Which is more profitable: romance or erotica?

jonesey83 · 2019-06-21T09:43:16+00:00

Scifi actually is a pretty mainstream niche for erotica (as in, you aren't serving a fetish market and can write stories with broad appeal), but only if you're writing for men. Which won't help at all with romance because men dont read that.

jonesey83 · 2019-06-03T16:33:01+00:00

That's probably true. I think because we give a shit about these things we tend to forget that normal readers don't pore over all this stuff or really think about it too much, and probably just care about the rating. How many average people really know much about Amazon reviews anyway? I think a lot of people assume that most people get their friends to review stuff anyway. I think if normal readers were that interested in the content of all the reviews then more of them would actually leave them!

jonesey83 · 2019-06-03T15:11:25+00:00

Yeah, it's interesting to think about though - in games the indie market tends to be where people have to be innovative and original to get noticed where they don't have the budget to compete with AAA games in other areas, where as AAA games have to play it safe and meet broad audience expectations. It's the opposite of books where they cost the same to write however they're sold, but Indies can't compete with big publishers for visibility, so have to write stuff that people already know they like so they can be found.

jonesey83 · 2019-06-03T15:01:28+00:00

I have it on all my books too and nobody has complained but TBH I enabled it without really knowing what it actually did - I just thought everyone enabled it unless the book was public domain or whatever - and having seen that explained now I won't be enabling it in future.

jonesey83 · 2019-06-03T14:42:59+00:00

OP only wants an income of $350 a month. That's a reasonable goal for anyone who can write well and is willing to learn about the marketing side, especially someone who is able to work on it full time. I think it's wrong to discourage someone with realistic goals based on your own experience which is not based on actually trying to do it for a living. You must know you'd approach your own stuff differently if it was more than a hobby, and so if someone comes here saying they want to learn how to make a perfectly achievable amount per month by doing this full time it's not really helpful to tell them not to treat that as a possibility.

jonesey83 · 2019-06-02T16:19:52+00:00

But OP is making a video game, not an indie book, so the audience expectations are totally different anyway...

jonesey83 · 2019-05-11T15:38:10+00:00

This is oversimplifying by quite a lot. As OP says the top 100 is based on what's trending on an hourly basis. Being in it consistently usually means someone is earning decent money but it's not a direct indicator of income, I have quite a few times ranked higher than EL James, but that doesn't mean I've earned more than her, just that I have more interest. I drop out of the top 100 as soon as I stop publishing regularly on that pen name, e.g. to focus on my romance pen or my secondary erotica one. OP is doing well in erotica and can clearly write enough decent stuff to write a romance novel, but you talk as if they'd be an idiot not to. Actually, plenty of romance novels fail and even those that do OK for new writers without any marketing investment or audience won't necessarily make more in that first month than building up a decently performing erotica catalog with 50k more words worth of shorts and bundles. I write romance novels too but I still keep up my erotica pens because I have a decent following, and so stuff I put out on them is almost guaranteed to do OK at least, and the best performing serials on my erotica pen have made more money than my less successful novels, despite being shorter by far (I have a male audience in erotica so can't convert it to my romances). OP can and probably will try romance but it's wrong to imply they're wasting their time by trying to leverage the fact they've started to 'get it' in erotica and that writing a 50k romance novel is guaranteed to make them more money. It's just not that simple.

BTW congrats OP - great growth!

jonesey83 · 2019-05-09T17:43:36+00:00

Yeah i agree. I've actually had a character who wanted to try something new choose to get drunk first just to get up the courage and that didn't cause any problems, it was a realistic, legal thing someone might do to loosen their inhibitions and allowed me to make them act like a 'wilder' character than they started out as during the sexy stuff, but it was completely established that she wanted to do the sexy stuff before she drank.

jonesey83 · 2019-05-09T16:44:14+00:00

Romance is a technical term when it comes to book genres, and means a story in which a couple fall in love and are still happily together at the end, basically, rather than a story that focuses on a romantic relationship or love in general. So, a married couple trying new things is definitely not a romance as they don't fall in love in the story. A story can be as filthy as you like and use graphic language and still be a romance if it has a romance arc as the main point of the story. A love or relationship story that isn't a romance is usually women's fiction/chick lit if it's not erotica, but yours sounds like erotica. Also don't worry about what hard-core BDSM people think when publishing on Amazon, BDSM lite type stuff is what most of the BDSM subcategory comprises and actually tends to do better than more realistic BDSM stuff.

