Jean Marie Stine | Write Sex

KINDLE – WHY IT ROSE, WHY IT MAY FALL

May 242012

In mid-2008 the four biggest distributors of our ebooks, the four who sold the most copies every month for us, each accounted for about 20% of our overall sales, while a misc. of smaller sites made up the remaining 20%. These four sites were:

* Distributor A (long established with one of the best and most reader friendly ebook sites),

* Our own website

* Kindle (then less than a year old)

* Distributor Z (who had until Kindle the best, if priciest, ereader)

Today things are dramatically different. One distributor now dominates the ebook business, and its rise has drained sales from most competitors, who experienced a sharp decline in sales. Here is the approximate percentage of our ebook sales which each of our current distributors accounts for:

*Kindle = grew to 70%

* B&N = grew to 18% (did not exist mid-2008)

* Distributor A= declined to 3%

* Our own website = declined to 4%

* Distributor Z = declined to 3%

* (Misc. small sites = declined to 2%)

What is the reason for this amazing redistribution of sales to a single ebook distributor? Not the Kindle itself. The original, and still basic black and white, Kindle was neither the best nor the cheapest of the ereaders.

What made the Kindle so special was one major sales innovation: 24/7 instant wireless delivery of your ebook to your Kindle, almost anywhere in the world you were. Amazon had it, and had deep enough pockets to afford to have purchased dedicated space on ATT three-sixty-five.

To download your ebooks from other sites after ordering them, you had to connect a USB cord to both your pc and your ebookreder, and then click on various icons, and then copy and paste the books from one folder to another, and then click “safely remove hardware,” and then uncouple the pc and reader, and finally turn on the reader and locate your new books, and only then were you, at last,ready to begin reading. Compare that to clicking the Buy button at Amazon and Bam! there’s the book in your reader. (B&N gave you instant wireless delivery, but only if you drove to the store and downloaded your ebooks there!!)

That’s how, from the moment it was out of the starting gate, Kindle left its competitors in the dust.

Over the next three and a half years they became THE market for ebooks. They were the 600 pound gorilla in the cage. They dictated terms and authors and publishers took it, because without them there weren’t enough sales to keep anyone afloat.

But last year Barnes & Noble, and the once laughable Kobo, acquired deep pockets and initiated their own 2/7 instant wireless ebook delivery systems, just in time for the holiday selling season. Meanwhile, Sony which had had deep enough pockets to afford to lease cell time three-sixty-five like Kindle, had been caught flatfooted by the idea of wireless delivery. They had to take the time to develop and test their own wireless ebookreader, losing more than two years in the process, which they also launched at the holiday season.

So for the first time the Kindle has rivals who also offer wireless delivery straight to your ereader, and could cut into Amazon’s ebook sales. A lot of people, including readers, have indicated their displeasure with Amazon over the years. They could lead an exodus.

On the other hand, it might be too late for Amazon’s rivals to catch much in the way of future ebook and ebookreader sales. After all, Amazon has already sold so many Kindles of so many types at such low prices that everyone interested in reading ebooks may already be said to own one. Why switch? Better yet, as far as Amazon is concerned, is the fact that they started as a bookstore, are still the web’s largest and most complete bookstore, and offer the convenience of one-stop purchasing for both paperbound and ebooks. That’s something Sony and Kobo will never be able to do. Only B&N seems to truly have a chance in this arena, and Amazon still has the lead, as they carry far more ebooks than B&N.

However, none of this factors in in the rest of the English speaking world and Europe, where Amazon is not as big as it is here and the ball is still in play. For instance, Kobo has already partnered with the W. H. Smith, the U.K.’s largest book chain, to provide content for and run Smith’s ebookstore, while Smith sells the Kobo in its stores as its branded ereader. Meanwhile, Sony is opening ebookstores with various partners throughout Europe.

I guess we will know the results when we have the next three quarter’s sales reports in hand.

SHOULD YOU QUIT YOUR DAY JOB – AND WHAT IF SO WHAT SHOULD YOU WRITE?

Jean Marie Stine 7 Responses »

Aug 112011

Recently, a woman whose erotic stories have been widely anthologized wrote to say her day job was killing her, she needed to quit and write books for a living, and could I tell her what sold best these days? With a few changes, the following what I replied:

Could there be a worse time to need to write for money? I might have advised (nonerotic) scifi/fantasy or Harlequin a few years ago; they are the easiest sales to make to the big publishers and get nice advances, but the big publishers are all scrambling to catch up. Writing eBooks, certainly can earn some you money, but like all other publishing, the big sales are in categories, that’s because readers have their favorite categories and buy literally 90% of their books in that category or categories.

