For a little background on why I put this list together, check out this page from the Eroticist’s Notebook.
Here’s the ratio of “fuck” to non-“fuck” words in my published stories. I was a little surprised that “Throuple” (incidentally on sale this month for 99 cents) is the winner here — I expected “Baby Bump” to win, as it’s one of my raunchier stories, or “A Dip in the Lake,” since Jessie likes her swears. I wasn’t too surprised that “Off the Leash” ranks low — it’s definitely smutty, and there’s some pretty intense action, but the narrator, Petra, is a bit of a prude (though as I work on “The Contours of Desire,” I find I like her more).
That’s 1,260 “fucks” in a total of 537,913 words, for an overall ratio of 0.23% fucks. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, I suppose it all depends on what the story demands: “fuck” is a seasoning, and some stories demand a lighter hand than others.
I thought about trying to do that, but it gets complicated pretty fast with some of my stories – like in “The Pinball Queen’s Debauch,” where does one act end and another begin? Much easier to just count words; I’m sure there’s some objective metric of raunch level out there …
I’m still figuring things out business-wise, so I’m not sure how much useful advice I’ve got, but I’d say that there are two things that have consistently improved my sales: paid newsletter placement and having a personal newsletter strategy. How much of this will translate to your situation I can’t say: you’ve got a smaller number of titles on a larger number of platforms, whereas I have a ridiculous number of titles divided pretty evenly between exclusively on Amazon and available everywhere; but maybe something will be useful! The big issue is that there are thousands of books out there, and you need to get your book in front of readers in a compelling way.
1. Paid newsletter placements. The two that I use are Excite Spice https://excitespice.com/ and Bookspry https://www.bookspry.com/. Both work on the same model: for US$10-20, depending on the placement options and price point of the title, they’ll include your book in an email to a large subscriber list. I’m currently at 150% on Bookspry placements (making a positive return), and 95% on Excite Spice (losing a little bit), though it varies. I typically do 2 promotion slots a month, but with a largish catalog it’s easy to spread titles out. Bookspry placements fill up fast — I think they’re out into March of next year for open slots; Excite Spice are a little easier to come by. Since you’re publishing wide rather than exclusive to Amazon, you have a little more control over when you do price promotions; I try to line up my paid newsletter placements with price promotions, going for the 99 cent slots whenever possible. These have the biggest impact on sales, as they go out to 15K or more subscribers, whereas my newsletter goes out to about 700 subscribers.
2. Newsletter promotions and swaps on a service like Bookfunnel https://dashboard.bookfunnel.com/ or Story Origin https://storyoriginapp.com/. I use Bookfunnel, though I’m considering trying Story Origin, as it’s a little better with swap and promotion opportunities for erotica titles. Both services work on roughly the same model:
a. “Promotions” are opportunities to add your title to a page that you’ll share on your newsletter/blog/social media, and that the others participating in the promotion will share as well. The titles promoted can be books for sale, or “reader magnets” — short, free stories or excerpts that readers can download in exchange for their email addresses, and which you can then add to your own mailing list (these promotions will usually be called “newsletter builders”). I have a collection of shorts and sample chapters to use for reader magnets, and if those shorts are part of a longer work I’ll add a link to the longer work in the epub download and will sometimes have a Smashwords or similar coupon as well. This is an example of a “reader magnet” promotion that I’m currently in https://books.bookfunnel.com/smutgiveaway/o05ghz25og and this is a sales promotion https://books.bookfunnel.com/alloftheerotica/9mott04u9i
b. “Swaps” are an exchange with another author to include their title in your newsletter, in exchange for them including your title in theirs. Again, swaps can be for a paid title or for a reader magnet. Bookfunnel and Story Origin both have a kind of bulletin board of available swap opportunities, and you can post your own or see what others are offering, and request a swap if something looks like it would be a good fit for your readers. I’ve had a few very lucky swaps — I had a free title on Kindle Unlimited that was shared by a top-tier erotica author and saw a huge bump in both sales and KU reads for a week — but also some that were pretty unimpressive, like when I did a swap with an author whose rather baroque BDSM title I personally enjoyed, but apparently my readers weren’t interested in her title, and vice versa, a good lesson that your tastes and your readers’ tastes don’t always line up as you’d expect.
With newsletter promotions, you’ve got really no control over where your title is placed among all the other titles, and someone else is running the show as far as the layout, images, etc. A lot of them can be pretty tacky, and I’m not always thrilled with my neighbors on the page (personally, bare-chested billionaires have the opposite effect on me than what they’re trying to elicit …), but the important thing is getting your cover in front of as many eyes as possible. People who subscribe to author newsletters like to click these links — they’re by far the most clicked links in the newsletters I put out — so having a compelling cover that people will click on this kind of page is a good marketing move.
I use Mailerlite https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/ for my newsletter. They have both free and paid options, based on the size of your mailing list; I used the “reader magnet” promotions through Bookfunnel, as well as social media posts, to build my list to the threshold where “free” rolled over to requiring payment, though I currently keep my list small enough to stay in the lowest paid tier by purging subscribers who haven’t opened an email in a few months. It would probably be possible to continue using WordPress as your newsletter — Bookfunnel lets you export people who sign up for your free downloads to a CSV file that Mailerlite can use, and I imagine that WordPress can work with the data as well to add subscribers. There are higher tiers of Bookfunnel/Story Origin and Mailerlite that automate this process; since I’m still getting relatively small numbers of subscribers, I just download the files from Bookfunnel every morning and upload them to Mailerlite.
If you go the route of Mailerlite, I would recommend reading “Newsletter Ninja” by Tammi Labrecque https://newsletterninja.net/. Early in my newsletter efforts, I failed to set up a “welcome sequence” (as outlined in her book), which meant that each of my weekly newsletters resulted in a 2-3% unsubscribe rate, which Mailerlite flagged as a sign of spam activity. It took some back and forth with Mailerlite support to convince them that I wasn’t sending spam, and I’m still a little skittish about unsubscribe rates (which are much lower now that I’ve got a system in place to let people opt out sooner).
I’ve also tried doing some social media promotion — primarily Twitter, Mastodon, and Facebook, with some Substack and Medium efforts as well. I’ve been using Fedica.com, which lets you schedule posts to Twitter, Mastodon, and Facebook. I use booklinker.com for a lot of my links, which lets me set up links for each social media site (I use a naming convention on the links — “tw”, “fb”, “ma”, “nl” (for “newsletter”) — and I can see how many times each link was used; currently, links from my newsletter (I use my “nl” links on WordPress and Substack as well) get the most clicks, followed closely by Twitter. But different audiences may be on different social media platforms, so it’s good to explore where yours might be.
Again, I’m learning a lot of this as I go, and the lessons can be weird and sometimes a little painful. No doubt I’m overlooking a lot of things that can make this easier — if you learn something useful, feel free to share!
I’m just a gal who knows what she likes, and that’s what I write about. I’ve got close to 50 erotic stories, ranging from super spicy shorts to novel-length explorations of romantic fantasies. Some are available only on Kindle Unlimited, and some are available on a wide range of ebook retail sites, including my own storefront that features exclusive stories and alternate covers available only from me.
Not sure where to start? I’ve get a Starter Pack of six story collections for just 99 cents each, or check out my handy guide based on length, series, location, and kink to find just the right Cornelia Quick story for you!
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