credits and all promotional material, under a name of your choice, and also the right to *remove* your name.
4) Ongoing money based on the success of the film, but tie it to gross, not profits, because "profits" can be manipulated to be zero on even very successful products.

If you have an interest in screenwriting, you might also want to think about having the option to take the first pass at the script and be paid for it, although they're going to want to have the right to have script doctors turn it into something unrecognisable when you're done.

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 ♪ ♪

I use Canva.com , a free design site with templates and fonts. They have a limited selection of images that are either free to use, or a dollar. There's also an option to upgrade for more features, such as the ability to add fonts you find elsewhere.

>He significantly changed the character's personalities; He removed scenes. He rewrote the scenes

He didn't edit you. He found a way to get you to read his fantasy. You have a right to be pissed.

> I didn't want him writing a book and basing one of his characters off of me or any of my characters

He's not interested in your characters or kinks. He's interested in his fantasy version of you.

> Kimi, didn't bother telling me that this is a well-known issue with female writers. Kimi was supportive about this whole thing in a hilarious way. She took it so lightly that I couldn't help but laugh

I'd take Kimi's advice with a grain of salt in the future. She's not warning you in advance of a problem that could have been prevented with a male pen name and she's not listening when you have a problem so enraging that you felt the need to vent on a business subreddit after clearing it with the board owner. You went through two step verification to try to find a friendly ear.

> He already knew what I looked like

Why? He doesn't need to know what you look like to provide feedback on characterization and story flow.

You've gotten good advice on staying safe in the future. The internet is full of creeps and weirdos. Even if all the interaction costs you is a good night's sleep why pay that price when a pen name email account is free? Here's a couple ways to get all your email accounts delivered and answered from one spot.

If those are the only places you found it, find a DMCA notice form on Google, fill it out and send it to whatever contact info you can find on those sites. Both of those domains were registered at Name Cheap or one of their resellers, so send Name Cheap copies of the DMCAs (). One domain appears to be hosted on Digital Ocean https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/#tab_abusetrigger and the other on Web Zilla (). Send the DMCA’s to those companies too. That should get the sites taken down or your content removed from them.

Send Amazon a reply saying you found unauthorized copies of your work on those sites and that you sent them a DMCA notices.

>The Authors content is irrelevent to payment proccessing

HARD PASS for me. I've worked for/with/in the sexual content providing industries on and off since 1995. You don't know what you are doing.

Stripe doesn't pay for porn: https://stripe.com/us/restricted-businesses

>Adult content and services Pornography and other obscene materials (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicitly sexual acts; sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, pay-per view, adult live chat features; sexually oriented items (e.g., adult toys); adult video stores and sexually oriented massage parlors; gentleman’s clubs, topless bars, and strip clubs; sexually oriented dating service

Good luck, and I honestly mean that kindly. There is a market gap for the service that you offer, but the payment issue is what is keeping other established members of the sex industry from filling those areas. You need to go on AVN and XBIZ, look at what they are saying, and use their workarounds.

Well, is it necessary for it to be exactly the same font as on another book? For example, if I check on https://www.fontsquirrel.com under the tag Calligraphic (tag, not classification) or Elegant I'm usually quite happy with what I find.

A font that's similar to what other books in your niche/kink have on their covers. Creative Market is where a lot of people buy fonts. They have loads of variety, good sales, and weekly freebies.

For me, this app is everything.

I usually book at least 2K words per hour on it; a few 60-minute sprints with short breaks in between, 10K/days be cake. Low-level panic trumps my inner-editor every time - with or without flow state, muses, inspiration, etc. Of course whatever you draft will need a copyedit, but I'm always pleasantly surprised at how clean my prose comes out when I'm using the app.

I vote pants-it for anything under 35K, or at least limit your outline to one-sentence summaries of each chapter. Outlining works for me for novel-length stuff.

Good luck!

Creative Market has a Black Friday bundle for $17 and another one for $5.

/u/the_ocalhoun, this is for you too: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/image

AI-generated faces. 100% not real people. No infringerinos if the person whose picture you're appropriating literally doesn't exist. :)

I was at Barnes and Noble today and they had a ton of face-out copies of a romance where the heroine is a honey badger shifter. "Hot and Badgered" looks ridiculous and HILARIOUS. I put it on hold at the library, cannot wait to read it. The author is a New York Times Bestseller.

Here's an amazon link! Sorry for any formatting weirdness, I'm on a mobile device: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073DN12HK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

This is a YMMV area. Use the words you need to use to tell the story you want to tell the way you want to tell it. I find King unbearably wordy. On Writing has a lot of good advice, but his career started in a different era. Flash fiction is hot now and the adverb debate sems to be rapidly moving into the Oxford comma and split infinitives zone. People who care really care. Many others don't.

Also, I've bought used baby goods. "Brand new" is usually followed by "with tags" and just means the seller got them without a gift receipt. "Never worn" hints at a plan gone awry but in this era of excessive baby showers and low infant mortality it doesn't pack the punch it once would have. It's not the words themselves that matter but how they hit your target.

People are not going to stop tagging black clothes, black background and black & white filters with "black", because those are all appropriate uses of that tag.

You can:

1) stick to sites that let you filter for ethnicity (shutterstock and gettyimages)

2) try search terms like african, african-american, ebony and whatever else people might come up with

3) try different search terms, like "sexy" instead. Black woman sexy gives plenty of nice results. Surely one of those would suit your purposes? You aren't allowed to show handcuffed people on amazon erotica covers anyway. https://www.shutterstock.com/search/sexy?image_type=photo&ethnicity=african_american&mreleased=true

4) be the change and hire a photographer and some models, then share the photos you aren't using yourself on stockphoto sites

Pexels . Selection is limited, but it's good quality and royalty free.

Edited to add: Keep in mind that if you advertise on Amazon, it may bar you from using a cover that has nudity. So cover the man to the waist and the woman to the upper chest if you can.

