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publishing

Mindless Smut

by | March 21, 2022 | | 5 Comments

Image by Andrea Altini from Pixabay

When I started publishing erotica, more than two decades ago, my work tended toward the more literary end of the genre. Reflecting on my personal erotic adventures, I wanted to explore the nuances of desire, the ways in which lust challenges and transforms us. I was particularly fascinated by the emotional and spiritual dimensions of dominance and submission. Indeed, along with fellow ERWA member S.F. Mayfair, I edited a collection of BDSM short stories in 2003 entitled Sacred Exchange.

If you pick up any of the tales from my first decade as an erotica author, you’ll find an earnest focus on conflict, characterization and language. There’s sex, of course, but less than you might expect given the genre label. I was at least as interested in the experience of arousal as I was in its consummation.

Writing serious erotica was hard work. Furthermore, as time went on, I began to feel as though I was repeating myself, rehashing the same themes, especially when dealing with my first love, S/M. For recreation and relaxation, I started publishing what I would label as “mindless smut”: stories without any deep message in which all the characters are perpetually horny and gleefully eager to act on their carnal impulses.

Much to my astonishment, and somewhat to my embarrassment, I discovered these uninhibited and rather superficial tales sold fairly well. Furthermore, creating them was a blast. Once I’d decided to slip into smut-monger mode, the words just flowed. I’d never succeeded before in writing any sort of series, but my outrageous, somewhat silly novella Hot Brides in Vegas had barely hit the shelves when I started getting ideas for a sequel. Eventually the Vegas Babes series grew to five volumes of mindless smut.

In fact, writing this sort of fiction does require some craft. Although you (of course) need to include a lot of sex, you also need variety. If every scene involves the same activities, eventually even the most dedicated one-handed reader will get bored. I’ve noted in a previous post the importance of escalation. As the story unfolds, the sex scenes should become more intense and/or more taboo. Even porn needs a story arc, with a big climax (or ten!) and a happy ending for all. Every chapter should push the characters closer to the edge – or maybe I should say, pull them deeper into depravity!

I just published a brand new piece of unmitigated smut entitled Alex in Tittyland. It’s a loose (in several senses!) parody of Louis Carroll’s classic with a harem theme, inspired by discussions with a young male friend. In the process of penning this story I realized once again (1) how much fun it is to let my sexual imagination run wild and (2) how much thought is nevertheless required in order to create effective porn.

But it was still a lot easier than writing erotic romance or historically plausible steam punk.

I have to admit, however, that the prospect of producing nothing but mindless smut makes me uncomfortable. It feels too easy, and yes, a bit exploitative. In addition, I suspect that much of the audience doesn’t care in the least about premise, plot, characterization or even grammar. They’re just looking for the dirty parts. While I believe that my emphasis on craft makes my smut more readable, I’m not sure that my efforts constitute a competitive advantage when it comes to sales.

So I’ll probably continue to swing from one extreme of erotica to the other, delving into the emotional complexities of sexuality in one book, engaging in orgiastic fantasies in the next.

Adaptability is always a virtue, right?

 

It is Not Just Sex

by | December 24, 2021 | | 4 Comments

Sex is exactly like magic, except for one very important difference. Both have an air of mystery about them, and practitioners who speak in hushed tones. Both have their rituals, their Words of Power, and both traffic in what some would consider to be dark secrets.

But the biggest, the most important difference between sex and magic is that the wizard who learns every conceivable spell known to man, becomes exalted. More often than not, they are elevated to the rank of grandmaster.

Nobody gets elevated for knowing everything about sex.

At least, not in the way that gets talked about at parties.

You see, while wizards are allowed to experiment, to test the bounds of human experience, the sex mage who screams, ‘I’ve mastered the reverse-cowgirl levitation technique!’ gets buried beneath Azkaban without a ceremony.

It’s not fair. It’s not even really funny, but…there you have it.

The ironic part about all of this is that sex is at its best when it is discussed openly, but even that open discussion can be twisted so easily.

I for one, have always been leery of those who speak of sex in metaphysical terms. Who talk of souls meeting, or celestial bodies, as though by speaking frankly about what they want, they might somehow sully themselves.

