You Gotta Spend Money to Make Money... Right?

Oh boy. In what might be a huge mistake, I have... (drum roll, please)... paid for advertising.

Nah, not on Facebook, although I'm investigating that as well. Since my books are almost exclusively offered on Amazon, I went with them first. The first unhappy surprise: minimum hundred dollars expenditure. Second unhappy surprise: I have to wait, potentially up to 72 hours, for them to review it.

The book I chose to advertise is The Queen of Swords... of course. If I have some success here, I may branch out and do a similar campaign for Delilah. Those are the two I consider my most popular (even though 1001 Erotic Nights is my best seller, by far). The first reason is... well, it's easy to pin down the interests. It's all based on comics and thus, I targeted people who would buy comics or super hero novels. The second reason is that there are three books out in the series. If people like Queen enough, they may check out Prince, and then Princess.

It was pretty easy to set up. My nerves will be wracked until it's actually a live campaign. I'll keep thinking, "OMG WHAT IF THEY DON'T LIKE IT?! WHAT IF I DID SOMETHING WRONG?!" which is silly, of course. The next thought is, "What if I don't sell a damn thing and I just threw a hundred bucks away?" That would be a lot more shaming. However, Queen has some of my best reviews, Rebecca Wolfe's audio is wonderful to listen to, and I think it's fun and dark and sexy to read. You ONLY get 150 characters to sum up the book, though! This is what I ended up with:

In Imperial City, villain-for-hire Caprice works hard... and she plays harder. This novella contains dark, sometimes brutal, sexy, mature content.

It hits all the main components. She's a villain (check) who is hired (check). She works hard (check... sort of a nod to her being a bad ass) and plays hard (check). It's dark (check), bloody (check in the 'brutal' comment), sexy (check) and for a mature audience (check). There's no main element of the book which I left out, I think. Oh, and it's a novella, NOT a novel (check). I do NOT want people to be surprised by the length. The next books are novels, yes, but this one isn't. I think Prince has more sex in it by virtue of its length, but per capita... Queen is packed with sex. I wasn't sure HOW much I wanted plot and how much I wanted sexy times yet, so I erred on the side of sexy times. IIRC, Princess has three and a half sex scenes in comparison... basically the same amount as Queen. But it's three times as long. Longer than that!

This is a new, nervous step for me. I am reluctant to bug bloggers and say "Hey, review my booooook!" but that'll be the next terrifying step. People have often told me that you have to spend money to make money, and I hope this pans out. If I get a lot of click throughs, that'll be good. If I get a lot of sales, that will be better. If I want to be taken seriously...I need to advertise. Which that's a whole other post--people not taking erotica writers seriously. I seriously challenge anyone on the street to write a hot sexy scene and get people to fap to it.

It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Hey, y'all! I'm happy to see I was on the ball and posted that Villainess 3 was live. I was afraid I had missed that since I tend to neglect the blog here, save for when I come back to "real life" work and decide to update.

Now, in reference to my title, what I'm going to talk about today is "making it" as a independent author. I won't give out solid numbers, but I figured if I want to quit my job and do this for a living, I'd need to make about $1500 a month three months in a row. Not only would that give me a sizable nest egg to fall back on, but it would show consistency month to month like that. That would be working a full time job in addition to writing, not just writing full time. Since I'm at work (*looks around*) obviously, I'm not making that.

I won't lie and say that it's not my dream to write for a living. It is! Of course it is! It's every writer's dream to be the next Stephen King, or heck, even Dean Koontz... or EL James. I think I first got into erotica because I thought, "Oh, hey, easy money." And while it is easy, and there's money, it's not exactly "easy money". There's work involved. There's stuff I'm not so good at doing involved... like making covers, and networking, and promotion. It's not just writing a story and sending it out into the universe, expecting it to be popular. Sometimes, yeah, you can get lucky, but those instances are pretty few and far between. It's work. It's hard work, but because I love telling stories, it makes it easy for me.

A couple people know this, but I started a romance pen name too. No, I shan't be giving it out here. At least, not yet. Romance isn't my thing. Like, writing about dirty, filthy sex is one thing, but writing romance? It's a lot harder. There are formulas you must follow there to be successful, and tropes you need to learn because readers expect it. It's a learning process. I won't say that process is fun cause it's not. It's work. But I still get to tell stories, even if they are romances. Who's to say there can't be derring do and all sorts of fun stuff in it?