ProWritingAid has a nice sale, with the lifetime license 50% off: https://prowritingaid.com/en/App/Purchase And if Grammarly is your proofreading tool of choice, it also has a 55% off deal on its annual plan.

And another one, not strictly Black Friday, but you may find it useful if you're a dictionary lover like I am: the OED annual subscription is only $90 until the end of March 2019 (more info here: https://public.oed.com/help/ --> How to subscribe to the OED).

Hi there! This is what you need: https://calibre-ebook.com/

It's a free convertor that'll turn anything into anything.

If you want my PRO advice, though, I always take my mobi file direct from Amazon itself. Here are instructions on how to do that:

https://youtu.be/0Bu6NmXnxkw

I think what most people forget in looking for a niche, is to actually LOOK for one. Instead, they just shoot their shotgun all over the place while wearing a blindfold, hoping to hear something yelp.

Don't just write random stuff until something sticks, look for something that is ALREADY working and write THAT.

Write sharknado, not jaws. For now, don't try to reinvent the wheel. Go hit up the top lists and look for authors making it on shorts. Check the top 100 erotic AUTHORS list:

https://www.amazon.com/author-rank/Erotica/digital-text/157057011

This is a fantastic way to find short erotica authors who are KILLING it. Go through the list and look for SHORT STORY authors. Look at what they are doing. Buy their bestselling short. Consider what they did so right that is earning them the money they enjoy. There are a bunch of them, and they hit different niches.

Now do THAT. They have lit the way for you, there is no reason to stumble in the dark. Do what works. Aim and THEN fire.

If that isn't working for you after a handful+ books, maybe consider a different genre. Don't just abandon them for nothing though, really give it an honest go before you run away from what might be a growing brand. Once your find success, YES, hammer that nail. No reason not to.

>I'm certain some people on Fiverr make much better covers than I possibly could

Don't be so sure. I was very unhappy with my Fiverr covers. I got several done from several different sources that had great ratings, but they were practically unusable. They were just awful and it really discouraged me that I'd already wasted more money than I would be making for probably months.

So I gave up and spent two hours watching Pixlr and PS tutorials on youtube. Almost immediately I was making WAY better covers than the people I'd paid. The problem is that some of the people on there are outright amateurs masquerading as experienced designers, but even the people who are actually skilled at that sort of thing aren't going to commit a whole lot of time to your cover when they are only making a couple of bucks from it. That's totally understandable, but it's just not worth it.

Like /u/WillowHartxxx said, PS isn't really that complicated. Spend a few minutes watching tutorial videos and you can do some impressive stuff with even a superficial understanding of the tools.

As for getting the stock photos if you haven't done that yet, I found this link in an old post here and was surprised to find that the offer is still valid. Using the site was a great experience. I just cancelled today after the tenth day, but I will probably go back for a paid subscription once I get caught up on my writing.

https://stacksocial.com/sales/improve-your-designs-with-100-hi-res-images-free-for-10-days

I know what you mean, personally I counter that by working on several projects at once. I write a thousand or so words on one story, realize I'm hitting a roadblock and switch over to another. That might not get me to daily publishing, but it does get me to basically finishing a story each day. At least that's what works for me, maybe worth a try.

Edit: Oh and This script is amazing for raw typing speed, corrects every typo you ever made (I mapped the 'add correction' key to capslock) and it's amazingly useful. Upped my typing speed so much, I started using it over two years ago and instead of backspacing to delete a wrongly typed word I just hit Capslock, type in the correct form and never make the same mistake again. I also use it to expand for example 'exp' to experience or words I hate typing like anything 'necessary' that are super awkward to type.

https://ifttt.com/

Short explanation: You connect two profiles and can do a bunch of stuff with it. Simplest is stuff like "If I post to my tumblr then also post to facebook", but you can also do weird stuff like automatically switching on the lights in your house when your phone connects to the WiFi. Pretty useful and free, I don't use it nearly as much as I probably could but there are lots of cool scripts to use.

Well -- yikes! I found the same thing for my one series (different pen than this) that I had used a CC2.0 license on -- the picture is now "All Rights Reserved". Thanks for the heads-up on this!

Edit: However I subsequently found this under the Wiki Commons licensing at the image itself:

"When this file was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, it was available from Flickr under the stated license. The Flickr user has since stopped distributing the file under this license. As Creative Commons licenses cannot be revoked in this manner, the file is still free to use under the terms of the license specified. See the Creative Commons FAQ on revoking licensing."

And then this is linked under 'revoking licensing':

"What if I change my mind about using a CC license?

CC licenses are not revocable. Once something has been published under a CC license, licensees may continue using it according to the license terms for the duration of applicable copyright and similar rights. As a licensor, you may stop distributing under the CC license at any time, but anyone who has access to a copy of the material may continue to redistribute it under the CC license terms. While you cannot revoke the license, CC licenses do provide a mechanism for licensors to ask that others using their material remove the attribution information. You should think carefully before choosing a Creative Commons license."

Sooooo..... I think I'll be all right, since it was OK to use under the license when I did it. Weird situation...

Ummmm....
https://stripe.com/us/prohibited_businesses

4. Sexually-oriented or pornographic products or services

Edit: Please understand that I'm not trying to thwart your efforts here, however it does raise some big concerns about trust when you say that you're very confident about this and this is your business, and yet I was able to find this in 5 minutes on the payment processor's website.

This is where hearing some credentials and experience for the people involved in your project would be beneficial to our audience because erotic authors in particular are very familiar with having to dance around Terms of Service with the various services we use and to consider listing our catalogs on a brand new site with no existing audience, we need to know that you're not just somebody trying to launch yet another ebook retailer without any real experience to make it worth our while.

You can't just come in and say, "We'll be like Amazon, but without the censhorship." - that doesn't cut it.

