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Raising the Dead: Clickbait

by | September 11, 2019 | | 7 Comments

Last time on Raising the Dead, we talked about your self-published stories that have just…ahem, gone to sleep. Tanked. Carked it. Better euphemisms come to mind, but Monty Python used them all in The Parrot Sketch (“’E fucking snuffed it!”) Specifically, we talked about Phase 1 of Reanimating Literary Corpses: Sexing up your Title and Keywords (also colloquially known as Hung Alien Jocks Drill Astro-Cheerleaders, though perhaps only to me).

If you’ve already read Phase 1 and applied those learnings to your dead or dying erotica, your title is now so sexy it smoulders, and your keyword game is tighter than an Icelandic nun. Should you expect to instantly start selling more books?

You already knew the answer to that, and it’s “not necessarily”. Making your eBook discoverable is just the first step in the journey. Now that you’re in a reader’s search results, what you need is for them to click.

Erotica that just Clicks

How do you choose fruit at the grocer? Do you look first at the sticker to see what variety of apple it is (Gala, Pink Lady, Fuji)? Do you look first at the price?

How about clothing? Do you look first at the label to see what fabric it is? Do you first try every outfit on to see which is most comfortable?

These are all important considerations, but they happen after the click. The click means you’re interested. The click means you might buy this product. At the grocer, the click happens when you pick up the apple. At the boutique, it happens when you touch the garment. Your focus switches from the endless variety of products that surround you to the one specific product in your hand.

In the eBook store, this focus shift happens when you click the mouse. People look, they like, then they click. They don’t look at the words though; they look at the pictures. Apples must look delicious. Dresses must look stylish/attractive.

eBook erotica must look sexy.

This is a very roundabout way of stating a simple truth: erotica is sexy. No sexy means no click. No click means no sale. If your smut’s not selling, ask yourself—is your cover sexy enough?

Define Sexy

Not everyone is going to agree with me on this. Not everybody wants a sexy slut or a well-hung hunk posing on their eBook. Some people like thought-provoking covers. Some people like minimalist covers. Some people actively look for the cover that stands out from the pack—the one that takes the road less travelled.

And they’re right. That does happen. It’s just that more people choose a sexy cover. If you don’t believe me, here’s a link to Amazon’s Erotica Top 50. Yes, there are a small number of non-sexy covers. You too might strike it lucky and sell smut without a sexy cover, be my guest, but if you want to play the numbers, stick with sexy.

So, pick a cover with a sexy model. Right?

No.

No. No. No. I can’t stress this enough. A sexy model and a sexy cover are two very different things. The biggest and easiest mistake to make is to choose a cover that is merely relevant, but not sexy. The book is about phone sex, so you pick a beautiful woman—nay, a sexy woman—holding a phone. Hear that sound? It’s your book dying. It doesn’t count that the woman is beautiful. It doesn’t even count that she’s sexy. She needs to be actively sexy. She needs to be doing something sexy. Ideally, she needs to look like she’s mere seconds away from doing something that would be considered pornographic.

Look through stock photos and mark the ones that make you feel aroused (watch out for nudity—you don’t want to be censored). I bet they’re active. I bet something is happening in the photo—or about to happen. It’s not just an image of stuff; it’s a moment from an active scene that has a very happy ending. This is the type of cover photo you want on your eBook.

Yes, your cover needs to be relevant. Don’t put a MILF on a sorority romp short. Don’t put a flat-chested waif on a BBW romance. It’s easy to over-think cover selection though—trying to find a model who looks just like your main character, hunting for elements mentioned in the story—buyers do NOT care. Remember, all you’re looking for is one click.

It’s a very simple test. If you don’t find the photo arousing—and I don’t care how perfectly, cleverly, satisfyingly relevant it is to your title—then walk away.

Actively Sexy. Got it. Anything else?

I’m tempted to say no. If you can nail an actively sexy cover, you’re nine-tenths of the way done with your erotica cover. There are still ways to screw it up with terrible cropping, futzing up the colours, using an awful font or indiscriminable text, but no amount of photoshopping is going to save you if you’ve picked the wrong image.