That said, grinding out category fiction can kill you.

And with any kind of books, it takes so long for royalties to mount up, because of systemic reporting problems. For example, we are too small to pay advances, and most distributors report sales to us at 30 days after the end of a month to 60 days to 120 days after. When we issue the Jan sales report in Feb, what it reflects, is not sales made in Jan, but sales we received reports of in Jan – which would be Nov., October, and even Sept sales. So when we pay royalties at the end of a quarter, they basically consist of 1/4 sales from the actual quarter, and 3/4 sales from the previous quarter.

Biggest sellers overall among ebooks: romance, erotica, success/self-help of all kinds.

Bestselling romance categories: erotic romance. Bestselling erotica categories: bondage and erotic romance. Bestselling subcategories: heterosexual erotic romance; male dom, female sub bondage from romance to pretty hard.

Then, to be one of the top sellers, it takes writing a lot of books and a very active and attractive website and/or blog with free stories, story samples, etc. (meaning contests, blog tours, and lots of other stuff). A good way to get an audience to your site/blog is post stories or hot scenes complete in themselves on Literotica.com, the free erotica website.

Our bestselling author, who writes strong bondage but often with romance, has written around 25 books over the last eight or so years, and currently earns about $28,000 through us. He works very hard to promote his books on the web.

Beyond this, everything is up in the air in publishing, sales and advances right now, with publishers in NY in a panic trying to figure out what the shape of publishing will be and what to sell. And a sinking economy. Of course, sex does sell, so there’s that.

Those are the basics, there are too many nuances to put in writing.

All the above notwithstanding, I always personally advise writers to write what they love.

Developing Your Creative Personality as a Writer Part II

Jean Marie Stine No Responses »

Jun 232011

Last time I had the blog we talked about developing a creative personality for the mind in writing short stories

Publishing the hottest in classic and current erotica and erotic romance

The following is a high-octane problem-buster that will make child’s play of even the hardest brain-stumpers and grind down to a manageable size even the most insurmountable dilemmas. It is a development of ideas pioneered by Tony Hodgson, and others.

It’s based on the well-established finding from psychological research that the more different perspectives we bring to a problem, the more ideas we are likely to generate and the more complete our perceptions of it.

You’ve heard of seeing the world through ‘rose-colored glasses’, which cause one to see only the sunny side of things.

Imagine the effect of seeing the world through ten different pairs of colored glasses — one for each hue in the rainbow (and each different spectrum of our mental processes).

Regardless of how difficult the dilemma, you’ll have found the answer long before you’ve tried on the tenth pair. By examining a challenging circumstance through each set of ‘colored glasses’ (each different mental perspective), we achieve a complete, rather than a partial, view, and engage our minds to consider it far more deeply.

Here are the TEN COLORS

*White – cognitive, the way our mind functions when we are learning, thinking, increasing knowledge or understanding.

* Grey – factual, the way our mind functions when we are absorbing information, scanning for important and critical data.

* Yellow – opportunistic, the way our mind works when we view possibilities from a sunny cheerful, optimistic, positive point of view, and see how we can capitalize on and make the best of events and situations around us.

* Black – critical, the way our mind functions when we are serious, skeptical, analytic, seeing the potential problems on the road ahead.

* Green – creative, the way our mind functions when it sends up the shoots of fresh, new imaginative, creative, innovative new ideas.

* Brown – practical, the way our mind things when we are being down to earth, thinking things through logically, incrementally, objectively, within existing systems and assumptions.

* Blue – holistic, the way our minds work when we are looking at the big picture and engaged in strategic planning.

* Orange -molecular, the way our mind works when we are attempting to throw light on the individual parts of something, either to identify or place them.

* Violet – directive, the way our mind works when we are thinking about crucial aims, objectives, decisions, when we have arrived at a turning point or crossroads, and have to make a gut-level choice about what it is we truly want.

* Red – Opinionated, the way our mind works when we are offering our own view or seeking the views of others, and either arguing our position, debating another, or melding the two together to achieve a greater understanding or consensus.