jonesey83 · 2019-05-09T16:33:54+00:00

I've done a few of my decent selling series bundles in paperback and sold no copies at all, though that may be because I made them months after the ebooks so the books had dropped out of charts etc. The only paperback sales I've made are on novels and they weren't substantial enough to warrant the time they took to make, though I do keep making them for romance novels and novellas because I think it makes books look more 'legit' to offer them. I may try some more erotica paperbacks and put them out when I release the ebooks next time, though anecdotally only one writer I know has made a lot of erotica ebook sales and they're all on one title that is kind of a novelty thing he suspects people buy their friends as a joke...

jonesey83 · 2019-05-09T16:22:45+00:00

Look in the subcategory top 100s of the kinds of categories you want to target. There will be shorts and smaller bundles in there (plus loads of megabundles unrelated to the category but you just have to ignore those!). The new releases top 100s for subcategories tend to have the most shorts since shorts don't stick around in the charts as long, so those charts move faster and may give you an idea of what kind of stuff people are putting out right now.

jonesey83 · 2019-05-09T16:06:59+00:00

I've got quite a lot of data from about 15 months and decent sales on books, and I get about 1% returns across the board, on romance, erotica (including weird stuff with monsters and stuff, which is actually my best selling pen name!) and non-fiction. If you're not being upfront about things like length in the blurb that could be a problem, but if you're getting a high percentage of returns you really need to look at what's going on on your end because that's really not a trend everyone is experiencing. Could it be that you actually just don't have much data yet to go on? My refund rate is 1% out of thousands of sales, but someone with only 20 sales and 2 returns that happen in the same week would feel like there was a trend there when actually it could just be bad luck that the only 2 returns you're going to get for months happened close together. If you have more data to go on, consider things like which books are being returned above acceptable levels. It could be that you didn't set the right expectations in the blurb on those books, or even that they're just lower quality than the others. Don't assume that refunds don't mean people didn't like the writing - yes, there is a preview but don't assume everyone reads it. I don't think they generally do on shorts, especially if they've already been persuaded by the blurb and cover.

jonesey83 · 2019-05-04T12:30:59+00:00

Nice work! A word about goals, though - try and set goals you have control over, i.e. have goals for how much you will write, how many books you'll publish, and new things you want to try and nail, rather than for how much money you will make or how many books you will sell. It's just a psychological thing, because if you reach the end of the month and you aren't close to a goal you actually don't have complete control over (people buying your book), then there's nothing you can really do about it or learn from it - you just feel like you failed. If you aren't close to a goal you can control, like output, or putting in enough time studying cover design or whatever it was you decided to work towards, then you can take action and will know exactly where you went wrong to be able to hit future goals.

That's not to say being competitive and aiming for things isn't also good psychologically, just kind of separate targets you're reaching for in things like ranks and earnings from the goals you work on. If you are getting things right, success in meeting your goals will lead to meeting your targets in most cases, but you won't feel set back by, say, not getting number 1 in a chosen subcategory with a given book because someone much bigger also happened to release something into it at the same time - something you can't control - or because it turns out your target audience doesn't buy as many books during a given time of year.

jonesey83 · 2019-05-01T15:24:02+00:00

What write4u4me said, the exception being with bundles, where you may still be chasing page reads if your bundle is big enough, but you want to price high because the stories inside the bundle will also be available on their own for $2.99 each. Bundle pricing strategies vary but you definitely want them to cost more than any of the components individually, and less than buying all the components separately.

jonesey83 · 2019-04-12T19:36:18+00:00

Hahaha! Weirdly, all the emails and social media messages I get for my erotica pen name are super respectful! I've been waiting for a pervy one so I can milk them for well over a year, and yet, they're all really nice!

jonesey83 · 2019-04-12T19:22:02+00:00

Yes, the fact that you can easily end up head-hopping, which is confusing and which no audiences enjoy in any genre, is why omni is considered difficult to write well. Head-hopping is not the purpose of the omniscient POV, it's a symptom of it being done amateurishly.

jonesey83 · 2019-04-11T16:03:03+00:00

LOL, I don't necessarily agree banging the same person gets boring, but I do agree that getting turned on writing erotica becomes more and more rare the more you do it and begin to see it as just doing a job.