If you’re buying your cover or hiring a cover artist, you’re just about done. Those guys should have the skill to compose a good cover around the right image, just find and show them some stock photos that you find arousing. They can use them for inspiration. This was how we put together the cover for ERWA’s ménage erotica anthology, Twisted Sheets. We started with an idea—a near naked woman with hands all over her—and collected a bunch of sample photos for our divinely talented cover artist, Willsin Rowe. Willsin didn’t use any of those photos, but what he came up with was better even than we imagined. It was actively sexy.

If you’re doing your own cover, here are a few tips:

  • If you don’t have Photoshop, download Gimp. It’s free. It is hard to learn, but very much worth it. If you start with an easier program, you’ll top out on the features early, and then to get to the next level you’ll have to start at ground zero with Gimp or Photoshop.
  • Learn about layers and layer masks. They are critical to Gimp success.
  • Learn how to adjust brightness and contrast. There are advanced techniques that make the colours in the image pop without yellowing skin tones. Look for tutorials on YouTube.
  • Use a drop-shadow to make text more discriminable. Learn how to use gradients behind text if it’s getting lost in the image.
  • For square-ish or landscape photos, learn how to blend the edges of the photo into a background.
  • Crop the photo tight around the model. Don’t be afraid to chop off body parts, even heads, to get more skin in shot. I think it was Churchill once said, “You don’t look at the mantle when you’re stoking the fire.”

Now go get yourself some Sexy

Title and keywords make you discoverable.

An actively sexy cover makes you clickable.

Are we done with Raising the Dead? Ha! You know we’re not. Now you need to close the sale. But that’s a topic for another blog. For now, go get yourself some sexy and see if your numbers pick up.

First Edition

by | January 21, 2017 | | 2 Comments

stack of books

By Lisabet Sarai

When did books become so ephemeral?

I have a bookshelf in my apartment full of titles I’ve lugged around for most of my adult life—from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again, and then from America to Asia. Indeed, some of these books (Alice in Wonderland, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan) have been with me since I was a child. These are books I don’t want to live without. I never know when I’m going to want to re-read one of them.

Many are hard-cover. Some have begun to disintegrate with age. I recently replaced two dilapidated volumes with new editions: Little Big by John Crowley and A Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. I found it heartening that both these books, among my life time favorites and first read decades ago, were still in print.

Growing up, books were my closest friends, possessing a special magic. They seemed more real than many of the people around me. It is perhaps strange, given the fact that I started writing as soon as I knew the letters, that I didn’t fantasize about being an author. However, I had a famous author in my extended family. I knew that having penned and published a book was a major achievement.

I remember the thrill of holding the first edition of my first novel. It was a cheap paperback, printed on dingy, low-quality paper. Still, it had my name on the cover, and my words inside. At the age of forty six, I felt that I’d achieved some small measure of immortality.

Now, seventeen years later, sitting in my apartment storage room, I have at least a dozen copies of that book that I can’t get rid of. Living as I do in a conservative Asian country, I can’t just toss them in the trash. I don’t want to send them to readers; I’m only too aware of the weaknesses in that edition, hopefully remedied or at least improved in the most recent release of this title.

I have even more copies of the second edition, and the third. In fact I have author’s copies of dozens of books that nobody wants—including me.

I used to believe that books were forever. Now they’re just clutter, inconvenient and space-consuming.

And that’s print books. What about everything that I’ve written that has been released only in electronic form? Talk about ephemeral! In a couple of decades, as technology and file formats change, it may not even be possible to read those books. (This is assuming that people will still know how to read.)

All the blood and sweat I put into those books, the energy and the love, produced nothing more than a collection of bits, easily erased by a random cosmic ray or an erroneous mouse click. Definitely a bit discouraging.

Books these days are ephemeral in another sense, too. In the days of traditional printing, it was expensive to release new editions. The text of a novel was more or less fixed.

In contrast, when I scroll through the directories on my hard drive, I find multiple versions of almost everything I’ve written. It’s so easy to tweak a tale for a new audience. Sometimes the changes are sufficiently large that it should really be considered a new book.

Which version is the “real” book? When future generations of students study my work (ha!), which file will be take as the authoritative text, from a literary analysis point of view?