Next time we’ll cover the last lesson from me on Developing your Creativity

DEVELOPING YOUR CREATIVE PERSONALITY Part I

Jean Marie Stine No Responses »

May 052011

Clearly, if you are reading this and interested in writing erotica (or just writing) and have ideas about things you would like to write about, you have a creative personality.

Science has discovered everyone and anyone can be creative. Creativity has nothing to do with IQ. We all have creative elements in our personality.

Psychology has delineated eight characteristics shared by most creative, problem-solving people. Amazingly enough, all these personality traits are cultivable skills anyone can develop.

According to creativity maven Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, former Chair of the University Of Chicago Psychology Department, his research revealed that creative people possess the following paradoxical matchings of traits. They are:

1. Smart yet naive

2. Playful yet disciplined

3. Imaginative yet realistic

4. Extroverted yet introverted

5. Humble yet proud

6. Passionate yet objective

7. Iconoclastic yet traditional

8. Experiencers of both intense pleasure and intense pain

9. In touch with their female side and their male side

These nine characteristics are the key personality components that engender creativity. As a writer you likely recognize a majority of these in your own personality.

Csikszentmihalyi’s research also suggested it is possible for people with creative personalities to increase these elements, and hence increase their own native creativity,

If there are times when you are stuck on plot, scenes or character actions and reactions, if there are times when you run out of ideas, or have ideas you can’t seem to make gel, you might give the three exercises that follow a try. These exercises can help you develop the nine qualities listed above and make you a more creative person than you may have dreamed you could be. They will not only help you solve problems with plot, structure, and characters but will enhance the creative side of your personality.

CREATIVE PERSONALITY EXERCISES

1. FROM MENTAL ZERO TO 60 IN SIXTY SECONDS

People often say, it’s a hopeless. My mind has gone completely blank. I can’t think of a thing. They want to know how to get their brain in gear, when it is worn-out, clouded, or simply won’t start.

The following three step strategy was developed for my workshops. No matter how blank your mind feels, it is guaranteed to catapult your brain from Zero to Sixty in half-a minute or less.

Step 1: Eliminate mental static.

Step 2: Focus on the problem.

Step 3: Ask yourself the following pairs of questions:

1. Ask yourself, what are the key issues?

2. Ask yourself, what seems most trivial?

3. Ask yourself, what aspects of it you feel positive about?

4. Ask yourself, what aspects of it you feel negative about?

5. Ask yourself, what seems to be the biggest obstacle?

6. Ask yourself, what seems to be the smallest obstacle?

7. Ask yourself, what aspects seem most confusing?

8. Ask yourself, what seems clearest?

9. Ask yourself, if there is any important fact you have a nagging question about?

10. Ask yourself, what facts you are most certain of?

11. Ask yourself, what’s the best result you can imagine?

12. Ask yourself, what’s the worst?

By the time most people are even part way down this list, their minds have caught fire and they are already generating ideas, possibilities, and solutions. When it’s my turn again to share the blog we’ll begin to delve deeper into the mindset and examine color schemes of creativity and how child’s play can really bring out the creative person in you.

PSEUDONYMS: WHEN TO AND WHEN NOT TO

Jean Marie Stine, Write Sex 4 Responses »

Jan 282011

WHEN NOT TO USE A PSEUDONYM AND WHY

When Bjo Trimble (justly famed as the “woman who saved Star Trek”) advised author and editor Ted White that she was thinking of using a pseudonym on a science fiction novel she was writing, told her bluntly, “Don’t. An author’s name is his or her stock in trade. It is what you want readers to be thinking of when they are at a bookstore looking for a book to read. The easier you make it for them to associate the name with a real person, the easier you make it for them to remember the name in the future.”

Ted White, then, was all for a writer using their real name rather than a pen name that would conceal their identity. It seems to work. When I go to the bookstore these days I am looking for Cathy Reichs, James Lee Burke, or the new Peter Robinson. All are real people with real names.

There are notable exceptions to this rule. Mark Twain, for instance. But there is not much confusion. Mark Twain lived so much of his life openly as Twain, that I would not be surprise if you, too, didn’t think of him first as Twain and then as Clements.

Clearly, this is not an absolute rule. None is. There exceptions. But consider carefully before deciding to make exceptions. Nothing less than your future writing career is at stake.

