Journey into the world of self-publishing

[ChickenHawk]

Thank you so much for these tips, I really appreciate the help!

You're so welcome!

About the cover art, here's a super-easy way to tell if a book was hit with the adult filter.
Go to this site: www.salesrankexpress.com, and plug in the author's name or the title of the book.
Aside from sales-rank, it will indicate whether or not a book has been flagged as adult. (If a book is rated "adult," you'll see the words ADULT in red capital letters next to the "content rating" field.) If you're wondering if your planned book pushes the boundaries too far, whether in the cover image, the writing, or the blurb, this would be a great way to get a handle on it.

One caution though... Depending on your Amazon settings, you might not even SEE the books that have been flagged as adult. So if you find (in Amazon) a book you think is pushing the boundaries, remember (in SalesRankExpress) to plug in the author's name, not the name of the title. Odds are decent that some of that author's books will be flagged, even if some have slipped through the cracks.

Looking at the book-covers you listed above, the top ones are definitely riskier. But it's a crap-shoot. If you plug in that author's name in the salesrankexpress Web site, you'll see that some, but not all, of her books are rated "Adult," even though the covers are pretty similar. If it were me, I probably wouldn't risk it by using artwork that explicit. But I see that she has her fans, so she's obviously doing something right. It's a risk-reward trade-off. It's also a matter of branding. If you're looking to make an erotica name for yourself, you might push the boundaries more than someone else who may, for example, want to trend more toward romance.

Of all the links you provided, I thought this book-cover was the safest, and oddly enough, the sexiest, even though it had no nudity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016NG7UDO/?tag=tff-amazonparser-20

I'm assuming words like "fu8Ked or nailed or rammed" would be considered too explicit and I would need to go for something more tame like "sleeping with the fireman or in his arms or something".

I agree! I've also heard that Amazon has some secret algo that analyzes your manuscript to determine if it's too adult. Like, maybe they only allow so many of those X-rated sexual words before you get slapped with the adult tag.

I'm assuming my catalog would need to be at least 12-20 books before I can see a decent cashflow come in?

Boy, I don't have a good handle on that, but hopefully some Fastlaners can chime in here? I'm following a different model, with full-length romance novels that include explicit sex, but aren't pure erotica. I don't have nearly that many books out, and have done well financially. But my books are a ton longer and more mainstream.

One neat thing... After you get the first one out there, you'll know a lot more. You'll see how your audience responds. You'll see how well your voice fits the genre. You'll hopefully get some reviews and feedback. That, along with the publishing experience, will put you far ahead of those who only think of going that far. It will be interesting to see how it goes!

 

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[Selfy]

Its a romance erotica, not purely erotica, although I would like to make the switch over to pure erotica later.
I haven't even thought about the title keywords yet nor have I come up with a book title yet
I'm assuming words like "fu8Ked or nailed or rammed" would be considered too explicit and I would need to go for something more tame like "sleeping with the fireman or in his arms or something".

My goal is to try and pump out at least 1 book a week if possible while still working at my job and eventually quit and then double that output and then start outsourcing it once my cashflow increases. I'm assuming my catalog would need to be at least 12-20 books before I can see a decent cashflow come in?

Yeah, rammed is too explicit. A good way to do it is look at your neighbors title and see how they did theirs.

About the catalog. No one can promise you 20 books is ok. Thing is, books die fast. Good thing is, readers have voracious appetite. It's about speed, imo. It will be formulaic. I know some Erotic authors pump a book per day, which is not hard to do.

Outsourcing - I don't think it's viable anymore long term. Will create more problems. Maybe if payouts were hundreds time higher like before then maybe. Bottom line is if u want this to be your fastlane.. You gotta write a lot and write fast.

Btw I'm talking about erotica - short and dirty (a place for practice) and converts to sales really fast and dies. @ChickenHawk is on a diff level with her long romance works -- which has a skill barrier if she's talking about series-- much harder to produce but is more lucrative long term.

