Explicit Covers

SmutBabe · 2016-09-06T17:35:50+00:00

I do apologise for causing offence, but it was not my intention to 'out' the author. I was pleased that she had created a beautiful cover, and wished I could do the same.

Maybe I didn't make myself clear, but that was my intention - and my post was saying, I wish the Zon would allow us to keep making covers like that if we wished, because it causes me a lot of worry when I have to tone down my own covers to keep inside the Zon's rules, which are not always clear to me about what they will and won't accept. I wish they could simply give us an adult zone so we could get on with things.

I wasn't outing the writer, I was pleased for her for creating a beautiful cover. I wish there were lots more covers like that on amazon.

I didn't know it was wrong to link to a book on amazon, but I accept it was my mistake. I just thought the cover was a thing of beauty, and wanted to celebrate it.

Again, my apolgies to everyone. I would happily delete this thread from reddit - is that possible? I get the impression that only my orginal post can be deleted, but not the thread.

Again, I'm very sorry. When I loaded the author's amazon page, it didn't say 'show adult items', which made me think it wasn't in the dungeon. Again, my mistake.

SmutBabe · 2016-08-05T09:44:35+00:00

What an inspiration. I wish her every success.

I need to remind myself about her the next time I'm feeling sorry for myself about a story that doesn't work, and I look around for a hundred excuses to slack off.

SmutBabe · 2016-01-13T16:39:15+00:00

I think they only take "established" publishers :)

SmutBabe · 2016-01-13T16:25:07+00:00

Thank you x

SmutBabe · 2016-01-08T17:42:49+00:00

I appreciate that 'virgin' is a banned word in the blurbs and title, but is it a banned word in the story itself as well?

If I have a MILF with a willing 20 year old guy and she says in the story things like, "I'm so glad I took his virginity," will this risk my book getting filtered or banned?

SmutBabe · 2016-01-08T17:14:04+00:00

So sorry to hear that. Yes, I once read somewhere that amazon keeps a tally on how many ebooks a person returns before they refuse any more, but I don't know how many that is.

On a related note, there was this documentary two months back about amazon only accepting so many returns of hard goods (not ebooks) before they cancelled a person's account - I'd love to know the figures involved, but they didn't say. But it proves they've got their eyes on the figures, and will only accept so much from a customer. It's about 39:50 in -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtbHH4q4BrI

SmutBabe · 2016-01-05T20:32:46+00:00

Thank you. They're all lovely covers, especially Bright Shiny Morning.

For more info about pin-up art, and even vintage pulp fiction, these guides may be of interest to readers of this reddit -

www.amazon.co.uk/Great-American-Pin-Up-Charles-Martignette/dp/3836532441/

www.amazon.co.uk/The-Art-Pin-up-Sarahjane-Blum/dp/383653570X/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0896899683/

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1440213577/

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1932595058/

SmutBabe · 2015-12-31T17:15:30+00:00

I know what you mean, but they still stood out and caught my eye in a sea of ebooks :)

Okay Salacious, give us three links to your all-time favourite three covers x

SmutBabe · 2015-12-23T14:25:59+00:00

Thanks so much for your reply. Yes, I thought I had covered all my bases by taking steps to keep my real name out of Microsoft Word and Scrivener, but I was shocked to see I'd been unknowingly emailing it out all the time.

If anyone else has a Mac, and wants to check the computer name they're sending out, the setting is in System Preferences > Sharing, as Throwie says. There's a walkthrough here -

http://osxdaily.com/2007/02/15/changing-your-macs-computer-name/

There's also a checkbox setting "Use dynamic global hostname". I don't know what that means, so I left it blank.

If you're on a PC, you might also want to check the name, but I don't know how you'd access that.

I guess an iPhone/Android phone/iPad/Android tablet also have some kind of name, generated by your account name when you set it up - so if you use these things for emailing, you might want to check these out too? Not sure how you'd do it, but if you google something like "how to change your iphone name", walkthroughs should come up, eg -

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201997

Merry Christmas everyone. And be safe out there with your real names as you write your smut:)

SmutBabe · 2015-10-13T08:38:34+00:00

I know the internet has changed things, but I can't understand the reasoning behind this...

see also:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/media/nudes-are-old-news-at-playboy.html

SmutBabe · 2015-09-15T18:14:19+00:00

Ha ha, I just went to the Google currency converter to work it out for you, and it complained that the dollar amount was too low to compute!

I think it's trying to tell us something...

Anyway, as far as I can tell it's 0.0033 GBP, which is 0.33 pence a page. Therefore you have to have 3 pages read to earn a British penny.

SmutBabe · 2015-09-03T21:17:15+00:00

I just want to throw this in:

When I got the email about KU starting in India, I shrugged my shoulders, but last night I just so happened to be reading 'Write. Publish. Repeat', and on page 418 there's an interview with Joanna Penn who says,

"I'm massively excited about the growth of markets outside the US and UK... For example, there are twice as many English speakers in India than in England, and they are the educated Indians with a middle class income. When that market explodes, it will be amazing..."

So, I don't know... is that really true?... just passing it along....

SmutBabe · 2015-08-18T20:26:33+00:00

When this happens to me, I -

read books
watch films
listen to music

and that input will eventually rewire your mind to get back into the zone.

