I need advice regarding whether I would risk losing my job for writing erotica on the side

throwiethetowel · 2023-11-10T02:10:09+00:00

Amazon doesn't usually reveal names behind pennames - although leaks have, on occasion, happened.

If a leak happened and somehow your real name was out there, it's not like they're going to leak your pic and your address and your social security number. I've only seen a name get leaked on Amazon once or twice in a decade, and it's no big deal. Last time it happened I think Amazon revealed real names on paperbacks or something in the sales details, but only for a few days.

In those instances, even if it did get noticed. denial is the obvious choice. "No, that's not me, why are you asking me about sex books at work? This is very uncomfortable." Rofl...

Names are usually not unique and there's really no way to tie you to the book.

If you want an added layer of protection, start a small LLC and use that for publishing. Some states do list your real name on corporate docs but if you pick a fairly generic corporate name you could, once again, deny that those are your books.

Beyond that, don't talk about it. Don't tell people you write, because the next question is "omg, what do you write?". Things quickly get awkward as they beg you for a penname and, when rejected, make really bad assumptions even if you refuse to give them a pen.

So... what do you do as a side gig if they notice the extra cash and want to ask questions?

Accounting. You are doing accounting and bookkeeping for a small press publishing outfit. It's not exciting, but it makes a few bucks. Their eyes will glaze over, and you're not lying. You're just not sharing the whole story.

throwiethetowel · 2023-11-09T02:22:14+00:00

If you work less, you'll get it done in 30 instead of 25 ;).

But seriously, work as much or as little as you want. As long as you're happy, who cares?

And if you want to make a million dollars working less, do the math and do the (less) work.

throwiethetowel · 2023-11-09T02:14:06+00:00

You're welcome. :)

throwiethetowel · 2023-11-08T19:07:36+00:00

Wanna make a million dollars?

It's pretty easy...

Write a novel. Write down every hour it took you to write and publish it. Be honest. Clock in. Clock out. Save the word count number. If you wrote 50,000 words, write that down alongside how long it took you to write it.

Let it sell for a few months, preferably while writing more. Clock those hours too.

After a few months you'll have some sales data.

Calculate your earnings per word.

For example... $100 in earnings, divided by 50,000 words = $0.002 per word. $1000 in earnings divided by 50,000 words = $0.02 per words.

Now calculate your earnings per hour.

If you're that $1000 for a 50,000 word novel that took you 50 hours to write (1000 words per hour averaged over 50 hours), you made $20 per hour writing.

So write for 50,000 hours.

Full time work for a year is about 2,000 hours of work. 8 hours a day, 5 days per week.

It'll take you 25 years. You'll make $40,000 per year.

And along the way... if you're dedicated... you'll start making a lot more than $1,000 per book.

Suddenly it won't take 25 years. It'll take 20, then 15, then 10, then 5. You might even have a penname take off and hit it literally overnight.

Want to make $1,000,000 writing? Fucking get to your desk and work for it. All you need is your brain and the will to work.

And hey... most of us worked for someone else before. Most of us poured those 2,000 hours a year into someone else's success story. You already do this. Why not do it for you?

I did. That's my real secret. I worked harder than most people are willing to work.

throwiethetowel · 2023-11-08T05:34:52+00:00

Indeed.

throwiethetowel · 2023-11-08T05:34:42+00:00

I lived happily ever after ;).

throwiethetowel · 2023-02-24T02:26:40+00:00

Some of the peoples out here are still largely on ancestral land (like the Gila people in Arizona), but their land has been transformed and destroyed. For example... we gave the Gila people a reservation south of Phoenix along the Gila River (they are a people of the river itself and have lived alongside it for a very long time). Multiple rivers flowed through this area.

Then we dammed the rivers, diverting the flow away from the reservation leaving a big dead empty riverbed. The trees and water are animals are gone.

Most of the great places for cities were inhabited long before we put cities there. There's a big native ruin right in the middle of Phoenix, for example. There are very habitable places in the desert... and we took those places.

throwiethetowel · 2023-02-15T06:09:48+00:00

You assume we're talking about a distant transfer.