 

[thunder_god]

Update:

I just published my first novella on kindle about an hour ago. Man was this a lot of work, but still I can't believe I went from just talking about writing a novella to actually creating an actual book in about a months time. The learning curve has been difficult and steep but I learned a lot through this process.

Things I accomplished:

1. I ended up using depositphotos for my photos. They have a new member trial where you can download up to 5 photos for free. I struggled looking for photos in my particular niche because there was not lot of photo options, both on this site as well as other popular stock photo sites. Also the models and photos that were available looked very amateurish and the models were not particularly very good looking. I had to improvise and just use the body and do a little magic with photoshop to convey the same idea. In the future, I will use my earnings from my book sales to get a subscription for either depositphotos or one of the more popular stock photo sites.

2. I designed my own book cover using photoshop. I was debating on whether or not I should hire someone just for ease of time and convenience but in the end decided to do it myself for two reasons. #1 I figured if I learned how to use photoshop this would be a life long skill that I now have and could potentially freelance to others in the future once I get more proficient at it. #2 I wanted to have more control over my book covers and also if I do outsource any work in the future, I can make the necessary modifications myself immediately instead of waiting 1-2 weeks before I receive the modifications back. I spent a little over a week learning the fundamentals of photoshop such as layers, masks, quick selection tool, content-aware, how to cut people out, or remove objects, blending, etc. A great investment I think.

3. Learned about the ins and outs of converting my word document into the mobi format using calibre. I spent several hours trying to figure this out because at my first attempt, my book was seriously messed up with all of the spacing being wrong. I'm going to create a template in word to help save me time from formatting in the future.

4. Had to do some research and learn how to write a good description for my book. I am in no way a great writer, but a novice at this, but I think my writing will improve with time as I do this more and more.

5. I had to do keyword research as well as selecting a particular genre in my niche. I hope what I selected was a good choice.

6. Signed up for MailCheat(Chimp) and created a mailing list and attached it my book. I also created a facebook author page as well which I will utilize in the future for marketing purposes.

I decided to enroll my book in the KDP Select to get more exposure and to build up my mailing list. I also priced my book at 0.99 just to start getting some sales and to hopefully increase my rank. Once I start getting some sales I'm going to switch it to $2.99.

I think now that I've produced my first book and learnt all these things, I can produce my second book in half the time, and even less for subsequent books. I think for my next book I'll just switch to erotica instead of romance and tone down the length to 5000 words. I want to test out several different niches and see which ones sticks and which ones don't.

That's all for now, I'm going to get started on my second book tomorrow.

 

[ChickenHawk]

I just published my first novella on kindle about an hour ago.

Congrats! Wow, looking at that list, you've made some amazing progress -- writing, cover-designing, formatting, and more. It's funny how much you can learn by actually doing something. Even if you end up farming some of this out in the future, the experience should serve you really well.

 

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[Omni]

@thunder_god great progress! For depositphotos, instead of a subscription, I typically grab this appsumo deal ($39 for 100 photos) that happens once a year
http://www.appsumo.com/depositphotos-2016/

 

[thunder_god]

@thunder_god great progress! For depositphotos, instead of a subscription, I typically grab this appsumo deal ($39 for 100 photos) that happens once a year
http://www.appsumo.com/depositphotos-2016/

Funny you should mention this, I just purchased the exact same pack from appsumo like 5 minutes ago haha. This will last me a while now. Hopefully I can make back my investment soon.
I also found a great site for grabbing background images for free that has a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license meaning you can use it without attribution and on commericial works as well https://www.pexels.com/.