But equally as bad, if not worse are those who simply shrug and say ‘It’s just sex,” as though they can’t possibly understand what all the fuss is about.

Telling a devout Catholic newlywed who has to go from demure protector to wild, kinky sex-kitten in one night that it’s just sex, doesn’t do anything except undermine her faith and her identity.

For a woman who has never had a pleasurable experience in bed due to vaginismus, the words do nothing to alleviate her pain.

And for the guy who was so nervous the first several times he tried to have sex that he couldn’t perform, (unashamedly raises his hand) the phrase doesn’t eliminate the nerves. Because by that logic, sex is just a matter of ‘get up and go’ and if he can’t, then he’s left with the exact same fear as the newlywed who can’t turn on a dime, or the woman who can’t ‘just relax.’

The fear that there’s something wrong with me.

Sex, in a lot of ways, is actually better than magic, because it’s defined by the people who take part in it, which means its impact or relevancy changes depending upon the person. Whether it’s to fill a void, relieve stress or forge a connection (however celestial) sex is a pillar of any relationship. Not the most important pillar. Far from it. But neither dressing up sex, nor trivializing it will help those who dread being bad at something that society says they shouldn’t know too much about anyway.

Honest, awkward, flush-faced conversations are easy to talk about, not easy to affect.

(We can all be hypocrites, deep in our hearts. Let’s be honest here.)

But what problems these conversations come with are immediate and often fade just as quickly. The alternatives however, the shame and hushed tones and fear we’ve all lived with for far too long, those effects can last a lifetime.

And that, to me, is the real shame.

Gallows Hope

by | August 24, 2021 | , | 2 Comments

Not long ago, I sent a story off to some friends, one of whom came back and said she thought it was beautiful and powerful, but far too bleak. She said I dropped my main character into a brutal, misogynistic system, dragged her through hell and then killed her. That’s it. ‘Where’s the hero’s journey?’ she asked. ‘Where’s the moment when the main character sees the system for what it is, beats the thousand to one odds and then changes things for the better?’

I wrote back to my friend and said, ‘I get it, I do.’ We all need a hero’s journey, and every writer has their own literary hero. But by asking for a hero’s journey, my friend was missing the point of the story. Because in order for there to be one man who beats the thousands to one odds, there has to be nine hundred and ninety-nine others who don’t. Before there can be a Final Girl, you must first have victims.

Let me back up a minute.

When I was coming up, my literary heroes were King, Rice, Bradbury, and Stine. They not only taught me how to write, they showed me that magic, real magic, isn’t found in words like abracadabra or hocus pocus, but in smaller, plainer, less flowery spells like, it can be done.

And from the moment I first thought those words, they began to grow inside me. Stretching and reaching until they became a new spell altogether. One which had me sitting up far too late at night, gripped by the sense that I needed to whisper this spell, because even then I was afraid the words wouldn’t come out right. But into that darkness, I said, if they can do, I can too. 

And then I set out to beat the odds.

But for as much as adults might shun the idea of magic, there’s a secret to it which only we can know because we’ve lived with it long enough. Magic has no rules. There are no laws, no guidebooks, not even a roadmap. Just a series of mutually agreed upon arrangements wherein Harry Potter can be rejected twelve times, Carrie thirty and Roots two hundred before they could become classics. The same unfathomable arrangement which implies, but never states, that buried amongst all of those slush piles we secretly dread, are masterpieces which will never be found, not because the writers weren’t talented enough, or didn’t have thick enough skin but because they committed themselves to a system which is wonderfully, bafflingly, borderline abusively incapable of explaining itself.

Even in writing this article, I’ve broken several of the ‘rules’ of writing. I’ve started a sentence with ‘when,’ I’ve used ‘and’ far too many times and I’ve switched tenses so often that I’m sure it’s driving some of you to distraction. But if you’ve come with me this far, I’m hoping you’ll go a little further. Because whether this article works or it falls flat, isn’t the point. The point is that no one in the industry can properly explain to you why, one way or the other.

We are, all of us, very much on our own, which is exactly the reason it’s taken me days to conjure up an ending which falls somewhere between wish-fulfillment and nihilism because the bittersweet truth is that both of them are right.