Do you know how many e-books are published now, every day? Thousands. One estimate I found said there are 40,000 new ebook titles on Amazon each week.

Even as a reader, I’ve started to treat books as temporary, disposable commodities. Mostly, my DH and I don’t hold on to books anymore, unless they’re among the best things we’ve ever read. We tend to buy in used bookstores, and pass the volumes along when we’re done with them.

Still, there must be some readers out there like me, readers who remember the books that touched them most deeply, who want to make sure they have copies for the future. I recently got a request to reprint a story I wrote ten years ago. A few people, I guess, pay attention to what I’ve written. A few people remember.

Meanwhile, when my husband went to a used bookstore recently looking for new reading material, he found a copy of Raw Silk front and center on the shelves, staring at him. First edition.

I do hope someone buys it—to keep the story alive.

Does a Print Option Lend Credence?

by | May 23, 2015 | | 2 Comments

by Lucy Felthouse

A while back, I posed the question on my Facebook page about whether, if I put one of my self-published titles into print via Createspace, people would want to buy it. I got various responses, most of which were favourable, so I did indeed go through the process of putting the title into print on demand.

But a comment one person made really made me think. I can’t remember the exact wording they used, but it was something along the lines of, if an eBook is also available in print, it makes it appear more professional, less like a self-published title. Even if it is self-published. Apparently, it just gives the impression of more professionalism, probably something to do with that if the author has gone to the trouble of putting the book into paperback format, that they’ll also have gone to the trouble of getting the book properly edited, formatted, etc. I can understand the thinking – we all know how many crappy quality books are out there, and not just self-published ones, either. We have to battle against opinions that eBooks are somehow inferior to print books, and also, that indie published stuff hasn’t been professionally produced. It’s infuriating, but there it is. All we can do is hope our books get into people’s hands, and that those people will then leave positive reviews on Amazon. Or even negative ones, if they didn’t like the story – you can win ’em all, after all – but at least if they make no comment on terrible formatting, spelling, grammar and so on, then at least other readers can rest assured that the book’s been done right.

But simply selling a book in both eBook and print format – does that give it extra credence? Make you more confident you’re buying a quality product? There’s no right or wrong answer here, guys, I really want to know what you think. As I said, the original commenter really gave me pause for thought, as it wasn’t something I’d considered before, so your opinion would be much appreciated. And please, share the post and encourage your friends to weigh in, too. It’s a very interesting topic, so the more opinions, the better.

Happy Reading!
Lucy x

Author Bio:

Lucy Felthouse is a very busy woman! She writes erotica and erotic romance in a variety of subgenres and pairings, and has over 100 publications to her name, with many more in the pipeline. These include several editions of Best Bondage Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica 2013 and Best Erotic Romance 2014. Another string to her bow is editing, and she has edited and co-edited a number of anthologies, and also edits for a small publishing house. She owns Erotica For All, is book editor for Cliterati, and is one eighth of The Brit Babes. Find out more at http://www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk. Join her on Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to her newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9

Print v. Ebook: The Never-Ending Debate

by | January 28, 2015 | | 4 Comments

Elizabeth Black writes in a wide variety of genres including erotica, erotic romance, and dark fiction. She lives on the Massachusetts coast with her husband, son, and three cats. Visit her web site, her Facebook page, and her Amazon Author Page.

Print versus ebook? That’s the big question. According to Waterstones, ebook sales have plummeted while print book sales have soared. Then again, according to The Guardian, print book sales have declined as readers migrated to ebooks.

The Guardian described the dilemma in this fashion:

A review of 2014 from book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan shows that while the decline in sales of print books in the UK slowed last year, with value sales down 1.3% to £1.39bn, and volume sales down 1.9% to 180m, the performance for printed adult fiction was markedly worse. The adult fiction market was the worst-performing of all areas of the book business, down by 5.3% in 2014 to £321.3m, with volume sales down 7.8% to 50.7m. In 2009, printed adult fiction was worth £476.16m.

The decline is even greater when paperback fiction is removed from the picture: according to Nielsen, hardback adult fiction sales plummeted last year by 11.6% to £67.9m, with just three titles – by crime and thriller bestsellers Lee Child, CJ Sansom and Martina Cole – selling more than 100,000 copies.

