Larry Archer

Ooooh, a Shiny Object!

Well, it’s that time of year, when we generally look back on all the things, we did right but typically remember those times when we stepped on our dick. Let’s be honest, the lessons that hurt are the ones we generally remember best.
This year I’m going to focus on one resolution, and that is to avoid looking at shiny objects. I have a bad habit of getting distracted and not finishing the story I’m working on as I get a new idea about a different story. When the dust settles, I end up with multiple stories in various stages of completion.
This year, I’m going to try and finish one thing before I start another. Checking my Draft folder, I see that there are 173 document files in it. If I assume that there are a certain number of auxiliary files, then this means that since I started writing smut in 2012, I’ve published about 25 stories yet have over a hundred waiting in the wings.
It’s so hard for me though and like when I see a pretty girl, my attention is instantly glued to the shiny new object. All other things fall by the wayside. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I’d finish one story before starting another, but I end up with a bunch of stories that are 25% -75% completed and only need a little push to put them over the top and out the door.

While I realize I should become a better person, lose weight, and stop jerking off so much, I’m not going to strive for something I’ll never accomplish. I’m going to try and do one thing for a change; finish a story before starting the next one.

I’ll do that right after I finish the four stories I currently am working on in rotation!

I certainly know better as I can watch my sales at Amazon and see the dreaded 30-day cliff when my latest story becomes old news and starts to drift off into the sunset. Just like the little engine that could, I can do it, I can do it.

I was reading Lisabet’s latest blog posting about how she got started writing smut, and my path was a similar one except for the fact that I previously hated to write. As an engineer, it seems to be a part of our genetic makeup that writing is always a struggle for us. We are much better at making something rather than telling someone how we made it.

I guess my first masterpiece after college was a paper I wrote on how to throw a swinger’s party. Foxy and I used to give presentations on throwing house parties back when we lived in the mid-west. You’d think it wouldn’t be that complicated to take your clothes off and lie in a pile, but it’s harder than you would expect.

Not trying to pat myself on the back, because it always makes my shoulder sore, we are reasonably successful at throwing parties. I can only remember one party when we invited someone we didn’t know, and the guy got belligerent and drunk. The couple we knew had vouched for them and against our better judgment extended them an invitation.

Our New Year’s Pajama Parties are typically 50-60 couples plus a few Unicorns and stags. The party normally lasts several days or until the next normal work day. After the first night, it’s down to about ten couples who we are very close with and with that one exception, always trouble free.

With several cops, strippers, a surgeon, a paramedic, and a forensic pathologist typically in attendance, we’re prepared for most situations. We can cover you coming and going!

The only problem having a party is that we don’t get to party much as watching out for everything is a full-time job. For us, constantly circulating to check the rooms, restock the towels, and change sheets takes most of our attention.

My first erotic story, Fantasy Swingers, was the offshoot of reading a poorly written story on Literotica and telling myself, “I can do that!” While struggling with the technicalities of proper English, I find that smut will pour out of my keyboard like a kicked over can of beer.

Swingers are still an ostracized group like the LGBTQ folks used to be, and I doubt that we’ll ever be fully accepted, but that’s okay as it’s a lot of fun and never a dull moment. Back home, we had a swinger’s bowling league, Friends and Lovers, that offended the other bowlers but it was amusing and would break up the work week on Wednesday night.

You would hear catty remarks about the girl’s low cut tops or short skirts and that generally encouraged them to be even more outrageous. A lot of women in the Lifestyle are exhibitionists, and the show is always a hoot. The manager at the bowling alley always bought the girls drinks and told us how much we boosted his business.

Unlike our current president, when I look back on 2018, I think it has been a successful year, all things considered. My only advice is first take a breath before proceeding.

Merry Christmas to all, and visit me at LarryArcher.blog for all your smut. Until next month.

Boobs, Beemers and SmashWords

by

Larry Archer

Warning Non-PC Message Follows

One of the first things you realize about Las Vegas, a.k.a. Sin City, is vanity and show. Nowhere else in the world, except maybe on Rodeo Drive will you find as many boob jobs and fancy cars prowling the streets.

Being in the Lifestyle, it’s common to see women who’ve had some work done, as the saying goes but here everywhere you go they are in your face. We moved to Vegas from the mid-west, where things move at a much slower pace, and the women and cars are much plainer except maybe my wife, but she’s an exception. I had to throw that in, or she’d be pissed.

Dr. Jim’s Trophy Wife

Our plastic surgeon friend Doctor Jim and his demo wife are a typical example. I doubt if there is an original part on her body except for maybe her heels, and nicely rounded they are. For a fortyish MILF Hotwife, she has the best body money can buy, and she even gets an employee discount.

He keeps telling me that a couple of 500cc implants would fill Wifey out nicely but I’m terrified that something will go wrong. Plus, I’m more of a leg guy than a boob guy and like her just the way she is. This is laughable in several ways, two of our closest girlfriends (a.k.a. Unicorns) have ginormous hooters, one real and one not. But, I love them for their minds!

Here you go to the grocery store, and it’s all you can do to not get an eye poked out. One of our neighbors is a dancer at a local gentleman’s club. She’s a little Asian who is so top heavy I don’t understand why she doesn’t fall over when she stands up. She told me that a big rack is worth at least $50K a year and I can believe her. We men are so easy to manipulate, show me your tits and I’ll follow you anywhere!

She’s one of the few dancers I’ve ever known with a decent brain and doesn’t just stuff her money up her nose or give it to a drug-addicted boyfriend, who is jobless and plays in a band. She owns five houses and drives a new Denali. Plus, she just gave her boyfriend a new Infinity. She’s 28 and at the tail end of her career. She figures that she will last maybe another five years, so she’s already planning for retirement.

In Vegas, strippers/dancers have to pay to work, and it costs every girl typically one-hundred dollars a night to work. What other profession makes you pay to come to work? It just shows how much money passes through the typical club. You hear stories all the time of bouncers who drag an indebt customer to the ATM so he can get money to pay off the dancers and not suffer a broken leg.

There was a big lawsuit, a couple of years ago, about a guy from Kansas who was beaten up so bad that he’s now partially paralyzed and won a settlement for several million dollars from the club. So let that be a lesson to you, make sure you have enough money to pay for that lap dance beforehand.

Now that we’re in Sin City, we seldom go to a strip club as they are not the same. Back home, clubs were much friendlier, with less high pressure. We knew a lot of the dancers, and they would often come to our house parties. One girl, Linda, looked exactly like my wife, close enough to be twins, and they always told people that they were sisters (incestuous sisters at that)!

Another thing you’ll notice is that everyone drives a Mercedes, Beemer, or other fancy set of wheels. A business associate of mine drives a new blue Mercedes GLC, and I know for a fact that she’s spending a big chunk of her paycheck for her ride. I like to have a nice car, but I don’t need to spend the majority of my pay for one. Wifey has a red Lexus ES350, but I have simpler tastes and have downgraded from my usual Suburban to a Honda CRV EX-L.