In our quest to be the hero of our own journey, we might very well die trying, much like the main character in my story. She’s the one who doesn’t get away from the serial killer because there will always be more victims than Final Girls. But failure is only ever certain when we give up the fight.

So perhaps the next time we take up the pen, after our latest rejection or the dreaded ‘it’s just not what we’re looking for’ refrain, we do so not with a bright-eyed belief, but with a gallows hope. The sort of pitch-black resolve which drives us to take up the journey, while never losing sight off the bodies which litter the way. A plain, stark acknowledgement that while the odds against us are tragic and potently bleak, they are also true and most definitely…a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

Insta-Culture and the Demise of Desire

by | June 21, 2021 | | 7 Comments

Image by lounis production from Pixabay

You’re probably familiar with the old joke about humor in the penitentiary. The convicts are taking their daily exercise in the prison yard under the watchful eye of the warden, when someone shouts out “Twenty two”. Everyone convulses with laughter. A few minutes later, another guy calls “Sixteen”. More hilarity ensues. Someone else counters with “Thirty seven”. Guffaws and catcalls ring out through the yard.

The punch line doesn’t matter. The point is that everyone is so familiar with all the funny stories, it’s not even necessary to spell them out anymore. Just the number, the label, is enough.

Erotica these days reminds me of that joke. Cuckold. Hot-wife. M-preg. MILF. First-timers. Hu-cow. Futa. Swinging. Femdom. Reverse harem. Billionaire. Breeding. Wolf-shifter. Bear-shifter. Polar-bear shifter. (Just saw one of those today…) Everything’s explicitly labeled. Titles leave nothing to the imagination, and just in case there’s some ambiguity about exactly the box in which a book belongs, there’s the always the subtitle to make things crystal clear.

Tell me the label, and I can predict what you’ll find in the story. Indeed, that’s the purpose of all these kink and genre categories. Given that thousands of erotica titles are published daily, people want a fast way to find the reads that will push their particular buttons. In today’s world of instant communication and information overload, it seems that readers don’t have the time or the patience to browse or to experiment. They think they already know what they want. Labels and keywords are intended to make sure they get it. In fact I know from painful personal experience that if a book doesn’t fulfill the expectations associated with its labels, readers will voice their displeasure.

Erotica has become predictable, compartmentalized and homogenized. Today’s insta-culture tags on-line stories with phrases like “10 minute read”, as well as the inevitable keywords. Erotica is something to consume, like gossip or popcorn. (See my post last month about serialized fiction for more about this.) And orgasms are absolutely required. A story in which the characters have some sexual interactions but don’t climax violates the requirements of today’s readers.

Most erotica I encounter now barely revs my engines. It’s too obvious, too stereotyped, too manufactured. I like my sex veiled in a bit of mystery. I appreciate a tale that keeps me in suspense. The build-up of erotic tension can be as pleasurable as its release, and an unexpected twist can be deeply satisfying, even when that tension is unresolved by orgasm.

When I started writing and publishing erotica, more than twenty years ago, things were very different. Variety was given far more emphasis. A single erotic novel could include all sorts of sexual scenarios: ménage, BDSM, exhibitionism, cross-dressing, same-sex interactions, toys and taboos. You couldn’t sum it up in a couple of keywords. Cleis published themed anthologies, but within the flexible boundaries of the theme, the challenge was to write the most original, surprising and arousing tale one could manage.

If you’d like a glimpse of the amazing richness available in erotica ten to fifteen years ago, grab one of the volumes from Maxim Jakubowski’s Mammoth Book of Best Erotica series. Or take a look at Cream (https://www.amazon.com/Cream-Erotica-Readers-Writers-Association/dp/1560259256), the anthology of ERWA authors I edited in 2006. (The reviews of this book on Amazon show a lot of disparity; the more recent the review, the lower the rating!) Or if you’re looking for arousing novels, consider K.D. Grace’s The Initiation of Ms Holly (2011) or Portia da Costa’s Gemini Heat (1995/2008).

It seems that thematic complexity, narrative sophistication and sexual creativity have gone out of style. I mourn their loss. I miss the stories that inspired me to tell my own, full of yearning, dripping with desire.

At the same time, I try to adapt to the current market of meticulously enumerated genres and key phrases. Every book I’ve published recently has a sub-title. What else can I do, if I want anyone to read my lascivious imaginings?