A couple other people know I'm writing "legit" novels too, though they are not published yet. I put legit in quotes because the erotica I write is legit, but people scorn it. Hell, people scorn romance, yet romance is probably THE top seller anywhere. Neither are easy to write. This novel I have is sizable, and I'm thinking it's probably to complex and doesn't make sense and all sorts of other negative things... but it's the one I've put the most effort into. Even my Villainess and Delilah stuff, which I love dearly, haven't gotten even a tenth of the work this novel has. Does that mean it's better? No. It means I've just put more work into it... and that I've dragged my feet trying to publish it.

Through all this, I'm not a popular author. I have fans, which is still trippy to say, but not popular. In general, the stuff I write is at worst, average, and at best, mind blowing. (seriously, someone said that!) I can handle that. Even the femdom stuff, the Dominating Her Man series, I've been told was better than much of the other stuff out there. It wasn't super hard core... but it wasn't meant to be. It was meant for people, myself included, to dip their toes into different aspects of the BDSM culture. This one might be about pegging. This one might be about bondage. This one might be about humiliation. And so on. Even when I haven't put my heart into it, it's still alright. I can deal with that.

I think what's holding me back is pushing. I don't push. I'm not a pusher. I CAN be aggressive, but in general I'm laid back and kinda nervous about pushing my stuff onto people. It's promotion, and I have remind myself that it's OK to push because that's part of my job as an indie writer... to push and wave my hands and say "Look at this! You'll like it!". But it's all part of the learning curve. Before I could write, I had to learn how to write, how to put stories together, how to make sentences, how to punctuate, spell, and all that other stuff. Before I can promote, I have to learn HOW to do it and get the mindset for it. I shouldn't (and don't) expect success overnight because while I learned how to put sentences together all of my life, I've only been a few months at learning how to promote myself. Each step forward takes me a closer step to my goal. And say I only make ten bucks a month, or fifty, or a hundred, or five hundred... each dollar gained is closer to my goal. And it's more than I would have had had I just sat on my ass and not did anything.

I've been at this for a year now, and in that year I've published over 45 stories, a couple of which have been full length novels, and at least a dozen novellas. Think about that. Does your favorite author put out novels twice a year? Of course not. (Of course, I don't have to go through copy editing and editing and approving covers and waiting for publication either. Advantage of self-pubbing there.) On a work day--because I write during my work days--I can write five to ten thousand words. That's inbetween working at my "real life" job. I read somewhere an average writer only writes about two thousand. If I did this for a living, anything under ten thousand a day would be a failure for me.

Some authors work really fast. I know of one who puts out a story every day to every other day. He's amazing. I know other authors who can't write that fast, who have real life responsibilities they must attend first and are lucky if they write two hundred words. Yet we're all in the same race. We're all learning, albeit at different speeds, and growing. We're all moving along to our dreams and while some of us are at the end of the race, cheering the rest on (and it's true, the "made it" indie authors tend to be really supportive of the little guy; it's pretty amazing), others are still racing at our own pace. It's been said this is a marathon, not a sprint, and that is so true. We'll get tired and winded. We'll get revitalized by the crowd. We'll work at a steady pace with periods of rest and periods of frantic activity, but each movement puts us one step closer to our end. The people I'm racing with aren't my competition; they're my companions. We're all doing it together.

*waves a hand* Inspirational thought for the decade. :)

Smut for Your Ears

Villainess: The Queen of Swords AUDIObook went live today, which was amazing. It was a lot of fun working with the producer, who nailed Caprice's voice completely, I think. Jotham did up a audio book cover for it since the dimensions are different than an ebook. Now I REALLY need to investigate putting a sidebar up on here to show all the different buy links! Just really, really busy at work at my day job and in writing.

For those who don't know, I am writing a story set in the Villainess world except told from Nosferatu's POV. I'm tentatively calling it "The Razor's Edge" and it's being written for an erotica anthology. The central theme of the anthology is "erotic transformation", and I thought a guy who transforms into a vampire is a pretty good transformation, right? I have a deadline on that one, so I have to get that done first before publishing anything else on my own.

The next one I'm working on is about half done though, and the cover is 99% done, so it should be out fast! This would be the next Witches of Back End book, and after that the next Delilah Devilshot. Then, all of my series will have at least two books out thus indicating to the people who read them that yes, I am planning on continuing all of them... because I am.

I am going to probably put a hard limit on a couple of the series though.

