Hello all

I started one of my pen names in January 2023 and it's been decently successful for me. It's grown pretty much month on month for around 22 of those months.

On November 11th, I had a bad day. I made half of what I usually do. I wrote it off as just one of those low days. But my sales never recovered. I'm making about 60% of what I used to ever since. Specifically, it's my KENP that's fallen, from around 7K a day to 3K now, with most of that being lost from the US. Thankfully, my ebook sales have remained reasonably constant.

I don't understand what's happened. I didn't have a raft of books dungeoned, only one title. I've not changed what I publish and how often. It feels like a switch was flicked and my KENP cratered (I know that didn't actually happen, it's just the way it feels).

And I have no idea what to do now. Do I persevere with that pen? Do I pivot and write more aggressively to market? Or is it dead and not worth any further effort?

Has anyone been in a similar position? What did you do?

Thanks

Luna.

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Can anyone help me with Do's/Don't of D2D and Amazon? I have some out and out gay erotica ready to publish but scared with restrictions. Plan is to publish on D2D. Please help with article references.

Sprints are here

1. Goals for the day? Word count? Reading? Editing? Covers? Something else?
2. Rooftop yellings? Successes? Failures?
3. How was your week? Did you get everything done that you meant to?

My first real sex scene is four and a half chapters (13.5k words) into my novel. However, I have journal entries starting from Chapter One that contain descriptions of sexual moments (example: ‘We did this together.’ ‘I did that to her.’ etc.).

My question is as stated above, and, also, do you think my first sex scene is too far into the book, or do the journal entries that I’ve described make up for it? Thank you all! :)

I have tried to write a book with developed characters, a well thought out plot, and of course smut scenes. I cannot really get into it except the smutty bits. It's hard to make myself write the rest. I feel stuck. I've written a few of the scenes, and now I'm trying to tie them together. My question is, would a combo book of short stories work? I'd definitely enjoy writing it a lot more if I could focus on those scenes.
Just wondering, TIA for your expertise.

Last year I regained control of the account I use to publish my books. I’d published a number of stories back in 2013 and 2014 at a friend’s prompting and then kinda forgot about it (and the password). I was surprised to find out that I’d been making about $30 a month for the last couple of years with over $1,000 in the bank since I’d last looked at it.

I decided at the end of December last year that I was going to put more effort into Amazon and see if I couldn’t turn my hobby of writing dirty stories into a more impressive second income stream. I have some aggressive goals for myself in 2025. I want to end the year with over $10,000 in total income and hit over $1K a month in sales along the way.

Keeping that in mind, I’m very happy with how well January went.

2023 numbers (rounded):

• Titles: 20
• Royalties: $350
• Sales: 50 eBooks
• KENP: 40K

Jan 2025 numbers (rounded):

• Titles: 54
• Royalties: $250
• Sales: 40 eBooks / 10 Paperbacks
• KENP: 16,250

I only publish on Amazon. I usually add a new book to KU a couple of weeks after it is available as an eBook. I have added paperback versions of all my books, mainly to make the eBook price seem more attractive, but paperback sales accounted for 18% of my income in 2025 so I will keep that up!

You may be wondering how I was able to publish 34 stories in January. I am fortunate to have a folder of erotic stories that I’ve been adding to over the last decade. I have a few hundred tales that I’m in the process of going through and editing. Of the 34 stories I published in January, 21 of them were stories that I basically ‘dusted off’ and got ready for publishing. Additionally, 3 of these books were collections of 3/4 stories. Only ten stories were completely new in January.

Almost all my engagement comes from one pen name representing 90% of my income. A single book (a collection of stories that usually shows up in the top 5 when searching for my main keyword) accounts for 30% of my overall income and 34% of my KENP. In February I hope to capitalize on this success with two additional volumes to make a series of collections. We shall see how that goes.

In terms of promotion, I haven’t done a lot. I occasionally post a link to a story if I see a reddit thread that I feel the story is relevant to. I’ve also made posts in a few subreddits with varying degrees of success. It’s weird though, in one sub there are multiple only fan accounts posting content and links with no complaints. I post a link to a story for sale on Amazon and the mods take it down for being self-promotion. I think that’s a double standard.

Looking forward to next month I want to keep up the pace of publishing stories with more of a focus on polishing stories from my library. I have a few new stories that I’m kicking around. I am also going to explore adjacent erotic themes to widen the appeal of my books. Right now they’re mostly stories about couples exploring a new style of intimacy and I’m starting to branch out into stories that play into dominance and submission as well.

Goals for Feb 2025:

• Titles: 70
• Royalties: $375
• Sales: 87
• KENP: 24,000

I wrote a super short smut a couple of weeks ago, and it gained some traction.

Then I wrote another short, more vanilla. Only had 2 people read that.

So I said fuck it, I'm going to make another one just like the first. Well, it got zero views.

I went to amazon.jp and looked up my author name. None of the erotica is showing up under my name.

The last couple of days, I'm getting zero views across all shorts that I wrote.