Consider: Suppose you create a pseudonym and then after writing several books change your mind and decide to come out as yourself and start writing books under your own name. Unless you are writing a completely different type of book now and will not be appealing to your former readers, you will lose some large percentage of your original audience, the one you developed for your pseudonym, and never gain it back. Changing horses in midstream like this is counterindicated.

WHEN TO USE A PSEUDONYM

There are three major justifications for using a pseudonym, when it may be and probably is to your advantage to hide your identity behind a made up name.

The first is that using your real name on something tgat could cost your job or customers – in short income. You could be writing a series of thinly disguised books about real people you know or work with, who would fire you or stop patronizing your business if you published it under your own name. Or, it might be works that exposed secrets of, or made fun of, your industry, job, or profession, where the results would be the same. For that matter, if you are in a profession that takes it self seriously, like banking or academe, and you seem to be writing what your bosses and colleagues consider frivolous, like pulpish mystery thrillers, it could be seen as lowering your gravitas, and you might find yourself eased out the door. Or some other variant where putting your name on the book would place you in serious jeopardy of serious financial loss.

The second major justification for employing a pseudonym rather than your actual moniker is that it would cost you friends or loved ones. This is almost always a case where you are writing about friends, family and acquaintances, and presenting things they have said and done that are embarrassing, unattractive, or that even show them in a very bad light. Things that if written under your own name, and read by mutual acquaintances, would very likely lead to the person you were describing being recognized by everyone, causing the subject of the piece humiliation and likely generate furious anger at you as well.

The third is that you are writing something so inflammatory that that it might put you in danger of losing both job/income and your family/friends. These days that often comes down to erotica. Writers living in small towns, or whose friends, families and associates are conservative in bent, are making s sensible choice when they put a pseudonym on their works. Of course, in a sophisticated city like San Francisco or New York, the effect might be the reverse, and being known as someone who writes erotica may enhance the luster of one’s reputation. Whatever the reason, today, unlike the 1960s and 1970s, many authors proudly put their own names on their erotica.

Sometimes writers producing stories and books on more than one genre will use their true names for books in one genre and a pseudonym on books intended for a different genre. At one time it was considered that if a person was going to write mysteries, and say westerns, that mystery readers would avoid books by someone who also wrote westerns because they would think the author was not really serious about mysteries. And that readers of westerns would disdain anyone who wrote contemporary mysteries with urban settings because they would feel that a writer who could do that well could not possibly capture the authentic feel of the old west. Today, however, that seems to be changing. Increasingly, readers seem willing to accept what are called crossgenre writers, who excel at producing stories of more than one type. Elmo Leonard is accepted as both a western writer and a mystery novelist, while a number of major fantasy novelists are also accepted as authors of credible, realistic mysteries.

I will have a few words to say about choosing pseudonyms in my next post.

TITLES

Jean Marie Stine, Write Sex No Responses »

Oct 152010

How important are titles? I hear this question at almost every writing workshop or panel I attend.

The answer is that titles are very important for books. Would you have ever wanted to read “Two Mules in Harness”? Or see the movie. Luckily, Margret Mitchell changed the title of her book to “Gone with the Wind” – a much more romantic and intriguing title. What is gone with the wind?, potential readers are likely to ask themselves.

Then there was the book about women who were daughters of alcoholics who fell in love with men who turned out to be alcoholics. All these women were obsessed with their men and would do anything for them and take any form of abuse from them. Publisher Jeremy Tarcher read the ms, and felt that the idea of women who would do anything and take any form of abuse was much larger and would appeal to a much larger audience than a book just about women with alcoholic fathers who chose men like dad. He put the author through six drafts (paying her extra to do it) and retitled the book “Women who Love too Much.” And since there is hardly a woman [or man] who doesn’t feel she loved too much at least once in her life, the book became a must have as millions of women wanted to know why they acted like that and how they could stop.

In case you don’t get the urge to purchase “Trimalchio in West Egg,” you may be surprised to learn that you have probably read it, or seen the movie, and may even have a copy of “The Great Gatsby” on your bookshelves.

Some titles practically guarantee big sales. Consider these titles, for instance, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but were Afraid to Ask” and “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Or these recent novels “Angels and Demons,” “Rich Man, Poor Man.”

Titles can make or break a book. Because the title is often the first thing someone learns about a book. If it is captivating or compelling or raises a powerful question in the reader’s mind or makes a promise, one is more likely to pause and consider the book and that is 2/3s of selling a book to a reader right there.

