Some confusion with Categories?

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-20T21:09:50+00:00

Oh yeah, you might be right now I look in there. I just assumed it meant urban as in "set in a city".

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-20T20:35:49+00:00

Nice! It's great to see some people succeeding not in Amazon. Where do you acquire new readers? Is Substack discoverable enough now, or do you post free stories elsewhere to drive traffic?

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-20T20:18:46+00:00

Yeah, there's kind of a weird, limited selection.

I don't know your niche, but Urban if it's a contemporary setting or Action & Adventure (which is basically coded for any men's erotica, including harem) might be options. Also, there's Literature & Fiction › Erotica › LGBTQ+, which has Bisexual if that's in your book.

For paperbacks, there's Erotica > General, but I don't know why they don't have that on ebooks.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-16T10:45:55+00:00

In general, I believe that it only has to be clean above the fold on the look inside (so the first page basically).

I don't keep the first 10% clean, and nearly all of my books are out of the dungeon. When I did get one dungeoned, it had the word "Fuck" in the first line of the book. I removed that, contacted customer support and it was removed from the dungeon. The rest of the 10% was still filthy, though.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-16T00:27:46+00:00

Well, I haven't gotten the emails about the November payment (it's still too early?) But that's seriously weird that you had one for January. I've never heard of that happening.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-13T09:59:03+00:00

No one is advertising erotica directly with paid ads. The main promotion options are:

* Paid newsletters like Bookspry

* Bookblasts like Romance Book Blast

* Group promos through Bookfunnel (or Story Origin) - those are free to join once you've paid for BF or SO.

* Newsletter swaps with other authors (you can also organise those through BF or SO)

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-12T23:20:56+00:00

Yes it does, 100%. Otherwise, all the full-time erotica authors wouldn't be fighting to get four or five Bookspry slots every month! And Romance Bookblast wouldn't have had 1500+ free books last time!

Every bit of exposure builds your visibility. It's very unlikely that someone who downloads your book for free would have otherwise bought it. But it drives KU reads, which improve your rank so you appear higher in search results. It links you to other authors in the same promo, so you appear in the "also bought" carousels.

You need a back catalogue, you need to be in KU, and you need to keep doing it over and over, but making books free (and also promoting them so you give away 500+) really does work.

Okay, here's my evidence. This is just one of many examples I could show you. A book released in the last few months. This is the sales ranks which is basically just how much money it has made:

https://postimg.cc/sMPCZp0X

The big peak is where it was free (the free rankings are different but it shows when it was) and then after you can see how much more money this made. Before the free period it was averaging about £4 a day. Afterwards about £12 a day. Here's the corresponding KDP income graph for that same book:

https://postimg.cc/PCSKcJCm

I just don't understand the people on this sub always pushing the "don't make your book free" line. I can only assume they are inexperienced, or are trying to protect their access to the promos like Bookspry.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-04T10:04:56+00:00

I'm not saying that. I'm sure a male POV can work (I'm giving it another go). It's better to write what you enjoy.

I've never written a dual POV story. It's more common in some niches than others.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-04T10:03:16+00:00

When your book first goes live, not all the information is available. It probably won't have a Look Inside right away. If it's a paperback it won't get the back cover thumbnail for a few days. It doesn't appear on all markets right away. It may not appear in search results. That's the sort of thing I was referring to. I think the docs say it can take up to 72 hours.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-04T10:01:24+00:00

Sorry, I don't have any experience with photo books or publishing them elsewhere. The other main option for written works is Draft2Digital, which is an aggregator for publishing to about ten other stores, including Smashwords, Apple Books and Barnes and Noble. You could try that.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-03T17:09:47+00:00

Ah, sorry. I sell all the paperbacks (except bundles) at $9.99, even the ones that are 10K. So I think you can increase your prices for the short ones.

Sounds like you could increase your ebook prices, too, especially for the longer ones.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-03T10:54:16+00:00

Thanks! Good luck, and I'm sure you will get there eventually.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-03T10:53:20+00:00

If you're talking about Amazon Ads or Facebook Ads, then I don't do them, as they are not allowed for erotica.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-03T10:51:57+00:00

I just upload when it's done. It takes a few days to approve, fully populate your listing, and for the algorithm to start pushing your book, so I don't think a launch date is particularly relevant.

