|
I guess it depends. On one end of the scale, you've got AO who is literally researching which kink, book length and price point is selling, and then nailing the marketing to get it in front of as many people as humanly possible. Then on the other end there's Duke, who's having fun writing what he loves and the money is kind of an incidental side effect of that. And plenty of people in between who are doing some variety of the two. From my perspective, writing formulaic romance is not something I can do - I've tried and I just don't think the end result is inspired or enjoyable to read. But i'm not going to pretend it's a miserable grindstone either, a lot of people really enjoy it. Similarly, not everyone who publishes outside of romance is a penniless hippie. So I guess there's room for both? I mean if you want writing to be your main job then romance is certainly more straightforward and more likely to succeed, but that's not to say that you can't be happy with other genres.
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2016 02:40
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 17:25 |
|
|
I think Moana's caveat is that Duke is incredibly lucky, in that what he loves writing is marketable and has a broad appeal. Duke seems to be using this as proof that anyone can do it without realising exactly how rare that is. You made the point earlier that unless you're extremely weird, other people will share your interests. We are literally discussing this on a site with a front page dedicated to how weird people on the internet are. For every Hard Luck Hank that manages to get away with it, there are a hundred unknowns churning out fanfic and mary sue poo poo and wondering why nobody's buying. And I'm not talking about making big bucks or even a living from it, i'm talking about a basic level of readability. Moana's point was not that writing is a fiscal risk like daytrading, but that not everyone has the right stuff to do it. Daytrading is a good analogy in this respect, because while lotteries are the usual metaphor, you can use research / skill to gain an edge with daytrading and self publishing. But the way the system currently works, not everyone can do it. I mean it's fantastic that it worked for you, but it's slightly disingenuous to pretend that everyone can or should just write what they want.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2016 10:55
|
|
|
Cast_No_Shadow posted:You read it. You can't unread it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2016 15:49
|
|
|
thewhitehand posted:Why is the link to the goonreads site broken?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2016 23:34
|
|
|
angel opportunity posted:I think if anyone is still in erotica...now would be a good time to start writing romance. I'm not so much lamenting my own position here as imagining an army of socially inept lurkers taking your advice, and Amazon getting flooded with 99c serials about Whiteknight McGoodman arguing his way out of the friendzone.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2016 11:50
|
|
|
I used to work in IT, and regularly ate laptops. That advice makes absolutely no sense.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2016 23:00
|
|
|
Jalumibnkrayal posted:It begins.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2016 16:07
|
|
|
$75 worth of free advertising for new customers. Can't verify it's results, reliability or that it's not a scam, but it looks moderately legit. Also it says genre doesn't matter, so I guess smut is ok?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2016 02:26
|
|
|
EngineerSean posted:Amazon doesn't feel the need to comment, ever, because they're the biggest game in town and believe that they always will be. Nobody is even bothering to compete against them so it's really not ridiculous. It smacks a little of monopoly, the way they sell the most e-readers and control the easiest way of getting the books onto them. I don't know about you, but if a book is the same price on Amazon and Smashwords, i'll buy it on Amazon so it downloads straight to my kindle. I can't be arsed transferring files, and i'm a moderately tech-savvy ex helpdesk worker. I think the reason that their control of the market is so huge lies somewhere between the two. Selina Kitt started her own smut distribution site, but it's barely doing 1% of Amazon's business from what I understand. I suspect that even if all of Amazon's romance authors banded together and launched their own site, they'd still hit the wall of the books being hard* to get onto kindles. * harder than most readers are willing to go through vs just instantly downloading on Amazon. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Mar 6, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2016 14:54
|
|
|
Beast Pussy posted:I'm going to set myself 1000 word a day minimum, and try my hand at the romance/ erotica paint by numbers that's been discussed here. I'm not afraid of hard work, or failure. I am hesitant to write a 50k word romance monster (or monster romance) that both don't enjoy and sucks out loud. From what I can tell, short 3-6k Erotica is now dead in the water as a revenue source, unless you put in the kind of time and resources you could throw into any other home business and make a lot more. Writing 50k is not a daunting task if you want to throw 1,000 words a day at the project. Look at it this way: 2 months of that, and you'll have had time to complete a first draft and redraft it a little to send it off to an editor. Grab some books on structure and set yourself word count targets. If you really want to do it, the current state of play is that it's going to have to be either a 50k novel or a couple of 10-15k serials.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2016 15:49
|
|
|
angel opportunity posted:I don't like it as a visceral thing even after having finished six novels now, but I like it as a "crafted product" if that makes any sense.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2016 16:03
|
|
|
Popular Human posted:edit: lol, I kill this thread every time I post Although i'm starting to get sick of everyone bad-mouthing self pub automatically. I'm always interested when people talk about it being 'less of an option,' how much of that is based on statistics, and what percentage of those figures are based on eBook self publishing vs. physical self publishing (i.e. going to the printer yourself, distributing and advertising locally etc - the old school vanity publishing market).