A good title with a bit of sizzle or sell to it even makes it easier to find a publisher for a book. They know that if the title catches their interest, it is likely to catch a reader’s interest as well.

Alright, you may be saying, it makes sense that dreaming up a good title is important if you are writing a book, but is a great title essential for a short story?

Well, no, in the sense of selling it. But, yes, in another sense. Let me explain.

If your story appears in an anthology or magazine, it is the title of that anthology or magazine that will impact and hopefully sell the general public.

So in that sense, the title of your story doesn’t need to be great to sell an editor, because the title of any one story will not have any impact on the public buying the publication it is in. The perceived quality of the story is what sells the editor. If a story for an anthology is good, you can call it something as pedestrian as “Lesbian Encounter” or “Gay Story” and an editor will take it. And if they are busy and fighting deadlines, they may never think to retitle it.

On the other hand, if you want your story or stories to be remembered, don’t just make them memorable, because people often remember really good stories they read, but if the title wasn’t memorable, can’t recall it. In the long run, giving your story a memorable title may even earn you additional sales, as anthologists may remember it when looking for stories to reprint.

Harlan Ellison could have called his story “The Rebel” and any scifi editor would have been happy to buy it. But readers remembered the story forever, and it was remembered well enough to be nominated for and win awards, when he titled it “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Tick-tock Man.” He scored another title bullseye when he came up with “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”

Or Richard O’Connell could have titled his story “Choice,” but who can forget “The Lady or the Tiger?”

As for Fitzgerald, who having heard it once can forget the title, “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz.”

So if you want your work to live and be remembered a cool, stick in the mind title will take a good story a long way toward immortality.

No matter how you look at it, or what the media, a good title is a good idea, and a necessity over all. It might not be essential for selling the story the first time, but it might go a long way toward helping sell it again. And again. And again.

Writer’s Block

Jean Marie Stine, Write Sex 4 Responses »

Jul 162010

Sometimes you sit down to write, and you can’t think of a thing. Or what you do think of is so obviously poor it isn’t worth pursuing. If you have a deadline, or even if you are just wanting to write something for your own amusement, this can be panic inducing. In the first case because you need the money, and in the second because being a writer (someone who is able to write) is part of your self definition. If you can’t write, you may wonder, how can you think of yourself as a writer?

The not-so technical term for this is, of course, writer’s block.

This is a phenomenon that seem to affect authors primarily, although it can also be a problem for artists of other types, particularly commercial artists working against deadlines.

It doesn’t seem to be a concern for members of the general population at all. After all, you never heard of “plumber’s block” or “soccer block” or “grocery shopping block” or even “management block”, did you?

Even the most productive writers are not immune. One of the jokes among science fiction writers in the late 1950s involved Robert Silverberg, author of mysteries, science fiction, non-fiction, erotica and much much more. He could turn out a novel in three days and a short story in an afternoon, and turned out such a flood of copy that for a while he was more productive than Georges Simone or Isaac Asimov (look them up if you don’t know).

At one convention I overheard authors discussing his productivity (and income) enviously, particularly several suffering from writer’s block. “It’s not all fun and games for Bob,” one wit interjected. “He had writer’s block, too!” the man paused for effect. “Last Tuesday from 11 a.m. till noon!” We groaned.

Although that was a joke, Bob did suffer from writer’s block much later in his career, feeling written out. But, predictably, he recovered and turned out several dozen more books. (Worse, not only was he prodigal, he was good, winning many awards.)

I am not going to discuss here the causes of writer’s block. It has been written about extensively by authors and by psychologists.

What I propose to offer are some suggestions for getting the words and ideas flowing again when you are all dried up creatively from writer’s block. In short, you don’t have to wait until your block mystically lifts to begin writing again. You can put an end to it yourself and get back in the writing/word/thought-generating groove in a reasonably short time.

1) Do some routine housework, paperwork, or physical labor. Sometimes you can be trying to think of what to write so hard consciously that it blocks the words you are seeking from trying to emerge on their own from the unconscious. Doing routine tasks, even walking, that require you to put your focus on your body and something other than yourself, can clear the consicous of interfering concerns about writing, and allow the sentences and ideas you are seeking to enter your mind on their own.