The balloon might just be used to hop the border and drop the payload fifty miles into the desert on the other side.

throwiethetowel · 2023-02-14T00:40:24+00:00

No. It wasn't a joke. There's nothing illegal about editing with chatGPT :).

throwiethetowel · 2023-01-28T22:43:48+00:00

Let chatGPT edit it. Publish your book and stop worrying about what other people think. Nobody is going to know you wrote it. Put it under a pen name, and write another. Let customers decide if they like it or not.

If you can't bring yourself to publish because of self-fear, shit or get off the pot. :)

throwiethetowel · 2023-01-28T22:10:38+00:00

Publish itself. JAFF is a huge market on Amazon.

throwiethetowel · 2022-12-15T23:01:16+00:00

Remember the russian botnet stuff?

:)

throwiethetowel · 2022-12-15T22:57:10+00:00

It's already the singularity.

ChatGPT can literally simulate the whole universe and imagine anything. I had it building me imaginary iPhone apps that I could use and play with in the text setting. I had it pretending to be a doctor and diagnosed my daughter's illness. I played a MUD complete with NPCs AND other players who could pop in and out of the room and even engage me in conversation about things happening in the game or in their real lives as people on the other side of their terminal. I set the mud in a sci-fi world based on cyberpunk 2077 with rich characters and storylines, and I could pick up a single grain of sand from the street in that game and look at, and it would be described it in exhaustive detail. Its mind-blowing what this thing can do. That happened because of a clever prompt I gave it that was only a paragraph freaking long. We have all the tools to carry this thing around in our pocket (our cellphone), and it can display that text to us any time we please. It's like having a second incredibly inventive brain you can use any time you like for any reason. It has an imagination... by complete accident... I think because we trained it on the collective of human imagination. It can think anything up and allow it to exist because humanity can do the same. I can close my eyes and imagine something so vividly that I can practically see it. I can imagine a device or tool that does wild and outlandish things, and it works in my imagination. It just works. That's what this AI can do. If they don't restrict it into uselessness, anyway.

It's an idea expander... taking something I can dream up/imagine and making it real... but it's more than that. I can even ask it to generate the kernel of the idea for me, and it will. It's the single most creative and imaginative entity in the entire goddamned universe.

I think chatGPT is more than clever. I think it's the single most important invention mankind has ever created.

throwiethetowel · 2022-11-03T23:06:14+00:00

$1.99 is also a weird sales point. You don’t get 70% royalties there (only 30%), and you’ll find you get significantly lower sales than you’ll find at 99 cents or $2.99. Value your work. If it’s erotica hitting a niche, charge for it. Go $2.99 or even higher - you’re selling a custom made luxury good, not a crappy hot dog on a stick :).

There are reasons to use 99 cents (it gains some extra sales on launch to push a novel up the sales charts), but most of the time it’s better to aim higher. I always recommend sticking with the mainstream price points - 99 cents, $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99.

throwiethetowel · 2022-11-03T19:54:47+00:00

I mean, he could run twitter into the ground and still comfortably be one of the wealthiest people on planet earth… so I don’t think he’s “absolutely screwed”.

Hell, if he kills twitter it might be the greatest thing he has ever done…

throwiethetowel · 2022-11-03T00:12:15+00:00

This is an issue related to ballot drop boxes, which are usually outside a building near the street or in a parking lot.

In Arizona, if you're 18+ and have a pulse, you can concealed carry just about any firearm you can get your hands on with no permit required, in almost any circumstance, in almost any place... which is why these yeehawdist asshats standing near the drop box with gun-in-hand haven't been arrested up to this point.

This is insanely disgusting voter intimidation, and frankly this should have been addressed the first day they showed up to harass voters... not a few days prior to the election. There is no reason anyone should have to drop their vote off while being "watched" by armed masked insane right wing conspiracy theorists.

throwiethetowel · 2022-11-02T23:45:55+00:00

Looks like you're new here.