I thought the max discount for orchard was 25%? Cos I had a sale recently that was (based on my shitty math) 45-50% off list price so I'm sitting here and scratching my head 🤔 and trying to figure out how that happened.

Hi there, what do you think about MfM / MmM constellations where the two M are related? Like Brothers, Father and Son, uncle nephew? Could that be problematic for Amazon. I’m not sure if that is considered incest or not. Besides incest, could it be problematic for other reasons? English is not my first language/culture and maybe there is something I’m not thinking about.

Title says it all. How much world building is too much world building?

Sprints are here

1. Goals for the day? (Word count? Reading? Editing? Covers? Something else?
2. Rooftop yellings? Successes? Failures?
3. How's it going? Anything you want to talk about or get off your chest?

DATA

2025 annual Goal: $3,600

2025 Monthly Goal: $300

Total Books Published: 25

Median Book Length: 8,602 Words

January Data

Books Published: 5

Free Books ‘Sold’: 661

Full Priced Books Sold: 94

Page Reads: 14,754

Est. Royalties: $148.40

This month, I called a bit of an audible to prepare for the release of my second erotica pen name, Bravo. My Bravo name is angled toward women’s erotica/romance, while my primary pen name, Alpha, targets men’s erotica/romance. Initially, I planned to do this in the summer, but I knew this pen name would take time to grow profitable, so I wanted to start earlier rather than later. As with my Alpha pen name, I created a backlist of a dozen books both previously written and written this month, so I have a 3-month runway for releases.

Alpha Words Written: 38,626

Bravo Words Written: 25,722  

Total Words Written: 64,348

Average Words Written/Day: 2,276

I have an idea to create one more pen name to serve a specific audience, but frankly, I’m mentally exhausted from January’s eroticathon. Writing sex scenes was getting tough in the last week, so I think I’m going to take February relatively light and see what it’s like to maintain. At this rate, to keep a 3-month burn rate for my backlist of books, I have to write one Alpha book and one Bravo book a week. This equates to 6k-20k words per week, with each book averaging 5k words.

I will note that giving myself a 3-month burn rate worth of books is mentally freeing. I’ve tried consistently releasing books with just a 2 or 3-week head start, and the amount of pressure and anxiety it caused was not worth it. I feel no pressure this way. 10 out of 10 recommend it.

Sustain

I was happy with my work output this month. Aside from 2 days that were spent dedicated to family, I wrote every day and averaged over 2k words a day. This is a good target of effort that I want to maintain.

Cover creation, formatting, and publishing on Amazon are being streamlined. I can now do these tasks while watching TV on the weekends, and I want to keep them as time-efficient as possible.

Improve

The biggest mistake I made this month was Patreon. Inspired by one of the posts here, I devoted precious hours and dollars to developing two Patreon accounts for my two pen names. The idea being I would develop web serials for each and be able to monetize early access to chapters. While this might work for some, I figure it would take a great deal of work and time for this plan to become profitable. Already feeding two pen names with weekly books, I realized too late I don’t have time to dedicate to web serials, especially for a limited chance of profit—at least in the short term.

I had invested a hundred dollars for a year’s subscription to Bookfunnel that, as of now, will be categorized as a loss. Perhaps I will find another use of this investment. My main lesson here is to stop trying to be clever, just write the next damn book.

The books I wrote in January were typically 4k-6k in length. Should that length continue, I may increase the number of books in a series from 3 to 4 in order for my bundles to be at least 20k words in length. Barring that, I will need to start increasing the length of my books closer to 10k each. I found in the past that bundles and ‘super’ bundles were where the money was.

Being a full-time author is a new experience. I technically am not completely full-time as I have a part-time gig for the next several months, but I’m still beginning to develop a routine. Doing ‘business’ /writing from home is becoming systematic. Planning my workload more than a few days in advance is impossible as productivity varies and changes day to day. I bought a physical planner and going forward I want to have my work day run by that planner. Start each morning by looking it over for what I have to do that day—that week.

Finally, I will need to do a great deal more research into women’s erotica, including covers, stories, and sex scenes. I found a couple of successful authors in my niche and plan to investigate their work deeply in the coming months.

Final Thoughts

I don’t expect to see any meaningful profit from my new Bravo pen name for months or years. Honestly, the same is true for my Alpha name. It took me that long to see anything significant for my Alpha name the first time around, so I expect that this time as well.

I’m happy with my profit this month. It's a 24% increase from last month's profit, but I would like to see it steadily increase. I’ve begun turning some of my previously released 0.99c books into $2.99, and I’m also beginning to release more bundles.

The plan for now is to keep February a 'steady as she goes' month, but I may begin to work on a Charlie pen name, just not as aggressively as I did Bavo.

Till next time.

So many books for female audience depict buffed male alpha(s). Is there no appeal for other body types? Or does the audience expect that distinct body types, like chubby, dad bod, skinny, etc., should appear in their own specific niche/categories?