“The ebook has quite demonstrably hit the commercial end of the fiction market,” said the Bookseller’s editor Philip Jones. “Almost any drop in adult fiction sales can mainly be put down to the migration to digital, which is obviously still continuing. We think consumer ebooks this year will be worth £350m, with most big publishers reporting ebook growth of double digits – and almost all of that will be in fiction.”

Which way is it? Are ebooks on their way out or are print books on the rise?

Articles like these have predicted the end of the ebook “trend” since digital formats became popular with the emergence of the Nook and especially the Kindle. That simply is not the case. Information Today reports that “The most recent AAP data, from December 2014, covers the first three quarters of 2014 and shows that revenue from 1,209 publishers was up 2.8%. “In terms of formats, ebooks were up, hardbacks were down, and paperbacks were up. Total ebook revenues increased by 5.6% over 2013 (to $1.2 billion from $1.13 billion),” The Digital Reader’s Nate Hoffelder notes.”

Deloitt’s 2015 Canadian Technology, Media, and Telecommunications predictions indicated that print book sales would climb four times higher than ebook sales. High end literary fiction such as Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” sell well in print. Children’s books also continue to do well in print.

Print books have their benefits as well:

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as holding a paperback or hard cover book in your hand if you’re a writer.

You can sign print books. Yes, you may sign ebooks with an ebook signature but it’s just not the same.

Having physical books for potential readers to handle and buy at conventions makes it easier to sell books than pushing ebooks on browsers in the same venues.

There is satisfaction in the feel of a print book. The tactile sensation of holding paper and the “new book smell” are very appealing.

Sadly, some do not consider ebooks “real” books. A physical print book may hold more psychological clout than a digital book.

It seems that people are not reading less. A contrasting report showed that readers are migrating from print books to ebooks. Ebooks are the wave of the future, and they have many benefits:

You can store hundreds of books on an ebook reader, which is great if you don’t have much room for numerous bookcases.

Readers of erotic fiction in particular are especially attracted to ebook readers because these ereaders give them privacy. They don’t have to worry about getting the raised eyebrow from onlookers who see a paperback with
scantily clad women and muscle-bound beefcakes on the covers. Ebook readers are lightweight and easy to use.

You can adjust the size of the font with an ebook reader. This especially benefits those with poor eyesight.

Some ebook readers light up, eliminating the need for a book light.

Ebook readers don’t crease or get coffee stains on the pages.

As before mentioned, erotic romances sell well in digital format. According to erotic writer Selena Kitt, sales of erotica alone have driven the rise of the ebook and ebook reader more than any other genre. Despite that fact, major retailers have cracked down on questionable titles including incest, pseudo incest, bestiality, and rape fantasy as well as the new trend monster porn (think Bigfoot or a T-Rex as the love interest, and you have this very strange subgenre.). Despite the pitfalls and fickle nature of some retailers, erotic fiction continues to be the top
seller of all the genres.

Despite many doomsday predictions, ebooks and ebook readers aren’t going away. Not by a long shot. Print books will always be popular, but ebooks are here to stay. It really doesn’t matter whether or not a person picks up a Kindle or a paperback. As long as they read, book retailers, publishers, and writers will be happy.

Not Naughty, Not Nice

by | December 21, 2012 | | 20 Comments

By Lisabet Sarai


Warning: rant alert.

I had planned this month to blog about
symbolism, allegory, allusions and archetypes, and how these can add
depth and substance to erotic writing. However, then I read a book
I’d agreed to review (without knowing anything about it), and found
myself so massively annoyed that I just had to vent.

I haven’t encountered such dreadful
writing in quite a while. Malapropisms (“intangibly bright eyes”,
“moved in perfect synchronicity”). Point of view that wanders
from one character’s head to another within a single sentence.
Stereotypically extreme descriptions of anatomy,with every cock
enormous and every breast and ass “large, round and firm”.
Typographical errors (“nearly identikit paths”) and grammar
gaffes (“grinded”) that suggest no editor ever came near the
book.