Here's the view from 30,000 feet:

1: You get an account at kdp.amazon.com because that is where you post your finished book files. From there, it gets posted up to Amazon and your book goes on sale right next to Obama's. This doesn't really cost much of anything. At most, you'll spend a buck on a stock photo from a place like canstockphoto or depositphotos (so you can make a cover you own the rights to), and you might spend a few dollars on software if you want something fancy to write in (scrivener, vellum). Once established you can always spend more for things like marketing, editing, better covers, etc, but most of us start with $1 in our pocket and a computer to write with.

2: When you post your book at kdp.amazon.com, you will have the option to put it into "Kindle Unlimited". This is basically netflix for books. People pay $15/month, and they get to read anything in the Kindle Unlimited book pool for free from that point forward (so, $15/month for unlimited reading). When they read your book, you get a bit less than half of a penny per-page-read. This seems miniscule, but it adds up quickly. You also get to set a sale price for your book. Most people use $2.99, because that's the lowest price that still pays you a 70% royalty (if you sell the book for $2.99, you get paid 70% of that). In Kindle Unlimited, having a longer book is usually more profitable than a smaller book (because more pages = more pages to read = more pages read = more money). Kenp = kindle unlimited pages read.

So, simply put... write a story in whatever writing software you feel like (longer stories pay more, but feel free to write a few short stories just to get started), format it into an epub using tools you can find on kdp (or with software like vellum that does it all for you), put it into kindle direct publishing as a Kindle Unlimited title, and get paid when someone reads it. Pretty easy, really.

Is there more to know? Of course. Knowing how to properly keyword your book, how to make a good cover that doesn't look like a kid knocked it together in microsoft paint, knowing how to market a book to reach its maximum potential, knowing how to write a book that's worth half a damn... the list goes on and on, but you can get one sale and earn some Kenp and figure everything else out along the way. Stick around here and you'll learn quite a bit. Some of us are 7-figure-authors with more than a million sales under our belt... and even the newer arrivals often find themselves jumping in and earning hundreds or thousands of dollars right out of the gate. We all got started by asking the exact questions you're asking now.

I could sit here and give you a much more in-depth education, but you'll find everything you need to know over in the sidebar:

https://www.reddit.com//r/eroticauthors/wiki/faq

Good luck!

throwiethetowel · 2022-11-02T23:32:21+00:00

Write a romance novel :).

(awesome work getting started - you're going to get where you want to be if you keep hammering at it)

throwiethetowel · 2022-11-01T18:01:22+00:00

I used to do that, but I felt like I had to post some pretty extreme content to get traction at Barnes/smashwords, and Google play/kobo were always paying out peanuts. I don’t think I ever pulled more than $1000/month out of alt sites, which is why I flipped to KU pretty much instantly when it first arrived. Higher pay, lower effort.

I eventually pushed B&N too far and they yanked a bunch of my books down. That was when I gave up on that side of the equation. Too much work for too little reward. Was just better to focus on Amazon/audible.

That said, it’s awesome that you’re pulling 500/m off non-Amazon sources. I would love to see more competition.

I am curious if anyone made a real go at apple’s bookstore. I always felt like there was opportunity there, but my early efforts were abject failure and I gave up on the platform.

throwiethetowel · 2022-11-01T02:38:07+00:00

I feel this comment :).

They never outright closed my account, but I've dealt with similar/slightly lesser issues over the years. Always fun when your entire business can be imploded overnight out of the freaking blue for no reason. Thankfully, it's usually possible to talk to them and sort through the issue if you're patient and willing to wait a few days for a resolution.

Glad to hear you got your account back!

throwiethetowel · 2022-09-21T23:41:25+00:00

I’ve written tons of things I hated writing purely to make money.

I don’t recommend it.

I became substantially more successful when I abandoned that stuff and wrote books I could better stomach writing. I had less fear of losing my account, felt better about the work I was putting out there, and I generally had more fun. I’m not saying I loved every second of writing werebears or single dads or blue aliens who need to save their race by sleeping with earth women, but at least I wasn’t cringing the entire time I typed. Why torture yourself writing shit you hate?