I just have one quibble. You DON'T need Photoshop, GIMP works just fine for most cover art needs and it's free.

ETA: It does have a bit of a learning curve, but that's true of most high-end image editing software.

I would recommend open office with the small caveat that you may need someone to help you set it up depending on your actual computer skills.

It's absolutely free, gets regular bug updates and will do if you just want a basic word processor. Failing that, google docs is free and can be saved to the cloud but I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of google docs due to a couple of bugs (mainly they seem to struggle with longer works)

Mine is a sci-fi romance novel that is just not selling, the previous book in the series didn't do to well, nor did another book I have published under the same pen.

New book (not doing well)

This is a new pen name - I wrote a bunch of smut before but wanted to move into romance because I enjoy the genre more - but yeah, not doing great.

Is the cover/blurb the problem? There are only two reviews because I used booksprout and it's obvious (to me, but perhaps not to the readers) that they didn't read the book, they also gave low rankings. I have only done free promo to date for this pen name as nothing is selling and I don't know if I am just throwing money away.

Please help. I would appreciate any and all constructive criticism as I really want to make this work.

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!

For another option, 5 Secrets of Story Structure by K.M. Weiland is currently free on Amazon--I picked it up a few days ago, and used it to rework a problematic outline. I don't think it'll work for every story for me, but it was really helpful for this one.

I don't do structure outlines on chapters or scenes. In my outlines, any given chapter or scene will get a paragraph, maybe two, describing what happens. It'll look something like: "John runs into Sandra at the bookstore. They have a conversation about Katie; John thinks she's being reckless, and Sandra wants her to be more aggressive. Sandra gets upset and leaves. Her wallet falls out of her purse on the way out, and John picks it up."

I wrote 9000 words today (christ my fingers are sore!). This is the first day I have been able to set aside just for writing since I started working on the novel over 6 months ago... What a difference 8 uninterrupted hours makes.

I'm at 32,000 words so far and am thinking of ending the first (it will be a multi-book series, or it will if anyone bothers to read it) at around 50-60k words. While it needs heaps of polishing, I am really enjoying watching the characters develop and the world emerge. I just wish I had more time to devote to it. If I could keep this pace up I'd be done in a couple of weeks instead of months... :-/

In other news, one of my stories is available for free on Amazon Saturday and Sunday PST. Please feel free to check it out if you are interested.

I've been writing ideas, plots, etc. down for years, but never followed through. I was scared and self-critical, embarrassed by my efforts. Today is the day I start to follow through.

1. Starting my first (short) story; as many words as I can do in 2hrs. Finish 'On Writing' by King. Break some of my other ideas into write-able stories.

2. <inarticulate vocalizations>

3. Block-out a 2 hr writing period every day. Maintain a sustainable word count. Get back to book reading.

A lot of erotica out there is poorly written. I'm not advising you to write poorly, but don't give up based on your perceived writing ability. Even if you're struggling now, practice DOES make it easier. Write everyday and you'll be surpassing your expected word count quickly.

That being said, I would feel a little remiss (and would probably cry over my english degree...again...) if I didn't recommend you do a little reading about writing. On Writing by Stephen King, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and Strunk & White's Elements of Style are great reads for anyone who wants to learn to write quickly, easily and well.

1. As usual, I'd like to 5000 words today. Odds of it happening? 1/5000. I didn't write as much as I wanted last night, but at least I learned how to FEATHER. EVERYTHING.
2. All good at the moment - just need to put words on pages.
3. I'm a bit ashamed to admit I've read very, very little about writing. I hear Stephen King's "On Writing" is fantastic. I even own a copy I hope to read someday.

Another 4000 word day for me today, hoping to power through it and get it done quickly as I've agreed to watch my buddy's baby this afternoon. I'm trying to remain happy with 4K days this week, with an eye on upping that to 5K+ next week.

I would say that Scrivener was a game changer for me and when I started using it I had that eureka moment. But love of Scrivener is pretty much a given around here. Beyond that, if you have a Mac I recommend F.lux. It's a free app that automatically adapts the brightness and colors of your screen to the time of day. The blue glow of a back lit screen can mess with your sleep patterns, and F.lux helps mitigate that. Awesome app.

EDIT: Currently at 2032 and it's nearing the time that I must go babysit. Not as much as I had hoped to accomplish but... so it goes.

1. Edit the final three chapters of my novel.
2. I'm on schedule on my WIP! I gave myself an artificial deadline that I didn't expect to meet, but at this rate I will easily. I hope I didn't just jinx myself.
3. This. It's so damn cute that I wish I had a use for it.

I read a helpful book on this subject recently: "Write to Market" by Chris Fox. It is not specific to the romance genre, but it IS pretty specific to Amazon, explaining their ranking system, how to research, etc. etc.

If you have a KU subscription, you can borrow it and read it for free.

https://www.amazon.com/Write-Market-Deliver-Faster-Smarter-ebook/dp/B01AX23B4Q

Hello! I'm still new to self-publishing, and I'm not really sure what I'm doing. I put some short stories on Amazon, but this is the first novella I ever published: All Survivors, Head West. Any help you could give me on how to improve would be so helpful! Thank you!

Here's a pretty big one off the top of my head, and last I checked, the whole series is in there. I think Amazon likely gave some popular books extremely favorable terms in order to use books like these in their KU advertising. Another one I can think of is The Handmaid's Tale.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HM289W5

I published this last Monday and it has already "peaked" so I probably won't spend time changing this book, but I would welcome some general advice on where I could improve so that I could apply that to the book I'm finishing and releasing soon.

Things I think: my blurb could be sexier, my covers could be better (I'm using desktop Canva and trying not to sink a ton of time into them though), and it's not very long. I'm also conflicted as to whether I should use a subtitle, as I've heard of people getting told off by amazon for keyword stuffing or identical subtitles for multiple books.