The novel does offer a great deal, and
considerable variety, of sex. Some scenes definitely deserve the
label “gratuitous”, in the sense that they involve minor
characters and are completely irrelevant to the plot. Other scenes
are so extreme that they struck me as ridiculous. I suppose that if
one is looking for pure sexual fantasy, realism doesn’t matter, and
I’m sure there are readers who would buy this book for the sex alone.
The sex, though, is just as poorly written as the rest of the book, a
strange mixture of sterile physical descriptions and romance-tinted
purple prose. (I’m sorry, but I can’t read the word “manhood” in
a gang-bang orgy scene with a straight face.)

This novel was not, as you might
suspect, self-published. On the contrary, it comes from a well-known
publisher, a publisher that I would have expected to have higher
standards – or at least better editors.

Why am I so upset about this? It’s only
one book.

The crux of the problem is – it’s
not. I’d like to believe this particular novel is an anomaly, but
the last three books from this house that I’ve reviewed have
exhibited similar, though perhaps less extreme, problems.
Furthermore, I’ve encountered the same issues in recent books from
other high-profile erotic imprints.

This book is symptomatic of a
unfortunate trend in the erotica publishing world, namely, a willingness to
accept and release pretty much anything, as long as it includes
plenty of sex. Publishers are choosing quantity over quality.

In fact,
this might be considered a rational business decision, because they
have very little to lose.

Ebooks have radically altered the
economics of bringing books to market. Authors no longer receive
advances, so if a book doesn’t sell, the company doesn’t need to pay
the writer anything. There’s no risk involved in accepting practically every manuscript submitted. Meanwhile, production costs for ebooks are minimal.
The only expenses a publisher shoulders are the labor costs involved
in editing, formatting the manuscript and submitting it to sales
outlets. (It appears that some companies are deciding to skip the
editing process, in order to improve profits.)

In the days of print,
publishers had to bear the financial consequences of bad decisions
regarding who to publish. This tended to make them at least somewhat
selective. Now, from a publisher’s perspective, selectivity has
almost zero advantage. The more books they release, the more money
they make, especially since readers’ appetite for sexually-themed
ebooks appears to be insatiable.

What about reputation? That’s a good
question. Have these companies no shame? I’d be horribly embarrassed
to put my name on a product like the book in question.
Apparently such considerations doesn’t enter into the equation for
these companies, at least when balanced against cash.

Maybe I’m just an elitist snob. Perhaps
an author’s writing skill doesn’t matter at all. A survey of the
Amazon reviews for the book in question suggests there’s some truth to this
theory. The ratings are pretty much divided between five stars and
one star, but quite a few readers claim to have loved the novel. Why
should my opinions be any more valid than theirs?

Well – I am an author, an editor
and a reviewer, who has been involved in erotica publishing for more
than a decade. Although it’s commonly believed that anyone can write
an erotic story, I know that it takes serious effort and determined
practice to capture the elusive nature of desire. Perhaps it is true,
though, that almost anyone can write a story that includes sex, if
all that’s needed is the tab-A-in-tab-B nuts-and-bolts (or the
nuts-and-cunts, if you will). It may be that this is all that readers
want, after all – not insight, not joy, not surprise – just plain
old down-and-dirty sex that they can wank to.

I’ve got nothing against wanking. But
that’s not enough to satisfy me as a reader – or as an author.

Publishers used to act as gatekeepers.
Authors would lament that fact. We all complained about how our opus
languished in the slush pile, ignored or rejected by those who had
the power to turn us into best-sellers. The gates are wide open now;
the slush-pile gets simply shoveled out onto Amazon and iTunes.

This is bad news for those of us who do
care about quality writing. Our creations, the children of our souls,
drown in the vast sea of (often terrible) quasi-porn that is now
called erotica. It’s trivially easy to get published and nearly
impossible to get noticed.

I’m tempted to publicly take the
publishers to task here, to broadcast the fact that they’re putting
out shoddy products. Unfortunately, I suspect it would make no
difference. The only kind of protest I can make is resolving not to
submit my work to them. But of course they couldn’t care less. They
have hordes of eager wannabee writers sending in their stories,
dreaming of fame and fortune. They don’t need me.

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

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