Dalia Daudelin - How to Really Self-Publish Erotica: The Truth About Kinks, Covers, Advertising and More!

How to Really Self-Publish Erotica

The Truth About Kinks, Covers, Advertising and More!

Dalia Daudelin

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Process of Writing

The Process of Selling

Fetishes

Cover Design

Formatting

Closing Remarks

Appendix:

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Why You Should Write Erotica

The thing most people want in life is to make a lot of money for fairly little work. Thats not exactly what this is, but its damned close. If you want a reason to write erotica, theres none better.

After the success of Fifty Shades of Gray , the market exploded. A lot of people got very famous very quickly, and made a lot of money. Delilah Fawkes, for instance, was making six figures within a year. That was the gold rush, when people realized there was money to be made, gold in them hills as it were. And flock to it they did.

The gold rush, Im sorry to say, is over. You wont be getting rich. Youll probably be making less than full time at minimum wage, honestly, for a long time. Months. I wouldnt quit your job and buy your dream house until you know you can sustain it.

But honestly, thats good financial advice. I have had a few troubles in my career, which began in June 2012 (a little over a year ago as of the writing) and I made as much as 2,000 a month during that time, in spite of bad reviews and the fact that most of the information in this book wasnt handed to me.

Of course, some wasI am not a pioneer. I walked a path that was fairly well-beaten, after the end of the gold rush. I had a wealth of information at my fingertips on the web, but at the same time so much information needed to come from practical experience and having done it ten, fifty, a hundred times.

If youve got a lucrative career, it might not seem like much. But frankly, I got out of high school with a 2.8 GPA, and no prospects for college. I worked for a year or two at a CVS, worked for three months at a Subway. In that time, I didnt make anywhere near what I have made in my time writing. And the job prospects just werent coming either. I didnt have any friends in high places whispering in the right ears, I didnt know how to get people to just give me a chance, so it took me more than a year to get a job at all.

To me, after that, writing was a lifeline, and I appreciate iteven if Im not going to be making $10,000 a month any time soon.

And whats more, the hours are short. Most writers, especially traditional writers, only write 2,000 words a day. Of course, working writers can turn the juice on and kick out 10,000 words a day or more. They CAN, but they rarely do so, because quite frankly its very, very taxing. Ill get to that later, to a degree.

However, what that means on the other hand is that you have 3 or 4 hours of work a day, or less. That leaves quite a few hours for going to the gym, spending time with the kids, browsing the web, catching up on your TV showsyou name it. Imagine if your commute time was zero, and you only worked a half-shift every single day. You can still take time off, of course.

Then of course you have the side benefits. Youll have experience writing. Everyone likes to say, I have an idea for a novel; maybe someday. Frankly, they arent going to write it. They dont know how to buckle down and get past the fact that their writing all seems to be coming out wrong. And when that happens, what are they going to do with their novel? Send it off to the Big Six and get turned down, or maybe offered a contract for half what its worth?

You will know how to get a story out there without any publisher taking a chunk of your money. Youll know how to push through the jittery starts and the bad days. And hell: maybe at the end of the day, when youre done with your erotica and you decide youve got an idea for a novel and you write it, maybe HarperCollins sends you an email telling you that theyre real interested in the novel you published by yourself, would you like a deal to get it onto a shelf in Barnes and Noble. And along with that comes a nice fat check. Then you can say yes, if you like. Thats the dream, anyways.

What You Should Know (or, Why You Shouldn't Write Erotica)

The first thing that most people do when they start a new project is brag about it. For most people, thats just not going to happen for you. In fact, youll probably spend a lot of your time avoiding talking in specifics about what you do.

The conversation seems to go like this:

Them: What do you do?

You: Oh, Im a writer.

Them: Thats cool! What do you write about ?

Thats when you suddenly realize that you write about the nastiest sex you can find, and theres no way in hell you want people you know reading it. Get your own preferred answer ready and get used to giving it. Mine is its nothing worth reading, but people pay for it, so it works.

Second, get used to the idea that youre never working hard enough. Theres no real direct correlation between how much you write in a given day and how much money you make, but there IS a correlation between how many stories you have and your sales numbers. That means that in an ideal world, youd be working 10 hours a day, writing 3000 words an hour or more. But you probably cant do that, nobody can.

Your limit isnt going to be the hours in the day any more, like it is in so many other jobs. Its going to primarily be your ability to focus on the task at hand. In an office job, theres a lot of making calls and talking to people, gathering information, etc. Once you get a knack for it, you can do it almost without thinking. Writers dont have any step on the line that isnt essentially thinking.

You have to constantly be thinking about your word choice. You have to constantly be deciding where you want your story to go if its not outlined in advance. As much as everyone likes to talk a big game on outlines, when youre in the trenches things dont always go your way, so thatll be more often than you like.

And whats more, what makes it ugly, is that when youre tired and you cant focus and you know in your head that your writing is suffering and you need to stop for the dayyoull have a little voice in your head (or a little external voice, sometimes!) pointing out that youre kicking off early. You could be working harder.

And then, at the end of the day, youre on the phone trying to explain to your sister in the least-specific words possible that you write nondescript fiction under a pen-name you dont care to mention, as if youre dealing drugs or something.

Lastly, be prepared for summer. In the publishing industry as a whole, including traditional big publishers like Random House as well as indie writers like myself and eventually you, regardless of genre, summer is a bad sales period. Your first summer, especially, is going to be demoralizing. The months I mentioned where Ive made $2000? I made $1,000 last month. Its a damn lucky thing that Im not reliant on publishing money to pay the rent at this point, Ill say that.

But its not just the incredible drops in money that you should expect. The thing that summer really does is demoralize you. You think, maybe it was a fluke, the readers dont like me anymore. A lot of writers quit because of bad sales, or panic. They need to be told: People dont buy books, or eBooks, in the summer. Its not you. Its the business.

But againdont misunderstand me here. The moneys fairly good, and the limits of your ability to be on and ready to work means youre probably going to be working less than 3 hours a day. All that comes at a cost, though, and I dont want to sound like it doesnt.

Principals in This Book

The first consideration, before you can discuss what to do is trying to figure out what your idea of success is, and trying to picture that in as specific a way as possible. The ultimate goal is to make enough money to keep your landlord happy, put food on the table, and have some left over at the end of the month to do something with. If you work hard, and you see sales, youll see people who like the work you did.