Good for you! This is all good stuff--just don't lose sight of priority one: Write, Publish, Repeat.

You'll definitely want a mailing list once you have a few titles under your belt, but don't sweat it too much if you haven't even hit publish yet. Sounds like you're doing a pretty good job allocating your time wisely. Now hit publish, start your next story, and we'll see you in 30 days!

The first story I saw on B&amp;N.

Yeah. I think you'll be fine with your dubcon tentacle story. You may even need to up your game...

1. 3-4k, I worked a lot on covers and nonfiction lately so I need to up my erotica word count again. Just need those stories to be finished so I can upload.

2. Work today, ugh. On topic: I've hit a slump with a project I was very passionate about lately, gotta get back into it because it has a ton of potential.

3. This script lets me type twice as fast with half the editing. Couldn't live without it. I have it mapped to capslock for new corrections so there's finally a use for that conveniently positioned key.

Checking in, at a decent time for once. Thankyou all for your helpful feedback on the romance schtick late yesterday.

1)Maybe 2.5K? Ahead of schedule - because I decided I didn't need to do some stuff, not because I'm, y'know, diligent or anything - so I might actually get some things published this evening.

2)Being ahead of schedule is good, but I need to not fark around finding unecessary tasks as I usually do. This is one of the hardest things I've found about working alone; other people's needs can be a pain, but they do help me keep my priorities straight. Sometimes.

3)Interesting question. I try not to have too many things going on at once, but I use Trello for all my planning, so there are cards there for extra ideas.

Goodreads is confusing as hell lol there are a lot of ways to promote there it's just...kinda confusing and time consuming.

The list thing is pretty easy when you get the hang of it. You can find them here https://www.goodreads.com/list/book/20572655 and two of them show up on any page or a book that's listed in a list. You can add your own to relevant lists, an then it helps people find your stories and add it to their "to read" book shelves. Not tons of people necessarily, but it might convert into a few sales!

You can also post in groups there, add your books to group bookshelves, and give away free copies of stories on there but I have played with those yet.

Good luck to you with your first, and future, stories!

I look for images that have a CC-BY license. It takes a long time and a lot of digging but you can find good images for free as long as you mention who the original image came from and I always have a link to the original image as well in my copyright page.

The only downside is my covers are also CC-BY because you can't change the license just because you changed the image. But no one has stolen my covers. Though you can download pirated copies of a couple of my stories which I think is kind of cool that some one would go out of their way to do that to my writing and at least they left my back matter intact.

1. Goal: 3,000 words. Actual: 2791 words. And now you know why I made this thread!
2. Thinking hard about how to better allocate time and not risk an hour or two of procrastination when working on various things without a deadline.
3. I use the pomodoro technique a lot and sometimes will just give myself a stupidly short timer, like 10 minutes on/10 minutes off just to overcome the resistance. The other thing that helps is to write about the thing I am supposed to be writing. The trick (for me) is not to try to start the writing but to just braindump what the plan is. This can help me get started or even find out what the problem is and why I'm not writing. I've recently found the Most Dangerous Writing App which I discovered on EA but find a bit scary for writing is really good for this kind of brain dump.

/u/pious-highness mentioned a few good editing tools the other day that actually checks for repetitiveness. The one I've used is editMinion, which does a good job and it's free. She also mentioned ProWritingAid, but I've never checked that one out before.

When I feel like I don't know what to write, I take a break and write something that I enjoy and want to write. I read an article the other day about an author who just wrote what they enjoyed and what they would want to read, and it worked out good for them. Even if it doesn't do as good, it gives your brain a break and you can relax and have fun for a bit.

This is the article I mentioned above. :)

Upstanding young lady. Adjective order.

Is 18 safe?

>he plans on showering her generosity

Can't tell if you want "showing her generosity", "showering her with generosity", "showering her generously", and I'm not sure it matters because if this isn't about him buying her stuff as a reward for good behavior or similar, you should cut it to something like "Suddenly, Cassie's new influence forces her to accept his discipline." Possibly with an "in order to" if it is about him buying her stuff. Shouldn't have taken me three reads to sort out that's probably what's going on.

It's good to see you back.

1. Gonna knock out another 5k short story today hopefully. Have the skeleton done.
2. Still going on only one sale on both Amazon/Smashwords. I'm sure it'll pick up as I add more but right now it feels like screaming into an abyss. I'd be doing this regardless, though, as I love writing this kind of thing, so I'm not too worried. Just gotta keep at it.
3. This. Is she supposed to be... a frog? Furniture? A hieroglyph? Is this someone's fetish? Why is she naked?

Just a couple thoughts that may help. BBW is a large niche, consider finding a smaller niche that isn't so saturated. Smaller niches may have a lower ceiling however at first you need to find an audience. When it comes to covers, I use GIMP. It is a free program comparable to Photoshop. The learning curve can be steep, but there are plenty to tutorials online to walk you through. You need stock photos from a place like Canstock. A few bucks on a photo goes a long way (especially if you can use pieces of the photo for more than one cover. Most of the bigger stock photo sites offer free images to first time buyers, use them! As dayvansmutgirl said, keep publishing. Write every spare second you have, and perfect covers/ blurbs/ keywords as you go. Just like anything else, practice, practice, practice. When your not writing, research keywords. The auto fill in the amazon search bar is your best friend. Nothing is going to magically change, so don't sit back and wait for that. Tell yourself this is what you are going to do, and pursue it!

That site seems to be responsive to DMCA takedown notices, but you may want to simultaneously hit their hosting provider. They hid behind Cloudflare, but Cloudflare will forward the information to both the website owner and hosting provider.

https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/

EDIT to add link

Yup me too. I just deleted my gmail account associated with my literotica.

I made a new one with Tutanota. It's free, secure (encrypted), and it doesn't require any verification bullshit. I can't believe I haven't heard of it sooner. I found it on Reddit searching for better email services.

https://tutanota.com/

Edit: I know I sound like a commercial, but I'm just honestly happy to use a free secure email client without verification.