• Villainess has 16 books. No more, no less. The reason for this is because I am writing the books based on the courts of the tarot. There are 16 court cards, thus, 16 books.
• Rock Hardin will probably have 9 or 10. It depends on how many covers Jotham has done. I am not one to waste his work, and while my illustrator dictates what it's about and the name of the book, I still write it. He just made all of these REALLY awesome covers, and I want to use them! So far he's only made 9 or 10, and I'm going to try to keep him to JUST 9 or 10!
• The Janus Key Chronicles will end on a zero: 20/30/40 etc. The reason for that is the bundling I have planned for them... it only works if it ends on a zero. If I run out of steam on it, then it'll be 20. I'm guessing it'll probably be around book 30 that I finally quit the JKC. It's fun to write, cute, and stress relieving for me. Plus I have a ton of titles for it planned. 
• The Delilah Devilshot series will go until there's no more story to tell. I have NO idea when that will be. However, since I know it'll be about six books until she gets the guns she'll be known for... and there's seven riders to track down who killed her family... plus stuff I have in my head and I can't spoil for you guys... it could be a long, long series. I'm going to aim for novellas for those, if not novels, but they'll be as long as they'll be.
• The Witches of Back End I'm not sure on. It would be symmetrical to have it be 9, but I just don't know. There's sort of a metaplot, but not really? It's a light write too, so it's not like heavy and plot intensive. I'm guessing 9 will likely be my cut off, right around there, but that one is really up in the air.

Now I do have other series, anthology series, which may get added to as time goes on. Dominating Her Man is done. That one is finito, end of story. I would be ok with leaving Wantonly Wicked where it is, but I have other ideas for erotic horror which may come up. I really want at LEAST one more Cosmic Erotic so I can make a bundle of the three. Mythic Erotica is slow writing, because they are all bunches of short stories put together. I have started the next one, but the starting is research. It'll be a while before I start writing that one. While it will continue, each of those could stand as stand alones simply because they are so different, exploring different cultures and legends.

Bryce and I have some ideas for a collaboration, but we're still both writing our own stuff, without much time to actually collaborate. Hopefully after things slow down here IRL I will be able to be more with it to knock ideas around again and get them down on paper.

That be it for now!

Running Your Event on Facebook

Boring title. Ah, well.

Now that I've come down off of the high and madness of getting The Prince of Cups released, I can share some of my observations from this whole self-promotion thing from both sides of the event thing: attending an author takeover at someone else's event, and running your own.

Author Takeover
Bryce has a blog, and he's listed a lot of the tips and hints there that I will repeat.

• Invite everyone. Even if it's just for an hour... invite them. That's why you're friends with them on Facebook. The thing is...I know it feels like spam. It does. But the thing is I get invited to them all the time. I check to see who is going, and what time it is (I have a very narrow window for these things), and as an author, I check to see if any event spots are still open. So, if you are an author on Facebook and you have a takeover, invite everyone... especially if there are slots still open. You are helping other authors too that way!
• Prewrite the segments you are going to go over. Have them in a separate document ready to go. I usually attach a picture to them when I post them so I know which is which when I see the pop-ups. Write an introduction, A THANK YOU FOR THE AUTHOR HOSTING THE EVENT (we'll go more on that later), the segments for your book(s), have your excerpt ready to go, and another thank you. If you have it ready, it's much easier to simply copy and paste it.
• Pic out the books you are going to promote. If, like me, you have a lot... pick a couple series and stick with it. Focus on one or two things and it'll be more effective.
• If you are having a giveaway, be sure to keep track of who enters and whatnot... and make them DO SHIT for entering. Usually I have them give my author page a like. Other authors have them sign up for a mailing list (I don't have one yet, which is another thing I need to change, sigh). If they are not somehow helping you to promote yourself, don't do a giveaway. There are a couple of ways you can do it. The first is gifting through Amazon. This runs the chance they may take the money from the gift and buy something else. It's happened to me a couple times. However, if they don't, it does help with your book rank on Amazon. This also costs you money, so the second option is to email them a .mobi or .doc file of your book. This costs you nothing! As a bonus, if they have a kindle, you can send it directly to their kindle via their kindle email address.
• Don't forget to list all of your contact info: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. 
• PACE YOURSELF. You want to run a more or less constant stream of information, but not so much that it overwhelms the readers, especially when you post something long like an excerpt. Give yourself time between posts to respond to people who are posting on your stuff, and stay interactive!
• Bring people to the event. This goes back to inviting everyone. Even if it's just your BFF saying how awesome you are, it's good for people to see you being interactive and other people responding to that. The aim is to get people want to buy your book, so having friends in your corner cheering you on helps a lot.