2) Play music that stirs your emotions. Whether its rap, r&r, classical, show tunes, or whatever, listening to music that jazzes you helps to get your feelings flowing, and these feelings often begin to carry writing-type thoughts along with them. Such music stirrs the unconscious, the sea out of which creativity flows. It’s a right brain kind of thing.

3) Find an image, maybe a photograph in an adult magazine, that has turned you on sexually before;. Sit down at your keyboard and begin to describe the specific element that turn you on the most. Before you are through, you will likely find that the ideas you needed for your own project are beginning to run through your head. (Hint, there are strong links in the brain between seeing and thinking.)

3b) Conversely, if you are stuck on a specific sex scene, pick an image of what people would be doing in that scene. Often, looking at a picture of people engaged in the sex act you are trying to describe will start you thinking about differences and similarities between the image and what your characters would be doing. Soon the scene will be writing itself in your head.

4) Find and read an erotic passage in a book or story that you remember as really turning you on when you read it before. Reading it can also start you thinking about similarities and differences; in this case about what you are reading versus how or what you would write. Also, reading a passage you find sexy will likely get you aroused and when one is aroused the chemicals that are released into the blood stream trigger the brain to start fantasizing about sex. All you have to do is write those fantasies down.

5) If you are having troble beginning a sentence, paragraph or scene, take a different approach, begin somewhere you would not normally begin. If you are describing a man and a woman making love. Rather than opening with a description of the couple, or a specific sex act, try thinking outside the box. Begin with a description of the sheen of her stockings, or the dimple on his butt cheeks. Ask yourself what you wouldn’t normally do, stand things on their head. That makes writing interesting again, and your brain can’t help dreaming up a few lines to go with the idea and soon you are writing easily again.

I will offer more suggestions for overcoming writers block in my next entry.

GETTING MORE BUCKS FROM THE BANGS YOU WRITE ABOUT, PART II

Jean Marie Stine 2 Responses »

Apr 232010

This will be short but hopefully pithy. Here are five more tips.

1) Yet another method of getting more bucks for the bangs you write about is to link some of your stories together into a series, and to write enough stories in the series to collect as a book.

This is a hallowed practice going back more than one hundred years. Books as diverse as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Cheaper by the Dozen were created just this way.

Terri Pray, who writes for Sizzler Editions, has a knack for writing novelettes about series characters, who are often captured and forced to be sex slaves and are sold and pass from the hands of one master to another — each owner or captor the subject of an individual story in the series – and then bringing it all together at the end through a developing story arc for a satisfying conclusion complete with her own version of a romantic happy ending bdsm-style.

2) Or to make it easy, you can forgo story arcs and just write otherwise unrelated adventures of a single character like Sherlock Holmes and then collect them into a book. This way you avoid having to hassle out a plot arc or happy ending. You could write a book about a woman named, say, Fay, who has a series of post-college sexual escapades with different men, and the collected stories could be called The Adventures of Fay, or the Exploits of Fay, or Fay Discovers Sex, or whatever. Anyway, I understand it worked out pretty well for the Holmes author.

This way you are at least assured of being paid twice for each story in the series you write.

If the book does well, you may make many times over what you received for writing the original stories.

3) Here’s another tip for squeezing more income from your work: Participate in public readings of erotica. If you live near or in a metroplex there are likely to be events like the SF Bay Area’s Perverts Put Out and Queer Open Mic, where writers of erotica read their work. Often they receive some small remuneration, but even when they don’t they are allowed to sell copies of their work; and if they get a decent discount on their books from the publisher, these writers can make $35-$100 a reading.

To get in on deals like this you will need a) find them and b) network. Also volunteer to read your work free at fund raisers where other authors are doing the same. That way you meet writers and the kind of people who put on events, making it far more likely you will get invited to any paid reading gigs than if you just sit home and wait to be noticed.

Through this kind of local networking, you will be in the best position possible for learning about local workshops, group readings, writer’s conferences, and the like. If you put yourself out a bit and ask, you will eventually get paid, or at least fed, gigs reading, teaching, etc. You may also learn about magazines and anthologies that are looking for erotica.

If you network on the web too, you may learn about opportunities beyond the local for making additional income from your writing. I, for instance, will be participating in an on-line course in writing erotica later this month for which I will receive some small remuneration.

4) If you have any personal area of expertise, you can also profit from creating and teaching your own on-line courses in writing via Google or other sites. One male writer I know teaches courses in writing believable male characters to women authors of romance novels. Using Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, etc., and emailings to various writer’s groups, you can drum up quite an income once established.