Foxy is extremely outgoing and as my Mom says, “Would talk to a fence post.” We hadn’t been in town long before she met two women on the Strip, who are prime examples of Vegas excesses. One girl drives an SL class Mercedes convertible and the other a beautiful baby blue Bentley. They are both a product of too much money and too much free time but I love them both, and so far they’ve kept my wife somewhat out of trouble.

So if you ever consider moving to Sin City, put enough money aside for a boob job and a nice set of wheels.

Changes at SmashWords

The other thing in the news is that SmashWords has redone their site and hopefully it doesn’t screw up author’s sales too badly. Now what you see is about a 100-pixel wide cover image along with the story title and author’s name. The description is gone and allows the prospective reader to see more stories at a glance as they scroll horizontally.

I browsed the section on Men’s Erotica – Best Sellers and found five or six of my stories, so at least for me, I’m currently happy. SmashWords has published over 500,000 stories, which is amazing in itself after being in business for ten years.

They’ve changed their search and ranking algorithms and only time will tell how that works out. There’s a nice blog posting by Mark Coker on what they did. You can now make better choices on what you see or don’t see on their site, which hopefully will make readers happy and less offended by our smut.

Up until the last couple of months, about two-thirds of my meager author’s income came from SmashWords and their down market. But recently Amazon is running three or four times my SmashWords bucks. The only explanation I have is my latest two stories were released narrow and in Kindle Unlimited. So far it doesn’t seem to have hurt my SmashWords sells as my SW volume is up about 20% over average, but I need to finish up some stories that I can publish wide to keep my dogs in Blue Buffalo.

My last new novel, House Party, an 85,000-word novel of pretty much nonstop F’ing and S’ing was published narrow at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Previously, I’d poo-pooed distributing solely through Kindle and Kindle Unlimited, but have been amazed at my sales. While I don’t know how sales would have gone through SmashWords, they’ve been great at Amazon. House Party was released the first week of October, and for the next four to six weeks, my author’s rating has averaged below 1,000 and all the way down to a little over 100. The first couple of weeks, my author’s rating was in the 100-300 bracket. House Party hit a high best sellers rank of 30 in Erotica – Mystery & Erotica – Thrillers, and is the first story I’ve ever written that the best sellers rank was below a 100 and the story stayed in double digits for a long time.

While I haven’t ranted about it, I am amazed at the number of four-letter words in the titles of stories at SmashWords. I write strictly stoke material but would never use “fuck” or “cunt” in a story title. My stories are as dirty as the next pervert, but I do have my limits. Mark Coker of SmashWords is to be commended on his allowing the most juvenile of story titles to be published without complaint.

Several months ago, SmashWords implemented a voluntary categorizing of story content. When you publish a story (and previous ones), you have a checklist of about 10 categories that you answer a Yes/No question to things like “Does the story include screwing your Mother?”

At first, there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth at the conspiracy theories about what Mark was really up to. I could see their point to try and maximize distribution while not offending those publishers with sensitive tastes.

So far, it doesn’t seem to have changed anything, but then my smut doesn’t usually involve large groups and Vaseline. Well, maybe the Vaseline and possibly the groups but you know what I mean.

The thing I love about SmashWords is they don’t nickel and dime you about story content or the cover image. I hate it when Amazon throws one of my stories into the dungeon, and I have to spend the next couple of weeks on my knees begging for forgiveness. Which usually means that I miss half of my maximum sales month.

Your first 30-days days at Amazon are typically when you sell the most copies because, after a month, you can watch the stories rating drop as Amazon starts to favor newer released stories. Plus, you are never told why you got dinged beyond vague hints as to what was offensive. While I write stroke porn primarily, I still try and meet Amazon’s restrictions. Then, when I get put on the cross down in the dungeon, it really pisses me off.

If you haven’t tried it, Amazon’s new beta report for sales and Kindle Unlimited pages read is pretty cool. It looks like they’ve been watching “Book Report” and have tried to emulate their reporting. There are two main pages, one for sales and one for pages read. I’ve posted a shot of each to give you a flavor of what they look like.

This is the sales page at: https://kdpreports.amazon.com/reports/sales

This screenshot is of the Kindle Unlimited pages read: https://kdpreports.amazon.com/reports/kenpc

This is the beta version of the new sales reporting tool and looks pretty sold so far. The report breaks down sales in a number of ways for all of you anal bean counters out there. The new report presents most of the things Book Report offers. The nice thing about Book Report as it gives you dollar sales figures for today, this month, last month, last 30-days etc. so it’s easy to see how your smut is going over with your adoring audience and when you’ll be able to afford your next lap dance.

Book Report is free and you can grab a copy here: https://www.getbookreport.com/ I think they start charging you for it after your sales hit $1,000 bucks a month, so for me, it’s a freebie.

I’m writing this month’s post on the Wednesday before Turkey Day and am sitting in the parking lot of a casino waiting for Foxy to emerge with her free bottle of liquor. When you have a casino player’s card, one of the regular inducements is free gifts to reward you for stuffing money in a slot machine or throwing it on the craps/poker table.

Wifey plays Texas Hold-Em primarily and does reasonably well at it, but I make it a point to never try and figure out what it costs me to keep her entertained. I am a firm believer in what you don’t know won’t hurt you.

If you run out of something to do, check out my blog at LarryArcher.blog for my latest theories on world domination and lesser topics. As most of the author’s on ERWA, I’m a writer of erotic literature, and my typical fare is primarily what’s called stroke porn for those of you with more base urges. Remember to think of me when you take yourself in hand!

See you next month on the 24th.

Larry Archer

Kindle Unlimited I’m Sorry For All The Bad Things I’ve Said

By Larry Archer

While I’ve understood the appeal of Kindle Unlimited (KU), up until now I’ve rejected it for a couple of reasons. First is narrow versus wide. With KU, you cannot publish your story anywhere but at Amazon. I think you can do print versions, but most of that stays with Amazon.

Going wide, you can publish at all the other sites such as SmashWords, Apple, Kobo, B&N, and others, in addition to Amazon. Another drawback to wide is that you can’t publish in ePub or other formats that are native to Windows, Mac, most tablets and phones.

Certainly, nowadays there are apps which allow you to read Kindle books on other types of devices besides a Kindle. But to me, it is aggravating that Amazon restricts you in an effort to keep you corralled into the Kindle World.

Publishing on Amazon and allowing your smut to be in the Kindle Unlimited section, allows people who cough up $10 a month to read all they can stomach. For an avid reader like myself, I like KU except the nonconformist side resents being told I can’t publish a story anywhere except on Amazon.

Amazon pays about one-half cent per page for every page someone reads of your masterpiece. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but when there are millions of people out there, it adds up.