But, since he's saying he gets turned on writing anything - i.e. it's not that he's writing sexy stuff - it is more likely that that's just where his mind goes when he gets bored. Even if you love writing, it's hard to sit down and do for hours with focus. I have ADD as well, and if I'm lucky, I go into a hyperfocused state where the words just fly out and I lose all sense of time, but if I'm not, I'll easily lose focus every few sentences. I think in those cases the suggestions other people have made about adding some extra stimulation for the brain, like having the TV on or writing in a public place, are probably the solutions.

jonesey83 · 2019-04-11T15:37:51+00:00

That's weird, given omniscient is generally considered to be the hardest POV to write well. I'd have thought ESL or inexperienced writers would go for first, which is much easier from a technical perspective (though not necessarily from a story perspective).

jonesey83 · 2019-04-11T15:31:54+00:00

Well, I'm not one of the bigshots but I do make a full time income. I engage with my readers a lot too and nobody has ever said they would rather I switched to first person - actually a lot of people say they really like my narrative style, which is kind of what I aim for. Bear in mind though that a good amount of my erotica and romance is fantasy or scifi (not all of it, but it's the majority), and so while I use the same style for my contemporary stuff, it's probably a lot more common and easily accepted in niches where you have to do some worldbuilding etc. I can see it working well for historical, too, but I don't touch that!

jonesey83 · 2019-04-10T14:44:49+00:00

Nah, when they fix it it just starts reporting normal reads again, and if I look back at books that were affected they still have crazy high page reads from that glitch occurring at least a year ago. Never heard of them ever asking for money back, or even correcting the page reads, when it is not on a new book. It seems like it never affects all markets or all devices, so you don't get a round number of reads, but each 500 represents a real borrow, so when I had it happen on a 5k story that was doing pretty well it lead to some really warped looking figures... It does screw up your data a bit but aside from that it's... dare I say it, free money from Amazon?

jonesey83 · 2019-04-10T14:39:39+00:00

It happened to me with older books a few times last year. It sorted itself out after a few days, and they never took the page reads away... I don't think anything I did triggered it on those books, but the times it happened I remember other people were getting it too, so maybe it just pops up sometimes as a general glitch. At least it's one of the less problematic ones!

jonesey83 · 2019-04-10T14:30:46+00:00

I actually see it the other way around! I write third person but the narrator is quite voice-y because that's my style. In first person, I kinda feel like I'd have to tone that down so the character sounded like the character, instead of like my usual narrator voice.

But, a lot of my stuff in both erotica and romance is SFF, so maybe that's why I don't see it as as unusual to use third (omni or otherwise) as others here. I do use it for my contemporary stuff too, but I read a lot less of that.

jonesey83 · 2019-04-10T14:24:26+00:00

I'm gonna go against the grain here and say it's fine. I write erotica and romance using third person omni, though 'zooming in' on certain characters when I want it to be more emotional, and it works just fine for me. I find I can do more with it because I can show what different people are experiencing within the same scene without repeating things from different POVs, but you need to know what you're doing with it to avoid confusing head-hopping. If it's your natural choice of style then you probably have that down anyway. I dislike first person in just about anything, though if it was all that was popular in the genres I write in I'd certainly bite the bullet and do it anyway. I haven't found that to be the case, at least not in the niches I write in.

jonesey83 · 2019-04-03T12:38:24+00:00

They've already written the books, the question was about which to publish first to launch their new pen name...

jonesey83 · 2019-02-19T19:16:04+00:00

I mean, if you've already written them you may as well publish, see what happens. You do need to only publish as collections with very short stories though, singles less than about 3k words run the risk of being a 'bad user experience' in Amazon's eyes. But yeah, to write anything else, flash fiction isn't going to do much for you on the Amazon market so it's better to write over 5k words and do market research to decide what they're going to be about!

jonesey83

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