A lot of the stock photo sites will do free trials. I think stacksocial is still running a BigStock 10 day free trial.

I have no experience with any pro writing help software, so this is my $.01...

I just finished editing my first short and I found a combination of the free grammarly plus running the piece through the Hemingway APP did a decent job of guiding the process.

Try out the Hemingway Editor for editing when you have a chance. Its suggestions are helpful most of the time and I feel using it has made me a better writer in general.

Write first then edit. That's one thing I can't follow. I edit as I go, then edit again two or three more times. I still don't catch everything. Lately, I've been writing in http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ which helps a lot. When I'm done for the day, I save my work in notepad or email, then copy and paste it back onto that site when I want to work on it again.

As others have said, it does take practice (writing is a muscle, and all that.) But in more immediate terms, the two things that have helped me most are:

1) Cold Turkey Writer: https://getcoldturkey.com/writer/ - It gives you the option to base your sprints either on time or on wordcount. I mostly do thousand word sprints, which take me 20-25 minutes, or if I'm sprinting with others (see below) it's usually 20 minute timed sprints.

2) Accountability groups / sprinting with others. Writing is lonely but somehow working with other people makes it easier. You can meet people on here, or on other forums, and some have challenges that you can join. Last month I wrote 50k in a week just because I was in a challenge and the competitive part of my nature refused to let me lose. :)

When intrepid time-travelling sex-positive homoliberator Guy Manspluge receives a tempero-phallic communique from the closeted ghost of Abraham Lincoln – imploring him to return to the year 1865 and emancipate him from his insane, dumpy little shrew of a wife, once and for all empowering him to unchain his libido, so that he can finally give John Wilkes Booth the attention and buttlove he thirsted for with the same passion and inflatedness with which Lincoln himself groped after racial equality, thereby averting his tragic death in one of the most widely-misunderstood lover’s quarrels of all time – Guy knows that he has no choice but to take history in his mouth, cup the balls of time, and let freedom rain across the chest of injustice, the lower back of tyranny, and the mouth and nose of racial inequality. Leaving behind his crush of muscular, oily, afro-dominant non-monogamous domestic life-partners, Guy fearlessly plunges himself through the tight, quivering wormhole he opens with his magical, time-controlling bottle of water-based lube, spluging himself deep into the past to break chains, hearts, and gender-stereotypes. Will Guy be able to help Abe and Johnny tame their passion before it’s too late? Did Thaddeus Stevens secretly lust after Fernando’s wood? Will Guy once again end up in the middle of things? Will things once again end up up his end? All this, and much, much more will be revealed in this tense, steamy, homoerotic tale of justice, awakening, and inter-racial up-and-down bouncy fun, where all men are created equally naughty and fabulous.
Heres the link: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09BNVRWKM

I got some helpful feedback on Blurbsday Thursday about making my blurb easier to follow. I rewrote it and removed all mention of a third character to hopefully make it more streamlined. What do you think? Any other thoughts/comments?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099FH5PMK

Thanks!

Clean romance is what you're looking for. "Sweet" tend to refer to low angst these days, so it's possible to find sweet books that have sex in them.

The writing gals have a podcast and mostly write sweet & clean iirc (but they call it "sweet" - it gets confusing!), so you could have a look through their videos and it'll give you a few pen names to start researching:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSBnYO8N1yItJ3WbLzNjsqQ

Victorine Lieske wrote How to Write a Swoon-Worthy Sweet Romance Novel, which I haven't read but I believe she goes through her process and then lays in one of her books, chapter by chapter, and takes some time to explain her choices by chapter. Could be useful.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07BT526JC

I just published my first short here if anyone would like to give me feedback on anything! (Blurb, cover, content?)

I should say that I know there's little chance of this being profitable given the content/niche! But as an amateur in this genre, if there's something I can do better to appeal to my (very small) audience, I would love to hear about it :)

I haven't had a problem with my novel so far (touch wood) and am not away of any platforms it has been rejected from via Smashwords.

It was initially blocked outright by Amazon, then I changed the blurb to include "18-year-old" and tweaked it and Amazon was fine. But Smashwords was ok with the original blurb apparently and iBooks accepted it. Lulu was also fine with it and got it onto the iBooks store (using the safer blurb).

You can see the difference here:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/428131
http://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Lessons-Noël-Cades-ebook/dp/B00JNAZ7B0/

It's not pure erotica, it is erotic romance so I don't know if the longer length helps.

I was blocked outright by All Romance. After some wrangling with them (since I can't even upload any future works up there, they appear to have kept my tax information online so I can't even re-register with them) they told me I was blocked for: "Works that are written for or being marketed to the barely legal market". I wasn't even aware this was a market, the book is just aimed at adult readers generally, but I can't be bothered to challenge it.

Done! Now, please do the same to mine!

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LEP7KCG

Free site link (Smashwords): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/453349

EDIT: Hmm, so I'm supposed to PM this to you. I'll leave it here, and someone who's got time on their hands or is procrastinating can do it. Let me know if this needs to go in its own thread.

I had a story filtered either because the gal on the cover was wearing a thong or because I used the word "mom." I never did find out. Here's the cover that did get the past the reviewer, and thus out of the adult filter "dungeon."

While that book was adult filtered -- aka in the dungeon -- you practically had to know its URL to find it. Even I, who knew exactly what the title was, was unable to find it via a title search. I know others say their books sold while adult filtered, but mine was essentially invisible. In my opinion, stay out of the dungeon...