I decided what the hell, I’ll try it again and published my latest story, House Party, both narrow and in Kindle Unlimited. This 85,000-word novel is my biggest yet, and I have to admit that I was a little hesitant about committing for the next 90-days before I could go wide.

I was floored when in the three weeks since release it has sold 31 copies, and almost 18,000 page reads, which translates into 74 complete story reads of the 243-page novel. This one story in three weeks has earned basically one and a half times my normal Amazon income for a typical month!

That’s all the bragging I’m going to do, and I apologize for it but what I’m trying to say is consider using Kindle Unlimited to see if it helps your book sales.

Normally I don’t pay a lot of attention to my Amazon sales as I’m too lazy to read all the reports but using Book Report (GetBookReport.com) makes it so easy to see your best selling stories and how much money you are making. Book Report also breaks out your sales per day, week, month, etc. so it’s a lot easier to see if you’re doing any good.

I’d had always read that Amazon has a 30-day cliff and will start throwing your story under the bus in a month. Since I’ve been using Book Report since May or June, I’ve confirmed to myself that is true.

If you release a story, it will bump your author’s rank for about a month, then you’ll see your rank start to fall. Publish a new book, and it’ll immediately jump up for another month.

So, the old saying “Publish or Perish,” is definitely a truism with Amazon. This does not seem to be true with SmashWords. From what I can see, SmashWords only goes by best sells or most popular, without considering age.

I have two books in SmashWords Men’s Erotica Best Sellers that are in the top 60, and one of the stories was published in 2014 and is ranked higher than a story published this year.

While certainly, you can argue that one story is better than the other, but the bottom line is that a story published four years ago is ranked about the same as a story published in the last few months.

This tells me that when you publish at SmashWords, your story doesn’t get forgotten in a month and continues to be ranked on its merits, without being penalized for age.

Up until recently, I’ve always made more money at SmashWords than I have with Amazon but the last couple of months have been just the opposite.

The thing I really like at SmashWords is that they automatically push out to Apple and others such as Kobo and B&N. My sales through SmashWords are typically split four ways between SmashWords, Apple, Kobo, and B&N.

Sales and marketing are the things I hate to do. I’d druther pound away at my keyboard than try to figure out how to market a story but I’m becoming convinced that I need to pay attention to things like sales figures, advertising, etc.

I’m not naive enough to think I’ll ever quit my day job and write smut but I am covering expenses and being able to buy a nice laptop every year or two.

That’s all for this month folks. Go out and VOTE on November 8th. Until next month, if it’s the 24th, it’s time for smut from the dirty mind of Larry Archer. LarryArcher.blog

cuckold – Hotwife – Bull

The cuckold, Hotwife, and Bull relationship is an interesting variant of swinging and sometimes is not even thought of as swinging. The wife is known as a Hotwife (upper case), who likes to have NSA (no strings attached) sex with men, who are typically well hung and known as Bulls (upper case). The husband is known as the cuckold (lower case to show subservience) and is often not well endowed or unable to satisfy his wife.

The 1950’s definition of a cuckold is a guy, who was often restrained and forced to watch his Hotwife have sex with other men. The husband is degraded and humiliated as his Hotwife takes on big cocked guys. The bigger their dicks are, the more it reinforces how inferior he is and is unable to satisfy his wife like her Bulls can.

The 50’s type of cuckold – Hotwife relationship has changed over the years to a somewhat different form. I can only speak to what I see as a swinger and the couples we know or have met who enjoy this type of play.

In my experience, you can’t easily pick out a cuckold – Hotwife couple until you get to know them. Often the Hotwife is in her late thirties or forties and generally has an extremely sexy appearance, but as many women in swinging are exhibitionists, this is not always a tell.

Off the top of my head, I can name about half-dozen cuckold – Hotwife couples that I know for sure. There are also variations of cuckold behavior, which is probably the biggest variant.

The common type is a husband who enjoys watching his wife have sex with her Bull(s). Often he will stand or sit by the bed and watch his wife taking care of her lovers, while often jerking off.

Our best friends, Pam and Jack, are a hardcore cuckold – Hotwife couple. Pam is a medium height blonde with shoulder-length curls, about a D-cup, shapely body, and is in her late forties. Her husband Jack is about five years older, nice looking guy, tall, and in good shape.

At a party, Pam is usually the first one naked and is a textbook definition of a nymphomaniac. Her husband generally likes to hide or stand somewhere where he can spy on his wife. They are honest and above board on how they enjoy having his wife take care of her boy toys. At our house, we have a large closet in the master bedroom, and he likes to hide in the closet and watch his wife with her Bull(s).

He loves to watch and will often do things like suggesting that her Bull take her to bed if the action doesn’t start quickly enough. He loves to video us with his wife so that he can watch and jerk off later.

He has never touched my wife or made any attempt to do so. To my knowledge, my wife has never had sex with any cuckold that we know. For them, they enjoy watching their wife with another man and are not really interested in sex with other women.

We met a very attractive thirties couple at a swinger’s convention out of state, well actually our wives met for girl-on-girl fun. They are both extremely good looking, the wife is a fitness instructor, and the hubby was well built. We invited them to one of our New Year’s Eve Pajama Parties, and they drove in from out of state a couple of days early.

The first night, we were in bed together with the girls in the middle and making out while facing each other. I was banging his wife from the back while spooning her. He was behind my wife and only played with her boobs. To my knowledge, he has never touched her beyond that.

The several other couples we know are all variants of that typical scenario. In all the cases, the Hotwife is thirties to forties, with a decent to great figure, and very sexy in appearance and attitude.

This is all honest and above board, with both the cuckold and Hotwife being open in their relationship with others. For those in the Lifestyle, attitudes about sex are open and casual, which is difficult for “straights” to probably understand.

The husbands, who are cuckolds, are not stigmatized in any way or treated differently. Just as their Hotwives would be called sluts in any other context, they are no different, and no one thinks differently if they enjoy sex with other men or gangbangs while hubby watches.

For those who are interested, it is extremely popular and fairly common to find these couples in the Lifestyle.

For more on this, visit my blog at LarryArcher.blog. See you next month!

Writing Porn at Work

If you have a job that doesn’t occupy the entire day, have you thought about writing porn at work but were afraid that the IT department would catch you? Portable versions of LibreOffice might be something to think about.

You’ve likely heard of LibreOffice, an open source or free replacement of Microsoft Word but what is a “Portable” version?

PortableApps is a software package that allows the user to run Windows programs on a USB jump drive without requiring software to be installed on a desktop PC. What does this mean for the typical worker in a corporate environment?

Most of us, as a minion of corporate America, use a computer that is locked down. Without Administrative privileges, a user cannot install software on their desktop PC. Plus the fact that corporate IT regularly sweeps user PC’s to see what their serfs are up to.

This reminds me of the scene in Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail when King Author rides through a field with several workers. One of the workers asked, “Who’s that?” A worker replies, “Must be a king?” First worker, “How do you know he’s the king?” Answer, “He doesn’t have shit all over him.”