5) Dream up an anthology idea and place it with a publisher. Anthologists traditionally get half the royalties, the other half is split among the authors. Use one of your own older stories in the anthology, and come out even further ahead. Sascha Illyvich came up with an idea for an anthology of gay male romance stories set against a background of starships and the spacelanes. I accepted the book as soon as he described it. I once spent a week reading through old science fiction magazines and emerged with an anthology titled Future Eves: Classic Science Fiction About Women, By Women. I also put one of my stories in it. It’s a pretty standard practice among anthologists.

If you keep these ideas, and the ones in my previous blog on this subject, you will at least double your earnings from your writing. Work hard at them and you can triple or quadruple it.

HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR INCOME FROM WRITING EROTICA

Jean Marie Stine 17 Responses »

Mar 112010

Many books, websites and courses tell you how to write and sell erotica. But they stop there. The fledgling writer is left with the impression that these two steps are all there is to it. In short, that successful writers of erotica earn enough to live on by simply writing and selling an erotic tale, and then moving on to the writing and selling of next one, never looking back.

Most of us would be starving to death if that was, indeed, all there was to it. Try it yourself and you will soon discover, via starvation, how absurd this idea is.

In fact, for many of us, especially those who write erotic short stories and novelettes, writing and selling the story are only the beginning of wringing the maximum income from it. When my friend Harlan Ellison (primarily a short story writer, whose example, while he does not write erotica, is germane) finishes a story, he first sells it to the highest paying magazine market he knows of. Then, a year or so later he sells it to some anthology it seems right for. A year or so later he puts it in a collection of his own stories. Next, he typically sells it to a magazine that pays it lower rates but whose contents page would be enhanced by a story with his name on it. Later other anthologists may also purchase the story. These steps sometimes transpire in a different order, but you get the general idea. He gets paid four or more times, usually more, for each story he writes.

That’s why when I sell a short erotic story the first time, if the magazine or anthology wants any kind of exclusivity on it, I insist on a one or two period of exclusivity, after which they can still keep the story in their anthology, but I can sell it wherever I like. At the very least, I absolutely insist on being able to put it in anthology of my own stories, after a one or two year period. This is, in fact, how many short story writers enhance their income and manage to pay the rent/mortgage.

The situation isn’t the same with novels or book-length collections of your own work, of course. Naturally, the publisher of a book wants exclusivity during the time they are marketing it and making it available to the public.

But there are still several ways you can leverage more income from your erotic novel/s.

Does your publisher have a strong presence (distribution to Amazon, B&N, Sony, and other major book selling sites) in both print books and ebooks? And what about audio? If they appear to be weak in one or more of the above, see if you can reserve those rights for yourself. Then search the web for information for publishers who do have strong distribution in those areas, and try to interest them in the rights you have retained.

Here’s another tip. The more books, novels or collections, you write and have out, the more copies of each individual book you will sell. If you only have one erotic book out and a reader buys and likes that one, all you can have is one sale. But if you have six books out, and a reader buys one for the first time and likes that one, that reader will inevitably come back for more. Resulting in one to five additional sales.

At my site, SizzlerEditions.com, we have seen this over and over. A new customer will come in and purchase a book by, say, Terri Pray, who has just written her 50th book for us. In a day or two and, sometimes even just a few hours later, they come back and buy a half-dozen more and they keep on coming back until they have read them all. And then they may discover another writer at our site they like and do the same. And from then on, they tend to purchase every new book by these authors.

The same is true of series. If you write six stand-alone books, each will sell better than if you had just written one book. But if all six are part of a series, and a reader likes the series, you have virtually ensured the reader will buy all six.

These are some of the key ways you can maximize your income from writing erotica. There are others. But, we will deal with those in a later installment of this blog.

Jean Marie Stine, http://SizzlerEditions.com

Erotica, eBooks and Economics

Jean Marie Stine 9 Responses »

Jan 292010

By Jean Marie Stine: Publisher of Renaissance E-books and Sizzler Editions

In January 2010 Amazon.com announced that, for the first time ever, ebooks had outsold print books during the previous December.

It was an epochal announcement. It was not only a first for Amazon, it was a first ever for the entire publishing industry. The long-heralded era of the ebook had finally arrived.