I think one way to approach this problem is to understand that anybody can surf Amazon's titles, and what they're worried about is little Suzy asking her mommy why the woman on a book titled "Come Here, Teddybear" is wearing a piece of dental floss for her underwear, and what does the word "fisting" mean. I think the way to approach your covers, blurbs (i.e. descriptions) and anything else that can be publicly seen on Amazon is to ask yourself if you could find it on the shelves of your local Barnes and Noble. You can still be risqué -- B&N does sells girlie mags after all, and they're pretty racy -- but remember that Amazon doesn't want ANY kind of publicity that has little Suzy crying because she just found out through surfing their site that pegging is something you can do outside the game of Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.

As you've learned, nobody is really an expert on this because the rules aren't super clear, and what one censor lets an author get away with will make another one pitch a fit... Thus, I offer my $0.02 which is to imagine whether or not you could find it on the upper magazine rack of Barnes and Noble...

Good luck!

One of the cool things about Book Report is that you can download your data on the settings page and then import it somewhere else. And like you said, amazon only holds onto 90 days of your sale data, so backing up Book Report periodically is easy and useful.

Keeping your books and drafts, photoshop files, and stock photos backed up on external hard and flash drives is also good. Storage media has gotten cheaper, faster, and larger over time. I have a 256GB PNY USB 3.0 flash drive I use to back up shit and transfer it.

I had started with Save the Cat and the Jami Gold beat sheets, which you can easily Google.

/u/Pious-Highness "Falling in Love / Fighting for Love" story circle, which I believe he/she based on the more general Dan Harmon's story circle. Pious-Highness had deleted his/her account and I can't find the thread with that image and those descriptions at the moment, so you might search around on this sub. You can find the Dan Harmon information via Google.

Another nice resource are tips from K.M. Weiland's 5 secrets of story structure, which is currently available for free on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BHE3HXE

Good luck!

There's a really great book that explains this and gives you some tips about going about it - and it's permafree! It's called "Reader Magnets" by Nick Stephenson. You can find it on Amazon here.

ETA a word I left out.

I work at a library, and we do put a romance sticker on the spine of our copies of "Outlander." The librarians who swear up and down that they "don't read romance" or "don't like romance" are all crazy about this series. It's one of those romances that flies under the radar. It is different from the sorts of romances in the paperback romance section, though, and I feel like the people who borrow the mass market romances are not usually the same folks who will read all of Outlander. Or listen to the crazy long audiobook versions of Outlander.

Now, Outlander has some outlandishly HAWT sex scenes, and you might be interested to know that Diana Gabaldon has a book all about writing sex scenes, titled I Give You My Body: How I Write Sex Scenes. It's $2.99 on Amazon.

Probably both. People generally don't really put on their covers what they personally like, but what sells on the market. And covers are very important tools to signal to your readers what is to expect from the book. For example, a typical sci-fi space fleet cover has a blocky, no-serif font in light tones on a darker background and a picture of a space ship and maybe some asteroids, a planet or stars. Like this: amazon space fleet examples

There are also examples that break that rule, but they are usually not well-ranked. So yeah, the norms are a thing in the market, and if you stray to far outside them, nobody will buy your books.

Generally, your cover is there to assure your audience that they found the right book for their tastes and can buy it without being disappointed.

On the other hand, of course standing out is a good thing. You want to get attention, you want to be perceived better than your competition. But with any divergence from the norm, there is always the risk of just looking weird or unappealing to the customers. Therefore, I would make absolutely sure that the images are really super high quality. Professionally done illustrations can be amazing, and be an actual advantage for your books.

But most people err on the safe side and use stock images.
Maybe you could post your covers in the weekly feedback thread and ask for opinions?

I could really use help figuring out what I've done wrong with my cover/keyword/blurb.

First short is out as of 7/24. It’s 10K words and as of 7/27, it’s got one sale and 51 pagereads. It’s not nothing, but I’d like to do better.

I’ve been watching my page reads obsessively, and I’ve noticed that a few people have read two pages and quit. I figure this means I’m hooking the wrong readers, and/or I need a much punchier opening in my next short.

Mistake number one is that I’m writing whatever I feel like. I figure I’ll do this for my first 2-3 shorts juuust in case something magical happens. And it’ll give me time to weed out the cover/keyword/blurb mistakes I’m inevitably going to make.

Cover: I was kinda lost here, but I figured it was better to have something that I could improve upon instead of just nothing. I’ve read the FAQ and seen tutorials, but something isn’t clicking. I also just straight up forgot to choose a different font from default. I’ve updated that part, but if you see blue text it means that Amazon hasn’t processed the update yet. Updated cover here

Since the story is mostly BDSM based I tried to stick to their cover dynamics, but was unable to find a pattern besides “woman in her underwear” or “tied up woman that could get me banned.”

Keywords: Not sure I “get” keywords yet. I know I can bunch them up, but I can’t wrap my head around why. I’ve looked through the shifter genre and it’s rare for the shifter to be the bottom. Even then, I’ve only seen it if the top is also a shifter. I’m not sure how to get this across in keywords.

I used: Dungeon, knight, magic, submission BDSM, romance, shifter, StorytellerUK2020 (I figured entering a contest couldn’t hurt… right?)

Blurb: The blurb is the part I feel the most okay about. Feel free to shatter that confidence.

5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter (Volume 1) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1548182494/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_fZvECb01WBFDC

He also has a great YouTube channel with videos about plotting, building characters, etc.

Seconding the idea of starting the plot with the heroine leaving the jerk! It reminds me of Jennifer Probst's book, "Searching for Beautiful," which starts with the heroine as a runaway bride. She panics and crawls out of a window, dress and all. It drops you right into the action and makes you instantly feel sympathetic towards the heroine. Great stuff!

Also seconding what the other person said about having the heroine and the jerk just be dating or engaged, though. Divorce is a whole different beast from a breakup.

You can read the summary for Searching for Beautiful here, if you're interested! - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1476780102/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_WjOKCbEKEDFE2

Just write. Don't try to fight the thoughts holding you back or criticizing what you do--don't struggle with them, just listen, then let them pass by if you can. If they stay there talking at you just let them stay, but don't give them any credence or listen to them. Realize that thoughts are just thoughts and don't have any actual weight behind them--only what we assign to them.