I want to be able to write a bit and then insert gifs inbetween paragraphs to give visuals. I don’t know where I can post where I can do that? I know there’s BDSMLR but that site is hell and operates bad (I say as a user for years) tumblr is also an option but porn isn’t really allowed there and I’d definitely get taken down eventually. Help?

Hey there,

maybe this is a stupid question, but I was reading the FAQ's, especially the part about what could get you blocked/banned on Amazon.

In the PI part there is a paragraph of what to avoid and it states not only titles and keywords but also content of the book.

I was not going to write an incest story, but I wanted to mention that the MC father was in the military and that they had to move around a lot and never settled anywhere.

Is it really problematic to have the word „Dad“ in the content of the book or do I simply misunderstood that part of the FAQ

Hope someone can clarify that for me 😅

Did you have any negative experience publishing covers that depict feet?

Assuming the feet are visible, bare or not, as part of a larger figure in the cover: if the rest of the image is dressed, could the bare feet trigger any kind of nudity alert like an overly-undressed butt or cleavage would?

I noticed that there rarely are covers with feet visible.

Sprints are here

1. Goals for the day? (Word count? Reading? Editing? Covers? Something else?)
2. Rooftop yellings? Successes? Failures?
3. What are your plans for the weekend?

Hello everyone! I'm looking for some advice on Amazon keywords because I'm having trouble understanding how they actually work. Do they function better as individual words, or should I focus on using short-tail and long-tail sentences?

For example:

Example 1: gay first time story Example 2: man gay first time steamy spicy mm short story straight to gay

These examples are just for illustration, I'm not really familiar with gay erotica. But when I compare these two approaches, the results are inconsistent, and my sample size is too small to draw any conclusions. Which one do you think would work better? More human-like search requests (even if they are shorter), or max long bunches of keywords?

Has anyone found an advantage or disadvantage to putting standalone books in a series?

I've had a play with doing so in order to try and encourage people who read one to check out the others that are in the same niche, but can't decide if it might instead be suggesting that it's necessary to read the others.

Sprints are here

1. Goals for the day? (Word count? Reading? Editing? Covers? Something else?)

2. Rooftop yellings? Successes? Failures?

3. How's it going?

Have a blurb that is bugging you?

Want to maximize its marketing moxie?

Post it here, either in its entirety or in part, and let your peers take a crack at whipping it into shape.

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I tried searching for this and the answers I found didn't seem to match Zon policy.

Under Prohibited Links in KDP, it says "Links to web forms that request customer information (e.g., email address, physical address or similar)." Which feels like it would preclude newsletter signup? But most authors I read do have a newsletter signup link in the backmatter.

Is it safer to link to social media or a website and hope the reader explores enough to find the newsletter signup?

I use Story Origins promotions regularly to push my books on Amazon and have found it effective. I'm wondering how it compares to Bookfunnel. Is anyone using it? Is it worthwhile?

I still have a running account on Prolific Works (downgraded to free). It was a powerhouse several years ago but seems to have died.

How do we feel about the word whipped? Anyone been dungeoned for this lately to their knowledge?

I’m trying to think of synonyms in case this is a red flag word but alternatives actually seem worse and more intense (thrashed, flogged etc)

I was worried disciplined might not go down too well either.

I could try something like ‘a taste of his riding crop’ but it’s a bit wordy for what I need.

I think the rest of my blurb is A-OK it’s just this one word I’m struggling with. Any thoughts?

Sprints are here

1. Goals for the day? (Word count? Reading? Editing? Covers? Something else?)
2. Rooftop yellings? Successes? Failures?
3. What is a question you have for more experienced authors?

I’m trying to practice more with writing spicier material but I think I struggle a lot with dialogue sounding natural, especially in kinkier or more intense scenarios. It just reads like cringy porn acting to me lol. I’m not sure what the trick is 😭

I’m looking for tips on how to get into the headspace to write intimate scenes. I’m working on some creative projects where I feel intimate scenes would help with the plot, but I think I fall flat with it.

I may need to create some practice drafts beforehand to get into the groove of it, but how do you folks create it?

I think I get so uncomfortable with it and start cringing that I end up putting the work away. I currently have one that I haven’t touched because of the unfinished scene. I have read plenty of books with intimate scenes and it doesn’t bother me, but writing it is a whole new realm. I sometimes feel like it’s just wrong, like an intrusion of the characters (silly, I know), so does anyone know how I can overcome this?

Hi guys.

I am going to be publishing my first billionaire romance book soon under my MF romance pen name. This will be my third book under the name.

I don't have much of a following currently with this pen name and my first two books haven't gone far with many readers. Not many people have read them.

With all of that outlined, I am not sure if I should put my book up for pre-order. I read some comments here last week or so that were telling people not to put book up as a pre-order, as it will ruin the ranking on Amazon. Now, I don't know if they meant for erotica books or romance too.

Many romance authors put their books up for pre-order, but they already have large followings.

With all of the information I have given, what would you recommend I do? Put the book up for pre-order or just publish it right away?

I will be marketing the book no matter how I publish it.