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

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.