Running an Event

• You have all day. After a while, it gets tedious, trust me. Don't sweat taking a break for a few minutes.
• At the same time, you need to be interactive. It's YOUR event. Ideally it's highlighting what you are doing or selling, and so people need to see you doing stuff and responding. Plus, it's nice to support the other authors, especially if they didn't bring people with them to the event. 
• Be prepared for people to be late or not show. I've seen people do "reverse takeovers" during an hour where an author didn't show up to some success, and I know Bryce has done a live writing event before that went over pretty well. If nothing else, you can talk about why you're there and sell your stuff, or maybe take questions until the author shows.
• Be sure to thank each author for showing up at the beginning and end of their hour, while you are introducing the next one. You don't HAVE to have a welcome and good bye pic, but it's good if you do.
• Prewrite any introductions you do make, just like for a takeover of your own. If you have them ready, you will be less prone to being scatterbrained. 
• Most of the author takeover stuff listed above also applies here to an extent. 

I don't know if anyone will read this and find this useful, but these are things I've found. And I can't stress enough that I learned everything I did by either learning from Bryce, or just doing it, but mostly the first. Ask questions of other authors you know, and find out what works for them so you can create your own style!

Talent Versus Popularity

It's been a while since I wrote (and these are words which will count towards my Nano total! Nyah!) and this post has been lingering in the back of my mind for a while. When it comes to success, what is better? Talent or popularity?

Obviously, the key here is to define what "success" means to you. If being successful means making lots of money, then it's hands down popularity. If you're not popular, you will not make money. Ergo... popularity wins.

If being successful means being fulfilled personally, then I think talent would win... but only by a narrow margin. After all, it's good to read something of yours and think, "Wow, that's really good." But it's pretty fulfilling knowing that people bought and read something YOU made. It validates your time expenditure.

If being successful means critical success, ie good reviews? Then definitely talent. There are some talented as fuck writers out there who aren't making money, yet all of their reviews are glowing... and they aren't even bought reviews either! That sort of writer writes because they want to put something enjoyable to read out into the world.

For me, personally, being successful is a bit of all three. I write because it makes me happy, which fulfills me personally. I would also love to make money and be a critical success, heh. Who wouldn't want all three? The most important part of that equation is simply being happy to write though. I would be writing anyway, regardless if I got paid for it or not. Getting paid and having other people enjoy my stuff is like icing on an already delicious cake.

Really, I know this is a pretty small blog post... but it was an easy question to ask and answer. I think each writer needs to define why they write, and what would make them a success in their own eyes. Becoming popular or talented, now that's another story altogether. Talent takes work, a lot of hard, eye gouging work. But becoming popular takes a lot of dedication, especially on social media. You need to be "real" yet pimp your books, have to interact without getting personal. It's a weird thing.

I may do some more thinking on this, but that's all I've got for now. Still editing Prince of Cups. Will have another update soon.

Payback Isn't Always a Bitch

I suck at tweeting.

I mean, I really suck at social media in general. People can be weird and scary. You can meet some good peeps (I met my husband over the internet! I ordered him from Amazon. :P), and you can meet some bad peeps. So, when it comes to Twitter and Facebook and suchlike, I'm really bad at like... you know... returning the favor. I don't do bite sized info very well because I'm very verbose even when I'm not trying to be. Keeping things inside 144 characters is a lot to ask!

However, I do get a lot of retweets and shares on Facebook, especially from Bryce, Reed James, and Deanna Michaels, among others. So, how do I pay them back? That's an excellent question. It's even more excellent because I don't have a ton of followers, and those that I do are generally other authors. We'd discussed this in a prior blog post.

I do recall where I got really fucking thrilled about a random review of one of my books on a blog post though, and I was like, "Hey, I can do that!" I'd already groused to Bryce about the fact that every author does reviews and it's like nothing special, but you know what... it still kinda is. I mean, it was random. I didn't ask for the review, someone found it and reviewed it all by themselves. I didn't trade for it or nothing. That made it special, and that they seemed to enjoy it made it even more special.

So, yes, I am giving in and deciding that in order to help support other authors who support me, I will review their books. This could potentially be good and bad for them, because I'm a harsh reviewer. If I read something that's not in my kink though, I won't penalize them for that because that's not far. As the famous cartoon from Penny Arcade goes, "It's not FOR me." I can, however, critique the writing, spelling, punctuation, story, and overall construction even if I don't like what I'm reading. I'm also unbiased, mostly, because even bad reviews help erotica writers, believe it or not. I wish I could put the reviews on Amazon, but sadly they are attached to my real name account so in order to keep my cover, I gotta stick to here and Goodreads.

I've already done a couple of Bryce's and one of Reed's. I haven't decided whether or not to keep it on this blog or make another blog for it, but I am leaning towards keeping it on this one. Keeping all my erotica ducks in a row. Even if just one person reads a review and considers getting a book because of it, then I will have repaid the debt.