What’s a worker bee to do? Into the ring, PortableApps steps up to solve a problem. Keep in mind that what I’m about to tell you might get yourself into trouble with your employer, and so I have no responsibility for anything that happens to you.

Using a USB jump drive or thumb drive, you can install applications which run off the USB drive without requiring installation on your desktop PC. Furthermore, when you exit a program, it deletes the temporary folder created to completely erase any trace that it ever existed.

In plain English, this means that you can pull a jump drive out of your pocket or purse and plug it into your locked down work computer. Then run word processing and graphics applications that allow you to do work that would normally require Word, Excel, or PhotoShop. Then after you exit the programs, pull the jump drive out, and all traces of what you’ve been doing are erased.

There are a ton of programs, which have portable versions, that can be run from a thumb drive. It is a little slower than having the software installed on your PC, but slower is better than nothing. The program itself runs at typically the same speed, it just loads slower as a USB drive is slower reading than the hard disk.

For an Indie author, especially the paranoid type, being able to work on your latest masterpiece without worrying that your employer might find out that you’re a pervert can be a definite advantage for those who have free time at work.

If you haven’t tried LibreOffice, it is an open source clone of Microsoft Word and can easily read and write Word files. A Word user should feel right at home with LibreOffice, and it’s completely free!

Portable applications are available for GIMP, a PhotoShop clone, along with most of the other programs used by Indie authors to create and publish their stories. It typically takes 2gb of space to install a full suite of programs, which leaves plenty of space to store your work with an 8gb or larger jump drive. With jump drives selling for under twenty dollars, consider giving this a try.

Below find step by step directions on installing PortableApps onto a jump drive along with a common suite of useful programs.

Installing PortableApps On a Jump Drive

  1. For Windows PC’s, go to https://portableapps.com/ and install the PortableApps program on a jump drive. I suggest at least an 8gb drive or larger. For this article, I downloaded “PortableApps.com_Platform_Setup_15.0.2.paf.exe” to the Downloads folder of my desktop running 64bit Windows 10 Professional.
  2. Run the program you just downloaded, which in my case was version 15.0.2 (the latest as of 8/18/18). Go through the normal installation questions and select “New Install” when prompted.
  3. Plug a USB Jump Drive into your computer and select “Portable” as the Install Location. The installation program should default to the jump drive but if it doesn’t, select the appropriate Jump Drive. Okay the “are you sure” question to Install. Then click Finish when the installation is complete. This should automatically run the PortableApps program on the Jump Drive.
  4. Go through the list of available programs and check the ones you’d like installed. I’d suggest you include LibreOffice, GIMP, Note++, IrfanView, JPEGView, Fotografix, Inkscape, Scribus, Sigil, Kaspersky TDSSKiller, 7-Zip, Don’t Panic, and FastCopy to start. Feel free to add any others that strike your fancy. After you click Next, wait for the apps to be installed. Depending on the speed of your computer and Internet connection, this could be a while. There should be an icon in your taskbar showing the progression of the installs. I’m on a 300 Mbit cable connection and using an i7 computer, and it still took me 10-15 minutes to install the apps selected above.
  5. Assuming that you don’t get any errors, installing at a minimum the above list of programs will enable you to read/write Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, edit graphics (aka PhotoShop) and create covers (aka CorelDraw). You will probably have to agree to a few license agreements along the way, and hopefully, you don’t end up like Kyle from South Park when he agrees to be a HUMANCENTiPAD! Much less the cuttlefish!
  6. One of the recommended programs I installed in this How To guide is “Don’t Panic,” which is what we used to call a “Boss Switch” that hides your work. If you’re doing something that you shouldn’t and your boss or co-worker starts heading towards your desk, press the hotkey combination, and your program(s) are instantly hidden. Remember that I’m not recommending you screw off at work!

Am Writing

Currently, my story de jour is still House Party about surprisingly a house party. House party is an acronym of a swinger’s party with a number of twists and turns from my normal fare. I’m still not sure how it’s going to turn out but will hopefully be HEA in the end!

House Party is currently over 52,000 words and going strong despite all efforts to end the story. Amazon has a 30-day cliff, and if you don’t publish on a regular basis, you get kicked to the curb. But my characters don’t seem to appreciate the fact that it’s Publish or Perish!

Thanks for reading and if it’s the 24th, it’s another bit of smut from Larry Archer. Visit me at LarryArcher.blog for more pervy stuff. Sorry, I can’t offer any cooking or house cleaning tips but if it involves abusing yourself, drop me a line: Larry [at] LarryArcher [dot] com.

Using Cloud Storage for Your Smut

I encountered a problem with my cloud storage that I’d like to warn you about as it could happen to you. While trying to finish my latest tome, one of my beta readers pointed out an inconsistency in the story. I referenced a scene where one of the guys was previously pegged, yet my “proofer” pointed out that the chapter didn’t exist in the story.

I could have sworn that I wrote that chapter as I knew what happened yet going back through the document, I came up blank. WTF? I said, the scene was completely gone? Luckily, my beta-reader is a lot more organized than I am and was able to pull the chapter out of a previous file that I had sent her.

Thankfully, I was able to reinsert the chapter into the story somewhat like Foxy inserted her strap-on into Greg’s ass. Quick thinking by my beta-reader insured that Greg could be able to take another “insertion” by a tag-team of girls. For the uninitiated, “pegging” is when a man is butt-fucked by a woman with a dildo.

But how did this fulfilling scene get lost? Has my computer suddenly gotten its collective brains screwed out? After all, I was writing this on an iFruit computer.

While writing, I often switch between a laptop and a desktop computer depending on where I’m at. Dragging all of the cables, tower, and monitor into the bathroom was raising suspicions among my coworkers especially with the extension cord into the stall. Plus, the fact I kept dropping the mouse into the toilet didn’t help.

My MacBook Air laptop balances on my knees quite easily and allows me to pound out my smut everywhere I go. But how to easily transfer files between my laptop and desktop required some additional software.

I use DropBox cloud based storage as a storage point between computers. Storing the document in DropBox allows the Internet based software to seamlessly transfer the files back and forth between computers.

DropBox stores a copy of your files in the cloud as well as any computer it’s installed on including PC’s, Mac’s, Android, and I assume iPhone’s. When you edit a file, it’s on your local computer and DropBox uploads any changes to its cloud copy.

Whenever another computer is connected to the Internet, DropBox automatically synchronizes the files to insure that the latest copy is transmitted to all other computers.

The most obvious issue occurs when the same file is opened with two different computers. DropBox doesn’t lock files so the user must insure that there is only one copy of an individual file open at any one time.

In most cases, DropBox will detect this and will store “conflicted” copies of the file. Then you have to open the copies and merge the changes to end up with a single file which contains all of the changed and new data.

Preventing this problem is quickly learned and you always remember to close the file before switching computers.

