Erock87
Regular Contributor
2/20 Update
Ahhh! Speed is a bonus, but only if you're ready for it. Wife and I were accelerating too much, so we had to pump the breaks a bit.
Right now we have resubmitted our initial book (Deviant Sister) that was flagged as adult for re-submittal. It has a new title (Deviant Desires), a new cover, and a re-worked description. We're optimistic.
I have emailed amazon about our "Forbidden Lusts" story that is currently listed as "Adult". Hope to hear back from them. And I can tell it's getting hit hard. I listed it free for a couple days two weeks ago when first released under its old (less exciting) cover, and it had 200ish downloads the first day. Earlier I checked, and with this brand new cover, re-worked blurb, and unfortunate "Adult" tag, it only had about 40 downloads the first day. Gives you an idea as the impact of the dreaded "Adult" tag that I can't seem to shake!
So let's start off with the good news.
I started this thread a little over a month ago, and I don't think I've lost any motivation or momentum. Through the month, we have edited approximately 6-7 stories (we're both editing stories now), and gone through a little over 90k words. This may not seem like much, but we're still juggling our full time careers and raising a baby (and he's so darned cute some times!). In addition to editing, we have set up a Facebook (which is a big deal to us...neither of us use that stuff), a twitter account (which I'm still trying to figure out - now I know how my parents feel when a new phone or something is released), a mailing list (which has a subscriber that isn't me or my wife!) and a website. While we have only made about 10 sales, it's 10 more sales than we had last month.
This weekend I am going to work on pulling down all my stories that refer to the old title (Deviant Sister) and re-work the channel page to the new title with updated links. I plan on doing this Saturday evening so that way all my stories are only down for one 12-hour period, and hopefully up by Sunday morning.
In fact, one of my stories I may keep down for the time being. It hasn't sold any copies yet, and it was supposed to be the first part of an erotic trilogy. The second installment I have in my inbox, and combined they are about 35k words. Adding in the 3rd installment should bring it near the 50k word mark, so I'm leaning towards just submitting it as one erotic novellas of about 50k words.
When we first started out, I remember writing down a plan with the wife, and mapping out how we'd be able to publish a book or two a week...each. While that may be feasible in the long run, right now we are focusing on building up some quality reads, and avoiding that adult flag. If we can keep up the pace of editing ~90k words per month (which is only 45k words each, about 1.5k words per day of editing/writing), which I think is feasible, then we would publish more than a million words per year.
Was our first month a success? Inconclusive. We sold a handful of books, we had some returns, we had some nice reviews with some bad reviews, we set up much of the promotional stuff, and we've made many mistakes. We purchased covers for all our books, then we went and re-purchased better covers for those same books. We've learnt expensive lessons...but they key is we're learning from them.
Our goal now is to sell more books in the next month, have more titles listed (and not have to worry about the darned Adult flag), and grow our brand. I have very high hopes for the story I have adopted right now (freelancer gave me a shoddy product of about 18k words, as of now it sits at 29k on my second edit through, and I can see it ending anywhere between 32 and 35k words). It may not be a best seller, but it's got a great cover, a great story, and will have a great blurb.
Thanks for the support folks - we'll keep moving along, and doing what we can.
Ahhh! Speed is a bonus, but only if you're ready for it. Wife and I were accelerating too much, so we had to pump the breaks a bit.
Right now we have resubmitted our initial book (Deviant Sister) that was flagged as adult for re-submittal. It has a new title (Deviant Desires), a new cover, and a re-worked description. We're optimistic.
I have emailed amazon about our "Forbidden Lusts" story that is currently listed as "Adult". Hope to hear back from them. And I can tell it's getting hit hard. I listed it free for a couple days two weeks ago when first released under its old (less exciting) cover, and it had 200ish downloads the first day. Earlier I checked, and with this brand new cover, re-worked blurb, and unfortunate "Adult" tag, it only had about 40 downloads the first day. Gives you an idea as the impact of the dreaded "Adult" tag that I can't seem to shake!
So let's start off with the good news.
I started this thread a little over a month ago, and I don't think I've lost any motivation or momentum. Through the month, we have edited approximately 6-7 stories (we're both editing stories now), and gone through a little over 90k words. This may not seem like much, but we're still juggling our full time careers and raising a baby (and he's so darned cute some times!). In addition to editing, we have set up a Facebook (which is a big deal to us...neither of us use that stuff), a twitter account (which I'm still trying to figure out - now I know how my parents feel when a new phone or something is released), a mailing list (which has a subscriber that isn't me or my wife!) and a website. While we have only made about 10 sales, it's 10 more sales than we had last month.
This weekend I am going to work on pulling down all my stories that refer to the old title (Deviant Sister) and re-work the channel page to the new title with updated links. I plan on doing this Saturday evening so that way all my stories are only down for one 12-hour period, and hopefully up by Sunday morning.
In fact, one of my stories I may keep down for the time being. It hasn't sold any copies yet, and it was supposed to be the first part of an erotic trilogy. The second installment I have in my inbox, and combined they are about 35k words. Adding in the 3rd installment should bring it near the 50k word mark, so I'm leaning towards just submitting it as one erotic novellas of about 50k words.
When we first started out, I remember writing down a plan with the wife, and mapping out how we'd be able to publish a book or two a week...each. While that may be feasible in the long run, right now we are focusing on building up some quality reads, and avoiding that adult flag. If we can keep up the pace of editing ~90k words per month (which is only 45k words each, about 1.5k words per day of editing/writing), which I think is feasible, then we would publish more than a million words per year.
Was our first month a success? Inconclusive. We sold a handful of books, we had some returns, we had some nice reviews with some bad reviews, we set up much of the promotional stuff, and we've made many mistakes. We purchased covers for all our books, then we went and re-purchased better covers for those same books. We've learnt expensive lessons...but they key is we're learning from them.
Our goal now is to sell more books in the next month, have more titles listed (and not have to worry about the darned Adult flag), and grow our brand. I have very high hopes for the story I have adopted right now (freelancer gave me a shoddy product of about 18k words, as of now it sits at 29k on my second edit through, and I can see it ending anywhere between 32 and 35k words). It may not be a best seller, but it's got a great cover, a great story, and will have a great blurb.
Thanks for the support folks - we'll keep moving along, and doing what we can.
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