Really though, just write. It's like jumping off the high dive--there's not trick to it, you just have to do it.

I'd read Stephen King's On Writing if you have free time for reading. It's super motivational and a longer explanation of the same thing: just do it. Edit later.

And remember the story about the pottery students. One spent a thousand days trying to make one perfect pot. The other made a dozen crappy pots every day. The second one is one who became good at pottery. (Or however that story goes).

Second u/nobadob there, Kings book, On Writing is right up on my shelf next to Strunk and White. It's just terrific. And also led directly to me being here. King mentions he writes 2k words per day but suggests 1k is probably a good starting point. So I do 1k a day and it's mostly working out ok...

Job...action? I mean, I finished off the last of the Halloween candy and attended conference calls, but I wouldn't call that action exactly.

1) 1000! Keepin' it low and realistic this week.

2) I'm really grossed out by how much sugar I've consumed in the past week. My exercise bike is staring at me vengefully, folded up in the corner of my office. Oh, wait, you meant WRITING failures. Nope, none of those!

3) Currently I am reading Story Genius by Lisa Cron. A good bit of it is questionable ("brain science," views of story based on pop evopsych...shiver), but the book has an interesting way of looking at the character's wound/fatal flaw/misbelief, as well as the need for every scene to illustrate an emotional impact on the character. And I just finished Chris Fox's Launch to Market, a slim but useful book that I wish had been about seven hundred times longer.

While I've finally given up the hope of finding The One True Writing Book That Will Make Everything Better, it's still fun and focusing to read about writing.

I am also networking, by which I mean asking my peers incessant worried questions. I'm joking. No, I'm not. But kinda. I could listen to people talk ALL DAY about their marketing strategies and how they plot their books and what Photoshop tools are their favorites. It's funny, and I'm taking it as an Important Life Signal, that I love networking with other writers...and cannot stand networking for my day job.

1. Currently have 1239/5000. Switching to writing in the past tense is hard!

2. Success! Sixteen people have bought/read my novella I released on Tuesday. I'm making pennies, but I can't help but be over the moon with the fact that someone out there is actually reading my stuff!

3. I'm trying to read "Bird by Bird," but I just can't get into it.

1. Working on getting the m/m story published. Editing, formatting, cover, keywords. The blurb is already written, for once, and didn't make me want to tear my hair out (a minor miracle).

2. This niche has cover requirements that do not overlap well with my existing Photoshop skills. I'm also a little paranoid that Amazon is going to think this story is dubcon. Everything is 100% consensual (with several instances of explicit verbal consent, even), it's just that this relationship is seriously dysfunctional.

3. I think I'm the only one who didn't love Stephen King's On Writing. It was okay, but I've read better, and his contempt for anyone who prefers to write with an outline rubbed me the wrong way. I've read a lot of writing books, but my favorite is Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass. It has a lot of useful information even if your goals aren't what he assumes they are (namely, writing a book with mainstream appeal and NYT-bestseller potential after having built a career in niche genre fiction). It's less for beginners and more for people who have been writing for a while, but I imagine a lot of the people here fall into that category.

First of all, welcome back and congratulations on finishing your novel! That's such a step in the right direction.

Here are some sources that I used when I first started out and that I refer to when I get "stuck". Hope this helps.

She has two books out on story structure and "Writing Love" but most of her info can be found on her blog. I purchased the books just to have everything organized a little better. She also uses examples from movies, which helps a lot.

Alexandra Sokoloff There is a TON of info here. It's a good place to just read, read, read.

Good articles on this site...some may be a little outdated...cherry-pick what speaks to you.

Writing World - Romance

Here are some other books that I've used. Some of them are romance specific, some of them are just for writers in general. Some have been super useful...some, not so much, YMMV, so I'm just throwing them out there.

Take Off Your Pants (Outline your books for better, faster, writing) Libbie Hawker

The Busy Writer's Tips on Writing Romance - Marg McAllister

On Writing Romance - Leigh Michaels

The Everything Guide to Writing a Romance Novel - Christie Craig

How to Write Short Romance Kindle Books: A 40 Minute MASTERCLASS - Nina Harrington

Hope this helps in some way. Good Luck!

I think there's actually some psychological research to back that up. I could be wrong, but I think I read about it in Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Basically you're more likely to value something that you've paid for. Possibly because you don't want to admit that someone as smart and discerning as yourself could have made a poor purchase choice. So you find ways to justify it, decide you like it more, remain happy with your choice. Whereas if you get something for free, you're not invested. Sucks that it works that way for book reviews, too!

I like Strunk & White's The Elements of Style. Written in 1920 and updated a few times (most recently in 2000), it has a lot of useful tips.

The most important thing is experience - you will get better and better the more you write (assuming that you're trying hard.)

It's probably pretty hard, you'd have to make it available through a private platform or your own site, not sure where that would be. Weirdly it would almost be easier to make it a kinetic novel and put it out on itch.io.

Here's a paperback resource that I used so much I had to tape and glue my original copy back together. I can't tell you how much this has helped me in general.

The Synonym Finder

1. 5k

2. I'm making progress, slow but inevitable.

3. This script that auto-corrects every typo I've ever made so I don't make it again. I mapped the key to add new corrections to Capslock, it's an amazing tool. Saves me hours of editing.

Do they grandfather in all the books already publish that are dubcon or straight out rape? Because there sure are a lot of them and they are not at ALL subtle what they are about:

B&amp;N search for &quot;rape erotica&quot;

Well this is WAAAAAY NSFW!

I'm not sure what I'm looking at, but ... if this cover gets a pass, anything does ...

They have a very low page ranking and the average visitor spends under 3 minutes there so I'm guessing a few people use it to check out a book before they buy it but I don't think people look for books there. This is just my speculation. Most of the links to that site come from goodreads.com to give you an idea of the crowd that uses it.