This typically works seamlessly except when it doesn’t. I’ve come to realize there are a few flies in the ointment. First, make sure that you wait long enough for DropBox to upload the changed files before shutting down the computer. This will ensure that the cloud has the latest version.

If you’re going to be using a laptop and are not sure if WiFi is going to be available, fire up the laptop at home and allow DropBox to sync all the files before walking out the door. This way your laptop contains the latest copies of the files.

What I’ve recently figured out is that DropBox automatically limits the upload speed and generally speaking, this option should be cleared. It can take an inordinate amount of time to upload files and my laptops will often go to sleep before the process is finished, which leaves the state of the changed files in limbo.

By unchecking the upload limit, my WiFi uploads occur almost instantly and insure the cloud has the latest copy. While a little bit of an aggravation, being able to edit your smut on the go allows you to be productive when traveling or killing time at Starbucks.

If you are like me and enjoy working on the go, using a cloud storage such as DropBox makes life a lot easier, especially if you follow the rules.

What’s Your Rank? or Is Yours Bigger Than Mine?

Always keep in mind that the guy who said, “Size doesn’t matter,” probably had a little dick!

Today we’re going to flop them out on the table and see whose is bigger, regarding sales that is?

One of the quandaries in writing anything is, “How are my sales doing?” How badly do I suck at this? Should I go back to truck driving?

To figure out how your sales are doing is sometimes an exercise in futility due to the scarcity of tools available. Looking at the two biggest publishing houses IMHO Amazon Kindle and SmashWords, how can we tell how sales are going?

SmashWords

Zip, nada, nothing is the short answer. I can find no tools for determining your rank on SmashWords. The one thing I do is go to the SmashWords’ home page and click on the category that you write in, such as Erotica. If you don’t see Erotica, then you have to turn off the safe filter.

Once you’re in Erotica, you have a choice, do I want to see my position in Erotica as a broad category or dig deeper in a subsection such as Men’s Erotica. Once you’ve selected your category, click on Best Sellers, Highest Ranked, or another ranking as desired.

My display shows twenty titles per page with covers shown. Then here comes the hard part. Scan down each page and keep advancing until you find one of your stories.

As an Example, today 11-May-2018, if I sort on Erotica | Menage/Multiple Partners | Highest Rated | Any Price | Any Length, we can scan down the stories and marvel at the topics and titles. You will quickly figure out that if you are not writing a story that involves animals, family members, breeding, whips, or gangbangs, then your rating is likely to suck.

Then voila, on the second page we see a familiar name, it’s moi. No clapping required, thank you very much, and autographs will be $5 each.

The story is “A Night At the Bar,” one of my cuckold – Hotwife stories. Counting down from the top, A Night At the Bar is 17 down from the top on the 2nd page. Therefore it is the 37th highest ranked Menage/Multiple Partner story on SmashWords as of today’s date (20+17=37).

By the same token, flipping to Lesbian Erotica | Highest Rated, we find “Nina The Fallen Ballerina” eighteen slots down the first page. I would assume that Nina is the eighteenth highest ranked story in Lesbian Erotica.

Then on the third page, five down from the top, we find “Nina, The Fallen Ballerina,” once again. Amazing how does that Larry Archer do it? Wait? Listed twice, does this mean that the story is twice as good? Modesty prevents me from agreeing, but I’d have to feel that it’s a computer screw-up, but hey I’ll take anything I can get, I’m not proud.
Modesty prevents me from going further, but you should be able to see that with a little hard work, you can get a rough idea of how your story is ranked on SmashWords.

The biggest problem with this is that like Homer Simpson, my mind tends to wander after about ten pages or so, which is the top two hundred and I usually quit and open another beer.

The one good thing about this exercise is that you can quickly figure out what sells by looking at the other stories. It’s not the story about a good church-going couple, who comes home, turns out the lights, and puts on rubber gloves to have two minutes of sex before running to the shower and washing that “stuff” off!

While we would like to think that we’re above it all, the truth is that kink sells and if your story requires plastic sheeting over everything and Wesson Oil, then you’re going to be a hit.

Amazon – Kindle

With Amazon, we have a number of tools at our disposal. I’m sure that you’ve discovered the Reports section of “kdp.amazon.com” where the daily sales are shown along with the normalized Kindle Unlimited results.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll find your Royalties Earned report or as I like to think of it, how many lap dances can I afford this month?

Flipping to “authorcentral.amazon.com” will show your sales rank over time. The sales rank will vacillate up and down with your book sales and over time older books do not move the needle as much as newer books do. So it’s like the old saying, “Publish or Perish.” What I’ve read and it seems to be true is that you need to publish every month to keep your sales up. More is always better.

What I watch is the monthly Author Rank, which is an indication of how popular your stories are in general. The Sales Rank listing shows how each of your stories is selling and keeping the Sales Rank at 500,000 to 1,000,000 or lower should guarantee sales.

Assuming that your sales ranking for the story is between 500,000 and a million which is a decent figure for an erotic story that captures the reader’s eye. This ranking should result in sales of 5-10 copies per month at Amazon or $10 to $20 per month income and the same from SmashWords. Personally, I normally make two or three times as much from SmashWords, but let’s assume the same sales. Refer to one of my previous postings for more on sales by clicking here (an excerpt follows from the previous blog posting).

Excerpt

Before you start rolling your eyes, consider this. A sales ranking of 100,000 should result in the sale of 30 to 40 copies per month or $60 to $80 per month profit per published story.

When your ranking drops into the top one-hundred, you could easily be selling thousands of copies per month and be waited on hand and foot by nubile scantily clad servants who are busily stuffing grapes into every one of your orifices.

Rank To Sales Estimator from David Gaughran estimates your sales as follows:

#1 to #5 = 5,000+ books a day (sometimes a lot more)
#5 to #10 = 4,000–5,000
#10 to #20 = 3,000–4,000
#20 to #50 = 2,000–3,000
#100 = 1,000+
#200 = 500
#300 = 250
#500 = 200
#1,000 = 120
#2,000 = 100
#3,000 = 80
#5,000 = 40
#10,000 = 20
#25,000 = 10
#50,000 = 5
#100,000+ = fewer than 1 a day

From what I’ve seen, this estimate is relatively close. A 100,000 sales rank should return sales in the 30 – 40 per month bracket, but your mileage may vary.

But let’s not get carried away here, the cold, cruel truth is that assuming you are a decent writer of material other people want to read, you’ll likely have a sales ranking around a million. At least that’s what you need to shoot for initially.

SalesRankExpress.com

SalesRankExpress is a very handy site that shows how your story is ranked and whether it is “Safe” or not. If Amazon doesn’t appreciate your story and slaps an “Adult” rating on it, you can kiss goodbye any help from Amazon. Stories with an Adult rating cannot generally be found by searching. The only way someone will find your story is a direct link from your website or some other location or promotion.

