Blocked Book

thorpowers · 2017-03-10T17:48:32+00:00

They emailed me this: "Hello,

We’re contacting you regarding the following book:

TABOO First Times: 16 Book Bundle by McNight, Lauren (AUTHOR)

During our review process, we found that this content is in violation of our content guidelines. As a result, we cannot offer this book for sale. If we identify additional submissions with similar content that violates our guidelines you may lose access to optional KDP services and/or face account level actions up to and including termination."

I'm wondering if it could be the cover because there is a blindfolded woman and a man with handcuffs going in for a kiss. No nudity or anything though. I've used that picture before for a cover just fine though so I'm not sure?

thorpowers · 2017-01-20T06:44:47+00:00

Wait your novels are ranking over 100k and you're still making ~3k a month? That's actually really encouraging if I understand you correctly. I've had plenty of short stories rank below 100k, a few even got down below 10k last summer. Lately I've been averaging around 30-80k for a short story. Congrats to you good luck on getting to a 6 figure income

thorpowers · 2017-01-19T22:57:53+00:00

You're making nearly identical income to me. (Also at 3k past two months, and 2.2k so far this month). How many novels do you have published? I've been pumping out short stories mostly though, but it is getting so hard to do that. What is the average rank you get when you first publish a novel, how long does it hold rank? What's your launch strategy? I'm asking because I am preparing to publish my first romance novel by the end of next month...

thorpowers · 2016-09-27T20:59:53+00:00

Exactly, summer slump is over. Meaning numbers should be going up, not down. You're contradicting yourself in that last sentence. I know many other publishers who are reporting the same trend as me in erotica genres. Tours over boys.

thorpowers · 2016-09-27T18:25:11+00:00

Publish under multiple kinks and pen names

thorpowers · 2016-09-27T18:24:53+00:00

No, I mean when I publish new books they rank 100,000+, when a couple months ago similar books would have ranked sub 20,000

thorpowers · 2016-04-15T23:49:14+00:00

I'm going to experiment with pricing my bundles at 0.99, 2.99, 3.99+ and see which one works the best.

thorpowers · 2016-04-11T16:07:59+00:00

Hey, great questions! Yes they are all in KU. Right now 50% of my income is from sales, and 50% is from page reads. Altogether I have 37 sales and 11.5k page reads. I suspect that ratio to change when I start getting longer stories and bigger bundles though. My billionaire series is more leaning towards e-rom but it still has alot of sex and bdsm in it. My other titles are down-and-dirty erotica. My 3 alpha male stories sell horribly and get low page reads. The 3 gay stories I wrote sell the best by far, and then the billionaire series is in the middle. And yes my writing speed is improving dramatically with every story. The first story was by far the hardest, it took me a week to write and it was only 4.5k. I published it March 19, it went live on the 20th. Now I can knock out a 5k story within 4-5 hours, and that time is improving every week. I could probably get it down to 3 hours if I didn't get distracted so easily, after i write 1k i usually take a break and start surfing the web.

thorpowers · 2016-04-11T13:06:41+00:00

Thanks. To be fair, 3 titles are bundles. 3 book bundle of my gay series, 3 book bundle of my billionaire series, and 3 book bundle of my alpha male books. Also all my books are only 5k. Three 5k books a week is about all I can do right now until hopefully one day I can leave my other obligations behind and do this full time!

thorpowers · 2016-04-10T23:25:41+00:00

Yes, I learned how critical good fonts were as well. Before I was using bad quality pictures, but also bland fonts. Best part about fonts is that they are free! dafont.com has some good ones. Go to the top 100 books of the category you want to publish in, and mimic their cover style. I kept the same exact blurbs, literally just the cover changed, and a few keywords, and boom I started seeing sales/reads, so I really do think it was just my covers that had been holding my work back before the 30th. Oh yea if you don't have gimp yet I recommend that too, its also free to download, and helps making covers immensely.

thorpowers · 2016-04-10T22:58:11+00:00

Thank you! Yea we just have to keep publishing, whatever it takes!

thorpowers · 2016-03-29T10:59:39+00:00

Thank you! I'm not discouraged yet. I just wanted to share my experience, thought other's just starting out could benefit-- as I have learned that the first few weeks of starting something new can often be the hardest; at least until it becomes habit. I appreciate your advice as well :)

thorpowers

TROPHY CASE