Plus, it's nice. I like being nice. Unless the book sucks ass in which case I will probably not be nice, but in the nicest non-nice way possible. Because I really fucking hate bad writing.

Arrrgh! Here be Pirates!

LOL. Ok, so emboldened by running into that review on accident (gonna be on Cloud Nine for days and days), I did an active search for my stuff... and it's out there. On pirate sites. XD

Now, I know I've really made it.

No, seriously! That means that someone either borrowed or bought it, liked it so much or had requests for it that they put whatever books up on a pirate site. I ... ooh, I should check Pirate Bay! ... DAMN. Not on Pirate Bay. Oh well. But still!

What should I do about it? Fuck it. Nothing. Why? People who go there pretty much aren't gonna buy 'em anyway. Second, I would spend all my fucking time ever sending emails and getting snippy with people demanding to take them down, and hey, it's free advertising. Honestly, I'm just happy someone reads the shit I write. I don't have the time or energy to chase down freebies. I took DRM OFF my books for that very reason. They're gonna pirate 'em anyway, and spread my name out there and give me free reads. Shit, I give out half my books for free anyway from time to time, so what the fuck do I care?

Now, if I saw someone saying it was THEIRS, I would go into holy shitfit mode. That's MY FUCKING WORDS, bishes! However, I see my name credited properly on all the pirate stuff, so I'm chill with it. I hope they get a few good ones off! Oooh, maybe... maybe.... I should write about cyber pirates. Hrm...

ReTweet THIS!

Another blog post, so quickly? OMG PERISH THE THOUGHT!

This is a different aspect of what's going on in my publishing world, though, so bear with me.

Retweeting is a great tool for indie authors to get the word out. It is! It's awesome! I will not lie here; I've absolutely used it, and only rarely retweeted back. There's a couple reasons for this, which might portray me as being greedy or selfish, but whatever.

1. I've only a handful of followers... who follow all the same people I pretty much do already, with a couple of exceptions. Most of my followers are other authors who already tweet their own work, often to the same circles I tweet to. Any more tweets, and it's just ... more chaos to the flow.
2. I generally only tweet a book once or twice, then call it good. I don't spam. I don't enjoy spam, so I don't do it. I DID spam for a couple of days to see where the sweet spot would be for advertising so I COULD tweet a book once and call it good, and then just promptly tweeted whenever a book was out, no matter what time of day it was. I'm not exactly a good self-promoter. And I apologized profusely for all those tweets, cause I felt bad spamming. 
3. I'm not on Twitter a lot. I check it once a day, if I remember. 
4. The sheer amount of stuff that goes across my Twitter feed is incredible. Like... really incredible. There's simply no way I COULD retweet all of that unless I set up an auto-reTweeter, which I won't do. Even for the "duplicate" Tweets I have, I type them all out cause ... I'm not sure why, but I do.
5. If I'm going to promote something, it's going to be something I've read and really fucking enjoyed. Promoting someone else's work is like putting your seal of approval on it, especially since it's coming from a person rather than a reTweet ring or something automated. I have so few reTweets because there's nothing I feel I can personally put a stamp of approval on... except for like... two. Two books I think. On Google plus I'm more than happy to share because that's an environment where repeat posts don't mean a whole lot but shares mean a fuckton, but on Twitter, it just gets lost in the spam. I would rather my word mean something than nothing. 

Don't give a shit if people call me selfish or whatever. That's not the point. If I had thousands of followers? Yeah, I'd probably be on Twitter more. I have... 33. I think. I'd probably be Tweeting a lot more. I'd probably be aces at self-promotion. I'm not though. I'm really, really not. I've set up a little corner, and I'm fine with it. I'm not a full time writer. This is a hobby, a side job, for me. My livelihood is not dependent on the money I bring in writing. I write other, non-erotica, things. I spend time with my husband and my friends. 

I really appreciate any reTweets I get, believe me I do, and I want to help out how I can... but again, most of the stuff that passes through my feed is already reTweeted to my same followers, or originated with them. I simply do not spend that much time online. Which is weird, now that I think on it, but I don't. That time I DO spend online is generally spent writing, because I write my stories in Google docs so I can go back and forth between work and home (when I get a free moment at work, that is) without wondering where I was. When I'm not writing, I'm researching about writing, or about what I'm writing about. 

If I became a full time writer? You bet I'd be more about the self-promotion and getting into groups and stuff! I would be all over that stuff! Sad truth is that I'm not, because it's a side thing for me. Writing is a side thing for a lot of authors, and they just don't have the time or resources to be all over it, nor have the money to hire a company or a publicist to do it for them. C'est la vie. Such is life.