 

[thunder_god]

Update: Its been about 1.5 weeks since my book went live. I didn't know what the heck I was doing at first, and just used 2 of the 5 free days in KDP select. Surprisingly I got 1 sale right off the bat before my book became free. I got 37 free downloads and then I started to see sales averaging around 1 a day when I priced my first book in the series at 0.99 cents. So far I have sold 12 copies. I wasn't expecting much and I was just glad to be making a few sales. Last night I went to check on my progress and I noticed I got a 2 star review on amazon, my first review. The comment was very hurtful. They said my book was too short wtf (it clearly says the number of pages on the description plus I wrote 12,000 words which was above the industry average of between 5000-10000 words) and that their was too much sex in it. I thought erotic novels are suppose to have a lot of sex it, even based on my cover and description, its pretty obvious that was what they were going to get. They also said that my plot was weak and their was no connection between the characters, fair enough. It was my first time writing a book of this length and I still have a lot to learn regarding character development. Anyways it totally killed my mood and confidence. Since receiving that 2 star review, I haven't gotten a single sale and also my pages read from the KDP select program has declined drastically as well. I think this review ruined my book sales.

I also managed to publish another 10k book in a different niche to explore other potential niches but I have yet to get a single sale on it. The book was published on friday evening. I'm using a different pen name for this one. I'm contemplating whether or not I should make this book free for 2 days. I have about 1900 or so pages read from the KDP select program as well from my first book.

For my next book, I'm planning to just jump into pure erotic and write a 5k book just to test the waters. Then I will go back and write the second book in the series to my first book.

I think for my pricing strategy, I will price all of my first books in a series at 0.99 instead of free and then price subsequent titles in the series at $2.99 and then package it between $5-9.99 based on the number of books in a set.

I also submitted my books to two facebook groups for new erotic releases to help for marketing but the owners of the pages, never even advertised my books on facebook. I think they are just picking and choosing what they want to advertise.

I'm going to have to start writing and publishing faster if I hope to turn things around.

Summary:
sold 12 books so far from first book at .99 cents
37 free downloads of book based on 2 day free book promo
About 1900 pages read from KDP select
Received a bad 2 star review that potentially killed my sales
Published second 10k book on friday
No sales yet on second book when priced at .99 cents
Now planning out outline for third 5k erotic book

 

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[tsupreme]

Is publishing an ebook free on Amazon? I know you have to spend money to make a cover, but does posting the book for sale come with a fee?

 

[ChickenHawk]

Is publishing an ebook free on Amazon? I know you have to spend money to make a cover, but does posting the book for sale come with a fee?

Happily, it's free to publish an ebook on Amazon. (At least for now. )

Amazon makes their money by keeping a percentage of every sale. Hope this helps!

 

[tsupreme]

Happily, it's free to publish an ebook on Amazon. (At least for now. )

Amazon makes their money by keeping a percentage of every sale. Hope this helps!

Helps a lot. Thanks!

 

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[Aisha]

Great to hear your progress! I've been devouring the threads in the Self-Publishing section in the last few days. I hadn't even thought about trying writing as my ticket to the fastlane but now, after reading stories like this, it makes me feel like I should really give it a shot. You mentioned calibre giving you formatting issues, in Held for Ransom's post he mentioned using this site: http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsCreator.asp for creating his ebooks. Maybe you will have more success using it as well. Anyway, I look forward to your updates mostly because the other threads were started back in 2013-14 and I love seeing how relevant or not some of the information is now that the self publishing game has changed with Amazon's new features.

 

[thunder_god]

Update:
Sorry for the lack of an update. I've been busy dealing with some stuff from my BS job and my parents hounding at me for not getting a regular office job like everyone else.

I thought I would update this thread as soon as I published my fourth book but its taken a lot longer than I would have liked.

I just published my fourth book last night and also fixed some grammar mistakes for my first book and rewrote the blurb for my second book today.

Details:
Book 1: I've made about $25 off of this book. I thought it was crap but people keep on buying it so go figure. About 95% of my sales come from this book.
Book 2: I've only sold 1 copy of this book.
Book 3: Complete failure. A 5k science fiction erotic short story. I didn't get a single sale on it and only got 30 page reads. I thought the cover was one of my best ones to date and I also spent a lot of time writing the blurb.
Book 4 (12k erotic romance) : the second book in the series of my first book. I'll see how this does. I added a link at the back of the book linking to my first book and will add a link to my first book as soon as Amazon publishes it on their website. I priced it at 0.99 for the first 1- 2 weeks and then will increase it to 2.99 and see how it will effect my sales.