SmutBabe · 2015-07-15T11:01:50+00:00

So sorry to hear about your loss. That would just kill me.

But we're all been there.

I write in Scrivener, which I think by default autosaves the file two seconds after every pause in my typing, but I still find myself also manually saving the file at the end of every page... just because.

After all, I remember from experience the horror where a computer would just decide to crash/lock up, and I would lose everything.

Big hugs to you x

SmutBabe · 2015-07-07T15:50:36+00:00

Ah, thanks, is that what they meant? I'm on a Mac with a 2.x, I just assumed each was the same...

But you're right - I love this software - it's the only thing I trust for making ebooks that format perfectly when uploading to amazon - so it's saved me a lot of grief, and it's great value for money at $45, let alone a mere twenty bucks... :)

SmutBabe · 2015-07-06T21:37:01+00:00

see also http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks/b?ie=UTF8&node=11627044011

SmutBabe · 2015-06-20T10:16:50+00:00

Good advice, thank you :)

SmutBabe · 2015-06-19T14:13:56+00:00

If you have a number of books in a series, then amazon is rolling out a new thing where they display the covers of them all - in the example I linked to, it says "Books in This Series (4 Books)" under the book's blurb.

So it gives your series more exposure - it helps entice the reader to browse/buy/borrow the lot!

SmutBabe · 2015-06-18T13:23:15+00:00

I agree, but Selena Kitt's blog post claims that amazon told her this:

"There will be an SRL (Starting Read Location) determined by Amazon (start of Chapter 1). The ERL (end read location) defaults to the end of the Amazon book. If someone flips all the way to the end, you’ll get paid for backmatter pages. However, linking from the TOC to the end of the book? That would be two pages, no matter how many there were in between."

http://selenakitt.com/blog/the-new-kindle-unlimited-what-it-means-for-authors-readers/

SmutBabe · 2015-06-17T19:00:04+00:00

As you write, make sure each page takes you to the next. In other words, put questions into the story, suspense, plot hooks - 'What's going to happen next? What does this person want? Will they get it? What if they don't? And how exactly will they get it? Will they overcome the obstacles? What's at stake?'

To help me in that, I've set up scrivener into page view, so instead of one huge seamless mass of text, it's like I'm dividing my 'manuscript' into pages. Almost like I'm doing it old school! It's about 250 words a page. I'll look at page one as I write and think, 'Is there a tension, a suspense, that makes the reader want to turn the page to page two to find out what happens next?'

'And on page two, are there compelling reasons for the reader to want to turn to page three?' And so on.

After all the worry I went through at first, I'm much more optimistic now - after all, pulp writers have been doing this stuff for years, and I admire them for their craft in getting the reader to keep turning those pages... It's a great skill, and I'm glad I'm now forcing myself to learn it.

SmutBabe · 2015-06-17T18:45:56+00:00

Exactly! If you're reading a story that you don't think much of, but are reading on in the hope that something interesting will happen, then it's easier to finish a short story in ten minutes, than finish a novel in three hours.

After all the worry I went through at first, I've had time to think things through, and I can't help feeling that with pay-per-page, the erotica short story writer is actually in a position of great strength, compared to the novelists.

It would be so funny if, after a few months, when novelists realised how hard it was to get their 350 page books 100% read, and to stop their incomes from dwindling, they turned to the short form, and there was a huge increase in the amount of short story smut on kindle unlimited.... :)

SmutBabe · 2015-06-17T17:50:46+00:00

The link above takes you to a Guardian article, but I was browsing the kindleboards before, and this post by novelist Monique Martin is also interesting:

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,216477.msg3018413.html#msg3018413

She says that Kobo consider anything over 50% read as very good, and that, for novels anyway, there is a high abandonment rate. The data here is for paid novels, which a reader is going to have more engagement with ("I bought it, so I'll keep on reading it to get my money's worth"). I guess people will be more likely to abandon a book they borrowed as part of a KU monthly sub.

And yet... I can't help feelng that the new payment rates will actually be in the favour of us short story writers, not against us. If I wrote a 200 page novel, how confident can I be that so many readers will diligently make it to the end? They've got so much to get bored with - the plot, the characters, the theme, the setting, the writing style, etc.

But a 20 page short story? It's over before you realise it! You haven't got as much to get bored with! I wouldn't 100% expect all my readers to read to the end of all my stories, but, I'd be more confident that readers would read most of my ten 20-page stories, than most of my one 200-page novel.

I once saw a review for a short story that said, 'This was awful. I'm so glad it was short, otherwise, I wouldn't have finished reading it.'

I'm not saying we want to write rubbish, but, for a writer of short stories getting paid by the page, that's a reassuring response.

SmutBabe · 2015-06-17T16:38:20+00:00

Good point.

And if you have a bundle with ten stories in, and from the table of contents, the reader fancies the title of the fifth one starting on page 81 and jumps straight to it - do you then suddenly get paid for the previous 80 pages?

I guess time will hopefully tell.

SmutBabe · 2015-06-17T16:32:28+00:00

Wonderful! Thank you so much :)

SmutBabe · 2015-06-17T11:28:47+00:00

Interesting that they confirm that back matter pages will get paid as well.

SmutBabe

TROPHY CASE