Here is the link to the Alexa Page Rank if you want to read more about their traffic.

Their top 10 for the week(Aug. 25th) are all over the place. A few are best selling authors and the rest rank anywhere from 300k to 1.1m.

I personally wouldn't worry about it too much.

This is the base script, I'm afraid it takes a bit of fiddling to set it up once, but then you can put the script into autostart (I even have it in my google drive with a shortcut in my autostart folder for synching between devices), but then all you need to do is press capslock (in the script I linked it's windows-H to add corrections, I just think capslock is more practical) and add the correction.

Price matched!

Edit: If you could price match mine, that'd be great... Scarlette is on Amazon, and free on Barnes &amp; Noble. Thanks!

Pricematch sent!

Edit: If you could price match mine, that'd be great... Scarlette is on Amazon, and free on Barnes &amp; Noble. Thanks!

1. 3500 Business trip for work. Looking forward to it. Based on past experience, my best writing comes through while listening to people discuss my occupation. ;)

2. First romance published. Slightly thrilled, slightly anxious. It's terrifying putting your baby out there. Seriously, me watching the reviews roll in

3. Nothing really. Mostly motivational stuff like this from Stephen King. I'm a panster, if that makes a difference.

If you are registered to their newsletter, you get every Monday two free fonts from https://creativemarket.com/ I bought there font packages to have some variety. They offer them from time to time very cheap.

Hurrah! I was running low!

I collated the basic alternatives to Photoshop:

If you don't want to spend the money on Photoshop or believe that they should fuck right off after moving to a monthly subscription plan, there is GIMP which is free.

https://www.gimp.org/

If you are intimidated by Photoshop or GIMP, try Canva. There's a free version. It's drop and drag. It doesn't have a lot of flexibility for font effects, but it will get you going.

Canva.com

Unfortunately, TextEdit is the Notepad of Mac. It works, but only if you're already familiar with using it for coding HTML and are comfortable with AppleScript.

You could also try something like Sublime Text 2 with the SublimeStringEncode plugin. You'd go with "html_entitize".

Edit: Congrats on your first book and welcome to the club!

The pomodoro technique is great for incrementally increasing your word counts. Other than that, having a good plan (like a basic story outline) is helpful.

I tend to be more of a visual person by nature, so for me designing the cover first gets me in the right mindset and sets the right tone for the story.

Correct, but itch.io is also a maketplace for Books, Comics, and other Media. It is one of the few sites that does not require a monthly fee to have a storefront, since you pay them a share on each transaction, that also allows NSFW imagery to be sold.

Seeing as the NSFW imagery in my collections prohibit me from selling on strickly book sites, it is a good fit for me and I wanted to share my experience with others who might want to include illustrations in their works or who might want another platform to sell their more niche works.

Don't believe that works. In my experience it's quite the opposite -- they will only Permafree a book at the author's request. Here's the steps I have used twice with success (not in the last 12 months though)

1. Publish book with same cover on Smashwords for free

2. Make sure cover image satisfies requirements for premium catalogue. (size and ratio) usually takes a couple of days for premium approval.

3. Add a free ISBN using Smashwords free isbn manager

4. Wait for it to list on ITunes.

5. Find the book on ITunes. It's not easy. Use https://fnd.io and then navigate to the book on ITunes

6. This will be the US Url. Copy it and paste a bunch of times.

7. On each link, replace "us" with gb, au, ca, br, mx, fr, es, de, nl, it, jp respectively.

8. Send those fuckers to Amazon, asking nicely for your book to be made Permafree in all those marketplaces. I made the initial request through the Contact link in Author Central, but it would presumably also work from the KDP site. Use the email address that was used to publish the book.

Good luck

Not the ones I use. CC-By is Creative Commons by attribution. That means free to use as long as you give credit to the original rights holder and link to the license.

Good job! Looks like you're definitely on the right track!

When you say "typesetting covers," do you mean literally covers with just type and no photos? Because if you do, you're probably losing a lot of sales from your covers. You should definitely sign up for a stock photo site (Depositphotos, mentioned already, is a good one) and start putting scantily-clad people on your covers as soon as possible.

I used to be overly precious with my words, too, and still tend towards that if I'm not careful. Have you tried WriteOrDie yet? I've found that to be the single best tool out there for getting me out of my head and just putting words down.

I do the same thing. Write or Die in kamikaze mode was a game changer for me. I just get what needs to happen down on the page and treat it as an early draft or a superoutline. It's much, much easier for me to gussy up a page of middling prose during real editing time than it is for me to agonize over getting every single word right while I'm writing.

Also, if I know that I would be able to phrase something better if I had time to think or I'm really jammed up, I put brackets around the shittily written text to remind myself to come back to it later.

"He caressed her [nipples and stuff, delete this later] while she..." etc.

1) 2k again! I came in just under the wire yesterday; let's hope I can reach my goal before 11:30 p.m. tonight.

2) I'm writing a menage romance right now, and feeling very self-conscious about the sex scenes. I set out to write a fairly typical "two hotties focused on the main protagonist" and it's turning into this weird egalitarian polyamorous feelings-fest. It's too early to tell if this is a bad thing or not; I'm sure I'll tweak it some in the editing anyway, but after every writing session I find myself scratching my head and going, "I'm...not sure anyone's going to fap to this."

3) My favorite writing tool and writer's block buster is Write or Die. If I'm stuck and just need something to motivate me to vomit out words, I'll set it up for a 15-minute 500-word session and go to town. The stuff I write this way is almost always terrible because it's totally stream-of-consciousness, but it helps get the words flowing again, and sometimes it provides me with workable outlines or rough drafts. It's a good way to just power through a scene that's giving me trouble so that I can move on to the next thing--yeah, I'm gonna have to rewrite it later, but at least it's done.