Total earnings for my first month is about: $27

Not exactly fastlane but I'm still learning the ropes and lost my momentum after publishing my 3rd book. Hopefully this number improves a lot in the future.

For my 5th book I think I will try and write a 5k erotic book related to the bestsellers in my niches. I want to see if their is still demand writing 5k books or if I'm just wasting my time. For my 6th book I'm going to write the final book in my series and then package it as a boxset. I'm actually considering making the switch to a full length novel in the near future once I get a lot better at writing. Right now I feel my dialogue is kind of boring, although I have made some improvements on it. My story's has also improved thanks to using an outline but I feel there is still much more room for improvement as well. I'll probably tone down on the sex unless its a pure erotic novel and instead focus more on story development, character development as well as connection/chemistry between the hero and heroine in my stories.
Lastly I need to write faster, and spend more of my day doing this instead of putting my time into planning lessons for my shitty job which I plan on quitting in 2.5 months from now.

Lessons learned.
1. Not a good idea to have 3 pen names right away when first starting out. Also I probably should have continued writing the books with my original pen name since my first book made the most sales, but I didn't want to be dependent on that one niche in case it wasn't profitable.
2. I should spend a good amount of time on my blurb and not rush it. I had to redo two of my blurbs because I didn't spend enough time on it.
3. Try to grab reader's attention on the first couple of pages to entice them to buy the book.
4. Don't waste time on social media with your pen names, its better to just write and release more books
5. Finish writing a series unless there's no demand for it

 

[thunder_god]

Great to hear your progress! I've been devouring the threads in the Self-Publishing section in the last few days. I hadn't even thought about trying writing as my ticket to the fastlane but now, after reading stories like this, it makes me feel like I should really give it a shot. You mentioned calibre giving you formatting issues, in Held for Ransom's post he mentioned using this site: http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsCreator.asp for creating his ebooks. Maybe you will have more success using it as well. Anyway, I look forward to your updates mostly because the other threads were started back in 2013-14 and I love seeing how relevant or not some of the information is now that the self publishing game has changed with Amazon's new features.

You should definitely give it a try and see how it goes. You never know until you try!
As for calibre giving me issues, they are just a few minor issues like having the spacing between the sentences and text either a bit too close or too far. I've ironed most of the issues out already so I don't foresee it consuming a lot of my time.

I've heard from others that writing erotic romance is kind of dead now and romance is where the money is but writing romance is a whole different ballgame and the readers have way higher expectations compared to erotica. I plan on making the switch to writing a 60k novel in the near future (maybe 6 months from now).

 

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[thunder_god]

Update:

I published my 5th book today under my second pen name. I think I'm going to just stick to publishing with my first pen name until I get about 10-12 titles out because I've made 95+ of my money from that first pen name.
My 4th book that I published about a week ago was doing relatively well. I was selling about 2-3 books a day, but then suddenly I noticed for the past 3 days I haven't sold a single copy and my KENP page reads has gone down drastically. It's frustrating and disheartening. I'm not sure why there is such a huge dip. I expected a drop to happen around the 3-4 week mark but not after only 1 week. I'm not sure what sort of strategies to try at this point other then to just keep on pumping books.

My total earnings to date is about $40USD which is really bad. About 99% of that is from my 1st and 4th book. My fourth book made about 50% of my profits after only being out for 1 week vs my 1st book which has been out for about 5-6 weeks now. I'm going to write the 3rd book in series now and then package it as a boxset.

Does anyone add chapters into boxsets for each book or do you just slap all 3 books onto the file and then link it to each book without chapters? I'm not sure what is the correct way of formatting for boxsets.