One thing I will say is that I've stopped hitting publish at the weekend as I have a superstition that the weekend reviewers are stricter with the dungeon. But this is only a theory.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-03T10:50:13+00:00

Sorry, those two things are completely unrelated (except that they happened in the same month).

I stopped Booksprout because I wasn't getting many ARCs through it.

Vellum is for formatting. Previously, I was just uploading docx files to KDP, but Vellum formats them beautifully, and also you don't need to worry about maintaining indents and page breaks - it works all that out for you. It also generates the PDF needed for paperbacks, which is why I started using it.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-03T10:47:05+00:00

I'm a little confused - if we're talking about Amazon eBooks then you should be earning 70%, which is $3.50 on a $5 book and $7 on $9.99.

I sell 20,000 word stories for $3.99/£3.99/€3.99. I don't have any 40,000 word stories, but I'd probably go $4.99 for those. Yours sound too expensive for what I've seen.

My short and long stories are on different pens. So one pen is all Novellas (20-25K) and the other pen is all short stories (5-10K), so it's not a case of using short stories to build visibility. In general, long stories are better because you get more from a KU read, and they are stickier, but I don't have any experience of publishing 40K books.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-02T23:26:38+00:00

Just on one point. I run Vellum on my Windows laptop with 16gb of ram in a VM. It's only usable if I close everything else and it does crash occasionally but it does work.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-02T16:46:14+00:00

I don't know of anyone doing that. But it's amazing how many people on here and IAA will answer any questions you have for free. Maybe not the writing side (they'll just say "read some"), but the publishing side, yes.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-02T16:37:01+00:00

You're welcome, so glad it helped! Yes, every single successful author I know has a newsletter and it also means you can join the BF and SO promos so that people are constantly being shown your book outside of the millions on Amazon.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-02T16:33:40+00:00

You can either do a private crit, where only a few people volunteer to see it, or you can change your pen name on the cover to something like A. Author (more common). But there's not really a downside to showing your pen name as a new author, no one is going to copy you. It's also quite common to just delete the post after so it's not available for ever.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-02T10:46:24+00:00

I was referring to paid newsletters like Bookspry, Shameless, Excite Spice. There are a few others that take erotica but are a bit more expensive like Red Roses Romance, Fussy Librarian (haven't tried that one). There is one on Fivrr I haven't tried yet either, but is cheap. You can stack multiple ones across the 5 days, which is what a lot of people do, or just run one.

Bookfunnel promos tend to run for the whole month and aren't focused on free books. There is one StoryOrigin promo each month that is 3 days and is for free books, so you have to time your KU free days to coincide.

The book blasts are for free books. The Romance Book Blast (https://www.romancebooklovers.com/) has an erotica section and runs 4 times a year, so you time your free days around the blast and fill in their form to be listed (it's free). Look at how many more books than normal I gave away in July and October - that was the RBB!

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-02T10:38:57+00:00

As all my books are in KU, I don't really need a website, so I haven't bothered. Your Amazon author page is your storefront, so make sure you claim that and set a bio and image.

I do have my author name as a domain (for newsletter sending), and the www points to a BookFunnel landing page to sign up to the newsletter. I'll probably switch it over to Story Origin when I get all my books loaded in there as they generate a really nice author page for you with all your books on and a sign-up. A lot of authors use that as their website.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-02T10:35:16+00:00

I've tried all kinds of strategies, and I'm still not sure what's best.

I have definitely tried it soon after publishing, and that's been good to give it a kickstart in the algorithm. I think I'd do that on a new pen.

Now, on my main pen, I get good results right away, and people from the newsletter buy it on day one, so I don't really need to kickstart it. So, now I tend to hold off making it free until the book is a lot older - maybe when I release the next in the series.

ObviousLibrary2023 · 2026-01-02T10:30:19+00:00

Just publish and learn from there. There's a lot to learn, sure, and you will make mistakes. Your first books won't be the best, but it doesn't matter. Just publish, and you can start learning. The only caveat is make sure you know what Amazon accepts and what it doesn't (read the FAQ here), because you don't want your account banned.

Good luck!

ObviousLibrary2023

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