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2016 09:05
|
|
|
EngineerSean posted:before I even clicked it, I knew which irrelevant two-year-old article from the UK you were linking
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2016 21:17
|
|
|
Scrivener 50% off until March 25th. Windows / Mac
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2016 11:48
|
|
|
Bear in mind though that this is the internet, so you don't want your only reviews to be 1 star diatribes from angry redditors complaining about technicalities.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2016 19:39
|
|
|
Quick question / confirmation. Thinking about going for this competition with my current work in progress. My current quandry though is that if it doesn't win, I don't want to end up missing out on the free Amazon promo when it first comes out. Looking at the terms, it looks like inkshares offer a non-exclusive option. Can I put the stuff on there, and then if I'm not in the competition, just withdraw it and then publish exclusively on Amazon to take advantage of the KU promos?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2016 13:47
|
|
|
The one I was already working on is futurism, mining on mars in 2050. They keep using the Martian as an example so it seems appropriate. The major sticking point is that i'm going for a dark comedy feel, and i'm not sure that's what they're looking for.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2016 21:13
|
|
|
I have to say, mentoring puppy authors for a percentage of their first book sounds like something you guys could easily do. I know one on one advice usually isn't worth the time you could have been spent writing, but maybe a cut of the profits in exchange for an email or two every day might be worth it?
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2016 12:38
|
|
|
Damnit i'm nearly there, keep going
|
|
#
¿
Jun 10, 2016 15:59
|
|
|
its one of the few times that pulling out works in erotica 
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2016 14:00
|
|
|
Barnes & Noble are going to start selling self pubbed books in stores. Thoughts?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2016 15:31
|
|
|
"Can I just check if you have a book in stock?" "Certainly sir, what was the author's name?" "Chuck Tingle. C H U C -" "Get out."
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2016 19:44
|
|
|
Popular Human posted:I'd argue that you could call Chuck Tingle an author working in 'absurdist fiction', but yeah. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Jul 13, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2016 16:35
|
|
|
Bardeh posted:He's also got a huge back catalog, and I'm still convinced that he's just a side project for an already successful romance author.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2016 18:11
|
|
|
syscall girl posted:A g-g-g-gay man? Is urban fantasy erotica a thing? It must be. Mustn't it?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2016 23:31
|
|
|
So let me get this straight, when we write short stories, they're bad and stupid and we should feel bad and stupid. But when James Patterson does it...
|
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2016 23:07
|
|
|
That's almost perfect (I did think it needed more of a margin) but the fact that 'night' and 'people' aren't the same width is very grating.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2022 13:42
|
|
|
I personally think it looks better, be interested to see what others think. (My inner nitpick thinks the name at the top is so close to lining up with the invisible margin it'd be a shame to leave it like that, but that's probably just me). E: demonstrating how at the moment it's subtly misaligned: : 
Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Apr 22, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2022 16:36
|
|
|
What would be the thread's opinion on using an AI cover, and then replacing the cover with a proper one once you have the money to pay an artist?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2022 14:10
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 17:25 |
|
|
It's almost as though automating these processes without human oversight is an inherently bad idea.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2022 01:25
|
|