As a suggestion, if you are self-publishing, make sure that you put your name in the “Publisher” spot when you list your story. What I’ve found is that if I search on author “Larry Archer,” it brings up a ton of other material but if I search on publisher “Larry Archer,” I get all my stuff and nobody else’s.

BookReport (GetBookReport.com)

I’ve just discovered this ranking program, and it looks to combine most of the features I’m looking for in one place. If you have less than $1,000 in sales per month, the program is free, so that means that it’ll be free for me for quite some time! My sales typically range between $150 – $250 per month so you can see that I can’t quit my day job anytime soon. The bulk of my sales are between Amazon and SmashWords with about 60% SmashWords and 40% Amazon. I think my sales are poorer at Amazon because they’ve “Adult” ranked two of my latest stories “Cheating Glory Hole Wives” and “Stripper or Nurse?“. I’ve managed to get Stripper or Nurse out of the Adult dungeon but have given up on Cheating Glory Hole Wives. There should be no reason that “Wives” should be adult but it’s often like arguing with a post or your wife.

If you want to publish on Amazon, tread lightly as once in the dungeon, it’s hard to escape. That’s all I’m going to say about that as I’ll start ranting!

BookReport allows you to select a time frame such as last week, month, 30 days, etc. and will display the best sellers and what your projected income will be over the selected time frame.

You also get your Earnings per Day which is handy if you’re doing some type of promotion and want to see how it’s working.

You get a breakdown by Marketplace (Amazon server) to tell where your stories are selling or not.


And then finally a breakdown by the individual book for the anally obsessed.

BookReport at least on first glance, tells me everything I need to know except if a book is ranked Adult or not. If you want sales, then you have to stay out of Adult or get most of your sales through other forms of marketing.

NovelRank.com

NovelRank is a super site that gives your estimated sales for the current month, the previous month, and the sales rank for the story. This is very handy for watching your sales.

Note: You can also track other author’s work so that you can compare your sales to theirs.

Tracker.KindleNationDaily.com

This is another site similar to NovelRank except it allows you to sort your stories on sales rank among other categories. This way you can easily see how your story is moving up or down in the charts.

For example, my stories have rankings that go from 240,000 to 1.6M, so most authors have nothing to fear from me.

The listing above of sales rank vs sales is helpful when you’re trying to figure out if advertising is working for you.

#AmWriting

I’ve got about four stories about 75% done, and if I could just focus, I’d get them out the door. I’ve just bought a new MacBook Air and given up on my Windows laptop. I’ve been installing software and trying to relearn how to do things the Apple way. Yes, I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.

I’m trying to finish up the story “Crashing a Swinger’s Pajama Party.” This story grew out of a neighborhood couple who crashed one of our annual New Year’s Eve pajama parties and discovered some 50 or 60 couples trying to reenact one of Caligula’s events except we didn’t sacrifice any goats but maybe a few virgins! The initial part of this story is based on an actual event at our annual PJ party, then expanded by Lisabet Sarai’s and my perverted minds.

It was funny after this that the husband was noticeably cooler towards us, but his wife was a lot friendlier especially when hubby wasn’t around.

What will typically happen to me is I’ll see something that will spark an idea for a story. Then I must at least get enough down such that at a later date, I can pick up my original idea and run with it.

This ends up meaning my “Draft” folder is full of 50-75% finished stories that one of these days, I’m going to finish. Time is always my worst enemy. With our Lifestyle, we always have a full schedule, then there’s work, and Wifey’s poker tournaments to eat up the remaining time available.

There are always House Parties going on or other socials, and we finally had to pull back and limit ourselves to weekends and Wednesday nights as we started ending up like Zombies and not the good kind.

On Wednesday nights, our bowling league, “Friends and Lovers,” is always fun and the alley told us that we have greatly increased their business. Our players run the gauntlet from scores below 100 to some who consistently bowl over 200 so you can tell that bowling is not the most important thing that we do on Wednesdays.

But it’s a lot of fun, and each team takes turns picking the restaurant to celebrate at afterward. One of the nice things about Vegas is that there are literally hundreds of places to have a decent meal and yet get home before it gets too late.

For more from my deranged mind, visit my website and blog, LarryArcher.blog. See you next month! If it’s the 24th, then it’s another day in the barrel with Larry.

Aww Gee, Do I Have To Wear A Rubber?

Rant for the day by Larry Archer!

Does Stephen King dismember his victims with a rubber knife? Did Jaws chomp up Captain Quint with plastic teeth? Did Maverick shoot down Russian fighters with a BB gun or bang Kelly McGillis with a dildo? What about Chucky and that delicious Jennifer Tilly (pant, pant, pant). No, No, No, No, and No!

So why do we have to put on a rubber when we bang out some smut story on our Underwood? This is not Randy “I can’t put my arms down” from A Christmas Story where we have to protect ourselves against our parent’s imagined fears, both seen and unseen?

I am continually amazed when someone says, “Your characters didn’t use protection in your story!” WTF?

Why is it that Dean Koontz can dismember his characters with abandon using a chainsaw, but I can’t have two people screwing unless they have a raincoat and rubber gloves on? You know, the big thick yellow ones that come up to your elbows and ensure you don’t get any of that icky “stuff” on you.

When you can get an STD from reading one of my stroke stories, then I’ll consider making my characters wear a rubber when they play hide the wiener.

In school, I had to read “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which was about some guy who dreamed of being different people; fighter pilot, doctor, and probably porn star in the Hustler version. He didn’t wear a rubber and probably didn’t put on his seatbelt either!

Fictional books are often a form of escapism for the reader. We get to imagine anything our little pea brains can conjure up. Like getting to bang Stormy Daniels, why should Donald get all the fun, not to mention watching hookers pee on the bed? Personally, I would have chosen the Playboy Playmate myself, but there is no accounting for taste. I’m more of a leg man than a boob man.

When you lust after your next door neighbor, the stripper who sat on your lap, or maybe the milkman, do you think about running to the drugstore or gas station to pick up condoms? I know that I don’t! The feeling of skin on skin is far better than with a layer of plastic in between and much easier to fantasize about.

Writing an erotic story, I don’t think about safety, and I don’t want my readers to think about it either. Getting laid with a rubber is not near as much fun as bareback so why would you want your characters to put on protection before doing the nasty? Just like Dean Koontz, I don’t worry about my characters as they are all fictional and impossible to hurt unless I allow it.

Well, other than the times Wifey has on her leather bustier, thigh-high leather boots, and riding crop that she uses to correct her slaves! Then I’ll stand back an extra three feet to be sure I don’t get anything splattered on my camera!

My erotica is not designed to teach you a safe sex lesson, just the opposite. If you wanted safe sex, then you can screw your boring wife or husband on the first and third Friday (let me check my calendar). We want to have sex in the produce aisle with that hot chick from People of Walmart. Just flip her skirt up and make mad passionate love amidst the cantaloupes while hoping the guard on his electric scooter doesn’t catch us! Afterward, we’d zip up our pants and join Wifey as she tries to figure out which detergent to buy to get those stains off the front of her blouse she bought from Monica.

