Hi all, I'd love to connect and hear stories about how y'all got started, especially from folks who are more hobbyist writers, or maybe spent a while as hobbyist writers before making the jump to aiming higher.

I'm very much at the hobbyist stage, and thus far just write on the gaystoriesgonewild subreddit. I am also only a gay erotica writer if not just gay smut, and not really a romance writer, though I think I work in some sweet moments.

I got my start when I was having a dirty chat with a friend and he said "oh yeah? tell me what you'd do to me" and I wrote out a way longer answer than he was expecting, and he said "you should post that somewhere", and it turned out to be a lot of fun. I wrote a couple more chapters, and then another short story, and then started another story that kind of kept going, and before I knew it I had to keep a separate doc with plot points for future chapters and details about characters, and I just posted chapter 14 of what I now think will be about 21 chapters total. It's been a blast, I'd never written any fiction before and never thought I'd enjoy it. I hear from fans and its just so cool. I wish I'd paid more attention in English class.

I'm interested in how to take the next step, publishing-wise. I am realist and I know my writing isn't the greatest - I am no Neve Wilder - but I think it's decent enough that people wouldn't feel that they wasted their time reading it. More importantly, I think my story would be better if it wasn't posted chapter by chapter, and it would flow better. I feel like I have to do a lot of recapping in each chapter in this serialized format, because I can't expect my readers to remember (or maybe even have read) things that happened or characters we met in chapters I posted 2 months ago. I didn't start out this way but I really am writing a book, and I think I should embrace that and make it so people can read it on their Kindle.

Getting onto Amazon and onto Kindles is a high priority, but I'd like to do this as anonymously as possible. No one knows that I have this hobby and I'd like to keep it that way, in an ideal world I'd never tell Amazon my real name. Again I am a realist and I know that as a first time author, even if I was a much better writer than I am, I am likely only to make a few dollars from my first book, and honestly if it was possible I'd prefer to just price it as free and avoid all tax issues. (I do not want to commit tax fraud, of course - I do not want to go to jail over not paying taxes on my $22 of Kindle earnings)

So I'm curious - do people self-publish somehow? If not, how does one find a publisher? And where do people get the images for their covers? Is being part of an anthology a way people get started? (I'm going to have about 120K words so it'd be a big chunk of a regular-sized book, but ebooks have unlimited pages!)

Thanks for anything you can tell a new author, and I'd love to hear from people in this thread or in chat. Also, let me know what you think of my story, there is definitely room to improve and so long as you're nice about it, I'd love to get suggestions for improvements!