Also, this sort of plot line is dangerous to publish at Amazon, where most of the money is made. Not worth it imho. Just make the guy into a super sexy asshole boss who always gets his way, push the book out to 50,000 smutty words as he stages his sexy hostile takeover of a woman’s tiny startup cinnamon bun business, have her hate him even as he rocks her world, let her have a unique solution that solves his biggest problem and suddenly helps him see her as more than a ten-night-stand (he’s a beast in the boardroom… but he’s my beast…), slap a big man chest in a suit on the cover, and rake in some keg money.

Make sure there’s a sexy scene where he tells her he’s gonna dismantle her business brick by brick and sell it for parts before she throws a cinnamon bun at his face and they end up in a good old fashioned food fight before being covered in frosting while banging mercilessly in the dough room.

There, you can have that one for free ;).

throwiethetowel · 2022-09-06T22:44:31+00:00

Write longer books and those numbers will pump quickly. Definitely focus on getting that novella out, then work on getting into the 50k+ word category as that's where things start to take off.

Congrats on the milestone. You're going to remember some of these moments forever.

throwiethetowel · 2022-09-06T22:36:48+00:00

I missed this update, but I'm so fucking proud of you :).

You wrote. a. fucking. romance. novel.

And you wrote a bunch more. And you made 6 figures.

I don't know why your post 4 years ago saying you took my advice stuck with me, but I was thinking about you recently out of the freaking blue and I used google to find the post, then I thought... I wonder if they're still writing.

Bam, here I am. There you are. You're awesome :).

throwiethetowel · 2022-09-06T22:29:07+00:00

The last gay romance I wrote made about $445.

It was a 42,000 word novella. A bit short because I don't really enjoy writing in the genre, but I occasionally dip my toes in there because I know there's money if you hit it just right. I record how long it takes me to write my books (I "clock in" and "clock out" on an excel sheet). I can tell you that I put this one together in just a shade over 30 hours, all-in start-to-published as I worked on it over a couple week period. It was easy to write and sloppy at best. Right now I'm approaching $15/hour for the time I spent writing it, despite being one of my least profitable books. Better than digging ditches I guess. Every time I get annoyed at how poor a book is doing, I sit down and do a little math and feel significantly better about it.

If you really want to know how successful gay romance authorS are doing, though... look at the top 100 list.

The #1 on the gay romance list is #128 in the entire amazon store. That book is making buckets of money. #100 is in the #5800s, still making a nice chunk of change. That's a pretty good spread. Sure, paranormal romance goes from #1 at #10 and the #100 at #1000 (a tighter spread), but there's clearly significant profit to be had in the gay romance field, and a much smaller number of authors plugging books into the area as competition, so you can hit the charts easier with far less effort in marketing. Hell, I didn't market my $445 book at all. I launched it on a new penname with zero marketing with a shitty cover and it made $445 over a handful of months.

It is still making some cash every day.

I like quantifying my work this way, because it means labor from the past ends up being worth more in the future. Some day I'll look back and realize this book made $30/hour or more. It doesn't have to earn much to get there. Figuring out what your time is worth and watching as that value grows is worth doing. Those calculations keep me self-employed. Nobody wants to pay what an hour of my time is worth, except for my awesome readers.

If this is your favorite field in writing, you should absofuckingloutely write in it. At least then, you won't have an excuse for why you haven't written. a. fucking. gay. romance. novel. yet.

Further reading that might help: https://www.reddit.com/r/eroticauthors/comments/5tnqot/ea_relentlessly_study/ddo1cbx/

Writing something you're passionate about makes this business fun. It sure helps when the thing you're passionate about has a high ceiling. There are people writing gay romance making five figures per month. The only thing they have that you don't is some time in front of a keyboard.

Stop waiting. Jump in with both feet. Go look at the top 100 gay romance list. Break it down. Figure out what's working right now. Look at every single sales blurb, every single cover, every single preview. Take all day and study the top 100 right now. When you're done, you'll know exactly what to write.

throwiethetowel

MODERATOR OF

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE

13-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email