Like in a story I’m working on. The husband finds out his wife was in a gangbang and asked if they kissed her. Her response, “Why would they want to kiss me, they just wanted to fuck me!”

I’m not sure why reading someone’s comment that your characters needed to wear a condom puts me over the top, but it always does. Like Walter Mitty, I want readers to imagine a situation they would never normally find themselves in and especially not in their normal safe, dull environment with their pipe and slippers.

Few of us are ever in a situation where they can do things like be in a gangbang or be the gangbang’ee, so literature is the escape mechanism to let our imagination fly free. Sort of like those rock climbing crazy people on a sheer rock face without a rope.

In the real world we have to make compromises, like not smoking when we fill the lawnmower with gasoline, but in our minds, we can be King (Queen) of the World. Sort of like ZZ Top when they sing, “We could have had Miss October, but we waited until November.”

That was the rant for the day, and maybe next month I can finally post the article I wrote like two months ago, which keeps getting thrown under the bus.

Remember that reading erotica does not cause STD’s but may create friction burns, kind of like the carpet burns you got in high school. Use lubricant as necessary and remember to stop when you need glasses.

As always, check me out at LarryArcher.blog or on Twitter at @Archer_Larry.

“Erotica from the Dirty Mind of Larry Archer.”

P.S. See Lisabet I can stay under 1,000 words!

What Am I Writing – or Did I Forget My Meds?

What Am I Writing? Or Did I Forget My Meds?

By Larry Archer

Caution, this is another long post so get a fresh cup of coffee before starting.

This is my third blog post for ERWA, and I’ve been conflicted as DropBox calls it. You know when you forget to close a DropBox document on one computer then you open the document and edit it on another computer. DropBox raps you across the knuckles like the nun in third-grade with her ruler.

While I’ve never had the pleasure of going to Catholic school and feel they failed miserably with my wife. Maybe the fact that she skipped out and went to public high school that she now has a rekindled desire for little school girl outfits but hey, who’s complaining? Those white thigh socks, black shiny buckle shoes, and ruffled white ankle socks are so neat. It’s just hard to find Mary Janes with 6-inch spike heels.

I’m writing this on my new MacBook Air and trying not to choke my chicken when I see her lying there, all opened up like a beautiful woman, who’s begging me to touch her with my fingers, the MBA that is.

Like the guy sitting on a park bench, in his raincoat, clutching a bag of candy with greasy fingers waiting for school to be over, the MBA loves me, but we have to be careful because my wife’s getting suspicious about our “alone time” in the bathroom.

I’ve always been a Windows kind of guy and not like my friend Jack who likes to stand outside and watch his wife through the bedroom window. Like everyone else, I bought into the theory that Apple people had drunk the Kool-Aid else why would they spend a bunch more money for a laptop with a half-eaten apple on it?

Going on six years or 3-raincoats ago, I was frustrated with my then Windows laptop. Sort of like Ray Charles, I could close my eyes and let the fevered scene play out between my ears as my fingers tried desperately to keep up with the action.

Then I’d look down and realize that I’d written a page of garbage because I’d mistyped some prose with my fingers on the wrong keys. Mr. Rogers my high school typing teacher would rip the yellow sheet out of my Underwood and scream, “Archer, all you’re good for is writing shit they keep behind the counter in a brown paper bag!”

As we all know, when you’ve tried everything else to solve a problem, throw money at it! By this time, I’d been through three laptops, and Wifey was getting suspicious about the fact my credit card statement was starting to smoke when you pulled it out of the envelope. In desperation, I bought a 2012 MBA, and it was love at first sight. Open her up, and she would instantly light up like a drunk college girl, ready for action and no foreplay required. She never told me no and never had a headache. To touch her was exquisite, your fingers fall naturally on the keys, and the touch is like a mechanical keyboard, without all the clicking noises.

To be able to type with one-tenth the level of mistakes and a battery that never went down on you. I was hooked and wanted more, much more until I got seduced by a new line of Windows laptops.

Since the MacBook Air’s seemed to lose favor with their CPU’s slipping further and further behind, I jumped ship and bought a high-end Windows 10 machine with the top box checked in every category.

My wife being a Luddite and who struggles to understand how to operate a light switch, it only seemed natural to re-gift my trusted MBA to her. I was surprised to see how quickly she became adept with the 3-pound marvel.

I, on the other hand, started to beat my head against the wall. My new machine’s touchpad had a mind of its own and apparently didn’t need any help from me to make mistakes. I spent hours with tech support and even had the touchpad replaced to no avail. Others on the vendor’s website were similarly upset.

Foxy said that she’d give me my Air back, but I couldn’t do that and just struggled in silence. Certainly, my new machine was cool, huge hard drive, bunches of memory, fast i7 processor, but using it always managed to piss me off.

One day she asked me to help to do something on her computer, and as soon as my fingers touched the keyboard, I was back in love. It’s kind of like when you’re doing the neighbor’s wife and will steal little touches when no one is looking, but that’s a whole different post.

After that brief illicit moment, I went right down and bought a new MacBook Air with a 3-generation old CPU but no matter, I’m back in love again. Of course the day my new MBA was delivered, I read that Apple is going to bring out an updated Air in the next few months!

I know that you’re telling yourself, this post is supposed to be about what I’m writing and not about my forbidden love affair with my machine, sort of like Wifey and her LeLo vibrator, except without all the buzzing.

My latest story, “Crashing a Swinger’s Pajama Party,” is rapidly coming to a finish and I thought I’d share a little with you about the story as it’s been a real hoot to write.

Lisabet Sarai and I converse a fair amount off-list about writing and story ideas. I mentioned to her that we’d had a straight couple crash one of our New Year’s Eve Pajama Parties and she suggested that we create a story based on it.

We keep trying to write a story together, but our styles of writing bump heads and we can never seem to get our stories straight, “Fake News!”

But I’m slowly getting the impression that we’re starting to rub off on each other. I’m learning to type with my little finger stuck out, and she seems to be getting more comfortable with her mind wallowing in the gutter. Sort of like that little sailboat and the clown in the sewer drain.

Anyway, I was telling Lisabet about the time we had one of our straight neighbors crash our annual New Year’s Eve Pajama Parties. For some years now we’ve hosted a pajama party to welcome in the new year. It gives kissing under the mistletoe, a whole new meaning.

The PJ party is typically 50-60 couples plus an assortment of unicorns that we run with and 2-3 single guys thrown in for good measure. There are always people from around the country that we’ve met in our travels, for flavor. So by midnight, there are well more than one-hundred naked or semi-naked people in our house. Victoria Secret is proud of us!

We carefully select the invitees and make sure that no one is invited that could cause a problem. Most of the people are professionals, doctors, business owners, and a handful of elected officials, not including the cops. Cops, doctors, and nurses are some of the most perverted when they let their hair down. We have to be really careful who we invite as some of our party animals are also on the social pages and being outed would not be a good thing.

