There I am!

I hit a minor personal milestone on Amazon: my schoolgirl stories have started showing up under other authors' books. Some of my lovely customers went on to purchase similar stories about spanking, so my work is starting to show up under other authors' stories. It's fairly low in the lists at the moment (I found this screen capture on page 12 of 17 of The Riding Academy - Strict Lessons for Teresa), but I'm hoping to increase my ranking over time.
This feature is becoming one of my favorite parts of Amazon. Self-published writers make a lot of their sales by having their work mentioned on the same page as an established author. I know I make the majority of my Kindle purchases by starting at a favorite author's page and following the links until I find something that strikes my fancy.

So, if you like my work, the nicest thing you can do is to keep buying similar stories from different authors. I may even start reviewing some of my favorite spanking stories* on this blog, because it helps me when similar authors make sales.

* My page don't seem to be linking to any menage a trois stories yet, even though that's a major feature of "Hard Body." Hmm, I guess that tells me which story my readers liked more...

Goodreads

My favorite part of Netflix is the rating system's ability to churn up indie, old or little-know movies based on your ratings. So of course I've become a huge fan of Goodreads, a social networking site based around books. Its rating system is similar to the Netflix algorithm; once you rate enough books, you get suggestions based on user data. I’ve bought several delightful books already by following the site’s suggestions.

I even set up an author page there. Feel free to friend me!

Website updates

I spent some time fiddling with the text of my author website. There's more information up there about the work I've been doing and where I can be found online.

I'm not a web designer by any stretch of the imagination, so any helpful comments/gentle critiques/foaming rants would be appreciated.

Where does erotica sell better?

Fair warning: this is going to be a navel-gazing post about the vagaries of e-publishing on different sites. Folks who are just here for the erotica will not find this terribly gripping.
 

I’ve noticed something weird about my sales on the two sites I’ve been using: I’m selling about twice as many copies on the Nook than the Kindle. Of course, “twice as many” is only a matter of a few extra sales. This month, I’ve had fifteen sales on Barnes & Noble compared to seven on Amazon.

I’ve been puzzling over this discrepancy because I thought Amazon was the more commonly used service. Since authors guards their Amazon rankings jealously, I’d like to figure out why I’m falling behind there. Here are a few reasons why I might be selling better on the Nook:

More Competition

Amazon’s direct publishing system is so easy to use that many self-published authors ONLY put their work up there. The Nook’s system isn’t exactly difficult, but it’s probably not anyone’s first publishing choice. There may just be more titles floating around in Amazon’s erotica section for my little stories to compete with.

I’ve also notice that the Nook PubIt! content policy is more conservative when it comes to erotica, forbidding “hard-core material that depicts graphic or explicit sexual acts.” Amazon’s comparatively liberal policy forbids “offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts.” That extra word, offensive, gives writers and editors a fair amount of leeway in deciding what’s acceptable. While Barnes & Noble does have an erotica section on its website, it may be scaring other erotica writers away with its ban on “explicit” sex.

That’s not to say Amazon never censors the erotica section. Its content policy just makes it look a bit more inviting to erotica writers.

Better Apps

The Barnes & Noble site has a very visible drop-down menu right at the top of the page to let shoppers know that they can read an ebook without owning a Nook. Amazon has almost exactly the same apps for PC, Macintosh, Android, Apple and so forth, but the link is further down the page on the right hand side. Since plenty of my potential readers don’t have e-readers, the ones who go straight to Amazon might be missing the link. For anyone who’s interested in the various apps, I wrote a post about what’s available a little while ago.

Different Devices

It’s a long shot, but there could be something about Barnes & Noble’s device lineup that’s attracting a disproportionate number of erotica readers. The tablet-like Nook Color certainly would be more attractive for people who planned to view a lot of porn on their ereaders. If that’s the case, the Amazon Fire should level the smutty playing field soon.

Different Audiences

The Amazon crowd has a large author forum to sift through, so they might be more discerning readers. Barnes & Noble has a forum as well, but it’s not as well known. Amazon readers may be relying on word of mouth (or keyboard) to decide on new purchases, and they have more sources of information to choose from. I haven’t spent much time at all on the Amazon forums, so my next step as an author will definitely involve some self promotion over there.

Freelancing versus E-Publishing

Now that I’ve dipped my toes into the waters of both freelancing and e-publishing, I think I’m qualified to give my barely informed opinion about the differences between the two. I’ve been freelancing for a content mill, writing SEO articles (keyword-stuffed pieces of text that will help bump a site up to the front page of a Google search) and miscellaneous pieces of text for anyone who wants to pay me five bucks. I’ve also released one ebook, which has been sitting around at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Writing the ebook was a hell of a lot more fun, but definitely more taxing. I spent a lot of time agonizing over each turn of phrase. When you’re freelancing, if you spend your time crafting deathless prose you’ll end up earning pennies per day. The effort I’ve been putting into writing for other people has been more about my time and energy, not my creative juices.

Here’s the deal: when I write for someone else, I get 1.4 cents a word. It’s not the best payout in the world, but it is a great incentive to keep going. Write a 500 word article, get seven bucks. Rinse and repeat until you have a dollar figure you’re comfortable with. The ebook, on the other hand, was around 6,000 words. By the standards of freelancing pay, that’s $80. To date, I’ve made maybe $15 off that book.

Of course, the ebook’s at something of a disadvantage because I haven’t put much time at all into promoting my work. I do plan to do that someday, but I’ll either have to spend money (to buy ads) or put in a lot of unpaid time (to promote myself on various social media). I’m holding off on that course of action until I have at least two or three other stories ready to go.

I’m going to keep writing ebooks, of course, because I adore fiction. What I’m banking on now is the possibility that churning out prose for other people will train me to be a better author, one who can sit down and put words on the page every day instead of staring out the window for hours.