Although print books continued to outsell electronic books over all, the tide was clearly turning. Meanwhile, sales of ebooks were booming at Sony’s own ebook store, as were sales at B&N’s new ebook store.

These sales were fueled largely by the availability of a new generation of ebook reading devices that could wirelessly download books from ebook stores, and several of which, notably Sony’s newest iteration and the new Nook from Barnes & Nobel, were multiplatform, capable of reading ebooks in a variety of formats.

Amazon claimed to have sold 200,000 units of the Kindle well before the holiday shopping season, while Sony reports having sold over 300,000 of their ebook reading device, and B&N recently said that the Nook was the single bestselling item at their site over the holiday shopping season. Between these three companies, then, about one million or more ebook reading devices will have been sold to readers by the end of 2010.

Meanwhile all kinds of apps for buying and reading ebooks on “smartphones” – as well as laptops, ipods, various palm held devices, and the newly emerging tablet-sized computers – are turning almost any portable device that will read or transmit any kind of digital data into an ebook reading device.

That means there are many times more ebook reading devices and people reading them than ever before, and ebooks have a growing market that should continue expanding for years to come.

Again, that market is still tiny compared to print books. 3000 to 5000 copies is a big initial sale for an $8.99 ebook (unless by Dan Brown or some other giant of the print bestseller lists) while the initial sale of, say, an $8.99 paperback is more like 60,000 to 100,000 copies.

As I know from talking to writers at various conferences, writers of popular ebooks in popular categories, especially if prolific and capable of writing a new book every month or two, can earn $30-40,000 per year. Some even more.

What are the most popular, bestselling ebook categories? In no particular order: Business/Self-improvement, science fiction/fantasy, romance, and erotica. Everything else is distant second.

Of these, erotica is unique in a very important way. You can go into a bookstore and buy business/self-improvement, romance, and science fiction. But you can’t go into 90% of all bookstores and buy erotica.

Why is another whole magilla we don’t have time to go into deeply. In part, it has to do with the vulnerability of chain stores (which are 90% of the market) to pressure from conservatives and religious groups. Which means chains aren’t going to carry erotica in the south, certain Western states, and any moderate-sized towns in any state with a conservative slant. That severely limits the bookstores chains can carry erotica in to all but the biggest and most cosmopolitan cities and some decidedly liberal college towns. Considering the logistical nightmare of having a category of books that can only be shipped to a few stores, and worries about such a book accidentally being shipped to a store in, say, Alexandria, Louisiana, it’s easier for chain booksellers to just say “no”.

Deduct from the independent bookstores those that are religious (a very sizable chunk) and those that cater to specialized markets like fishing, handicrafts, etc., and you can see that all that would be left would be one or two bookstores in each of the biggest cities – and a few college towns.

Some erotica collections and anthologies do get published in print form and reach those one or two bookstores in each big cities and those few college towns But they are mostly from smaller, independent presses and, sadly, the current economic depression has impacted the small print publishers of erotica heavily, with many going out of business and others cutting back on new releases and even cancelling contracts they had signed for future books.

Clearly if print was the only market for erotica, it wouldn’t be worth discussing the subject at all.

Over on the internet, however, among ebook publishers, sales and the market for erotica are booming.

There are a lot of reasons the market for erotic ebooks is hot right now.

First and foremost is, as noted above, you can’t get them anywhere else.

Equally important is the anonymity of ebooks. They can be purchased over the internet and downloaded immediately to the privacy of your own computer or electronic reading device. No standing in line at a brick and mortar bookstore where a book’s title might be a dead give away of your secret kink to the person behind the counter or a friend you found unexpectedly standing alongside you in the checkout line.

Also erotic ebooks are priced competitively with regular supermarket paperbacks (most erotic ebooks selling for $6-7.99).

There is another reason erotica sells so well in ebook form. People who read, say, an erotic novel, read more than one a month. Females and males, we all know, read erotica to get off. Once they have read an erotic book a couple of times it loses its potency and they need a brand new book to help get them off.
That means there is a near endless demand for new erotic ebooks.

So, for anyone interested in writing erotica, as a career or part-time, the present is a very exciting and rewarding time to enter the field.
It is safe to say that, due entirely to the internet and the rise of ebook publishing, more people are making more money writing erotica than at any previous time in history. And even with all the authors already writing in the field, there is still a greater need for good new writers than ever.

Jean Marie Stine
SizzlerEditions.com