One morning after a New Year’s party, I was reading the paper and on the society page was a couple who’d also come late to our party. The woman was wearing an exquisite dress cut down almost to where the crack of her butt started. The society editor was buzzing about what a knockout she was and how that dress was scandalous. I laughed as I remembered that dress lying in a pile on the family room floor after my wife had pulled down her zipper and let it slide off. 

Anyway, after midnight, the doorbell rings and me being the idiot I am, answer the door. Standing in front of me is an attractive couple dressed to the nines. It was the couple, we somewhat knew from down the street, and I’m standing there with a short bathrobe on and nothing else.

It was somewhat embarrassing, but they asked if they could join our party as theirs was a snooze fest. Not knowing what to do I invited them in. Foxy joined me, and she was wearing her typical New Year’s outfit of an adult sized pair of kid’s long johns with bunnies on it. Except she wears it with all the buttons undone and so is open down to her bellybutton.

You can imagine their shock to see an orgy going on in the living room and all the people running around in teddies or much less.

We invited them to stay, but I think the shock value was too much for the husband. His wife looked like she wanted to stay. This is where the story Lisabet and I are working on diverged from reality.

She fired back with a suggested list of chapters, and we were off to the races.

With our sick minds, it was easy to suck the new couple in and throw them to the wolves. Greg, the dominating always in charge husband quickly discovered that he really wasn’t in control at all, courtesy of Foxy and her assortment of painful toys. Greg’s new word for the day was “pegged.”

Samantha, the otherwise “normal” housewife, was quickly divested of clothes as she realized that she was at an all-you-can-eat buffet or maybe the main course, depending on which end was up.

My stories are always HEA, but I keep getting told that a story needs conflict and resolution, yet mine always seem to lack conflict as everyone is too busy getting laid to fight. So it only seemed natural for Samantha to give Greg his walking papers and move in with the swingers down the street. She quickly discovered that it was a lot more fun to play, “hide the weenie,” with the neighborhood perverts.

But poor Greg was sent home with our real life cuckold – Hotwife couple, Pam and Jack, who proceed to take him within an inch of his life while giving him a sunburn with studio lights. If you look up nymphomaniac in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of our friend Pam, who is one of our resident MILFs. Jack is typically hiding in the closet watching or behind his movie camera.

So now I’ve gotten the neighbors split up, but so far they’ve not realized that they are the conflict part of my story. Greg has figured out that there is truth to the story of being screwed to death but is trying to soldier on. He’s afraid of coming back to our house as the last time Foxy and our redheaded Amazon Chrissy took turns pegging him. But he seems to be a good sport about everything, well except for the beatings!

Naturally, we didn’t want his wife to feel left out as she seemed to be enthralled by the idea of a gangbang and pulling a train. Why should we let her miss that experience? Now every time she hears a train whistle, she feels a tingle between her legs!

The story now stands over 40,000 words, and I’m trying to get the estranged couple back together again so the story can end up HEA. Lisabet and I are planning on co-releasing two stories in the next couple of months, so I should have time to finish it up. I’m looking at this blog post’s word count, and it’s at 1,700 words, and I’ve been trying to hold my posts down to under 1,000 words but not having much success.

You’ll have to wait a few weeks to see how the story comes out. Will Larry write his first non-HEA story, will Greg learn to love the sound of the whip? Or will Foxy sell Greg’s wife to a German Goo Girls movie producer? Check LarryArcher.blog for more ramblings from my perverted mind.

I promise Lisabet, my next blog post will be shorter!

Red Ink

Although I don’t try to make my living through my writing, I consider myself a professional author. The Internal Revenue Service agrees. Every year for the last decade and a half, I’ve dutifully tallied up my royalties, subtracted my expenses, and reported my income on Schedule C.

Every year, I’ve managed to make a small profit—until 2017. When I finished the computations for this past year, I discovered that for the first time ever, my writing business is in the red. I spent more on promotion and publicity than I received from sales.

Strangely, I’m not upset by this. For one thing, I know that independent authors everywhere are seeing their incomes decline. Plus I haven’t had as many releases as I’d like, mostly due to outside demands on my time.

Also, I realize that I’ve been less than frugal in my expenditures. For instance, I spent over $200 on gift certificates and books used as prizes for my fans and blog followers. What can I say? I get joy from giving things to people who take the trouble to read my stuff. Next year I plan to cut back on this. I’ll offer free books that don’t cost me anything as prizes where I can. I will also reconsider some of my advertising choices. This past year I devoted quite a bit of cash to promoting two major releases. It’s not at all clear that the costs justified the benefits. I’m sure that with more judicious management of my funds, I can turn my red ink to black in 2018.

The main reason I’m not depressed, though, is that I’m having more fun writing than I have in years. My main difficulty is finding the time to write, given my real world responsibilities. When I do manage to sit down with a work in progress, my stories seem to flow—perhaps not effortlessly, but with far less friction than a few years ago. I’m writing in a variety of styles, each one aimed at a different audience. My intuitions are stronger. I revel in my sense of control over my craft. I’m not sure whether my readers would agree, but I feel as though I’ve become significantly more skilled as a writer.

I’ve moved almost entirely to self-publishing. Why not? The work I’ve released in the past through established publishers has never done particularly well, and I have sufficient editing and graphics skills to either do things myself or barter for editing and art services. Of course, the profits are higher on self-published books, as well, and the turnaround time a lot faster.

Meanwhile, I can now write what I want, even if my books don’t fit neatly into the established genre categories. I find this freedom truly exhilarating.

No longer do my lusty heroines need to restrict themselves to only one lover—even if they ultimately end up in a committed “romantic” relationship. No longer do I need to worry that an editor will object to my mixing lesbian or gay or even transgender content in with straight sex. I can write dark sex, taboo sex, silly sex, or deeply meaningful sex, depending on my mood. Not every reader will be comfortable with my erotic visions, but that’s okay. At least what I’m producing now is genuine, not a compromise based on genre “rules”.

I never planned to be an author. When I published my first novel, almost as a lark, I didn’t expect I’d become addicted to the thrill of sharing my fantasies with the world. Sure, the money is nice, a concrete validation of my talent, but the real payoff is the occasional rapturous reader email or breathlessly enthusiastic review.

I can’t afford to treat writing as an expensive hobby. If I started to lose a lot of money, I’d have to stop. As long as I can break even, though—or close—I’ll do it for the joy.

(My latest releases, in case you’re interested, are Butterfly: Asian Adventures Book 4, and Hot Brides in Vegas. The former is romantic literary erotica with a transgender theme. The latter is a light-hearted, smutty romp with very little redeeming social value, set in the world of swingers created by Larry Archer.)

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

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Babysitting the Baumgartners - The Movie
From Adam & Eve - Based on the Book by New York Times Bestselling Authors Selena Kitt

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