I’m not very good at it, though. I keep wanting to tear down the walls, shatter the boxes, break the rules. I long for the sensuousness and subtlety of two decades ago. Which is probably why my stories don’t sell nearly as well as Hot Erotica Short Stories – 32 Explicit and Forbidden Erotic Taboo Hot Sex Stories Naughty Adult Women: Filthy Milfs, First Time Lesbian, Dirty Talking Position for Couples, Horny Bisexual Threesomes (Amazon rank 11 in erotica anthologies today) or Erotic Sex-Story: Daddy Dom, Menage Explicit Adult Couple: Wife Ganged Bi-Strangers Hard Husband Forced Watching Gay (Amazon rank 237 in bisexual erotica) or our own Larry Archer’s House Party 4: Swingers Swap More Than Their Partners at Hot Erotica Sex Parties with cuckolds and Hotwives.

No surprises here. But I guess that’s what today’s readers want.

Old People Sex

by | May 6, 2020 | | 7 Comments

by Ashley Lister 


I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going a little stir-crazy with all this lockdown/quarantine stuff. Obviously, I’m being a good and dutiful citizen, working from home (where I deliver online lectures) and practising social distancing on the rare occasions when I have to step outside.

The executor gave me a big, dusty box
Whilst I was still trying to mourn
When I looked inside,
my smile grew so wide:
Because I’d inherited all Grandpa’s porn

But it’s such an unusual situation. And, because I pride myself on being relatively productive, I’ve been going into overdrive publishing titles (where the rights have reverted to me) and even going so far as to publish a collection of my personal highly offensive poetry.

Now Grandpa’d lived a long full life
He’d loved his kids. He’d loved his wife.
He loved his beer. And he loved his fags
But his biggest love was his titty mags.

I’ve been writing poetry for more than a decade now and it’s slowly been getting more and more offensive. I suppose part of the challenge is pushing myself to the limit and seeing how much I dare say to an audience when I’m on a microphone. I know this has resulted in upsetting one or two audience members, but it’s also resulted in making several other audience members laugh with all the gusto that leaves a person breathless and satisfied.


And I sorted slowly through the dog-eared pages
A collection so vast it must have drained his wages
And I looked at all the women in their seventies glam
And I stared in wide-eyed wonder at each very bearded clam.

And so, it was relatively easy to put the collection together. I keep each of my poems stored on a cloud and I simply dumped them into a MS Word document, and then uploaded the document to Amazon Kindle. Because I was doing this over a period of a week I had a chance to read through each of the poems and decide whether or not it deserved its place in the final collection. Some of them no longer amused me and so they were ignored. Some of them, the ones that earned a place in the book, had me chuckling as I tidied up formatting and spelling prior to publication.

I saw a vadge so hirsute
It looked like an adult malamute
And another looked just like some big Maine Coone cat
There was one that looked weird
Like Chewbacca’s beard
And another that looked like Trump’s wig on her twat


Even though this is a link to that book, this blog post is not intended as a sales pitch. This blog post is simply my way of saying, I’m going stir crazy here, and this is how I’m coping. What are you guys doing to stop yourself from going all ‘Yellow Wallpaper’? Replies in the comments box below, please.




Publishing for Fun and Profit

by | February 24, 2020 | , , | 4 Comments

Cuckold Club – First Date

Today was a somewhat successful day of man over machine and software! Last week I promised myself that I would release my latest smut story, which required me to climb several hurdles.

The first was obviously to finish the story, which I did Saturday. My plan is to release it for preorder on Monday at both Amazon and SmashWords. To do that, you have to have two almost identical copies of the stories.

One has the frontmatter and backmatter for Amazon and the other, frontmatter and backmatter for SmashWords. You are not allowed to have links in a story that points to a different publisher. For example, if you have a link to a SmashWords site in your Amazon Kindle copy, then Amazon will throw you under the bus.

Once I had the body completed, then I had to create the frontmatter and backmatter for each publisher. As I’m using Scrivener to write my smut in, I had to translate my existing Word versions to Scrivener. While copy and paste is the obvious solution, trust me, its not that easy, especially when I’ve never published a story out of Scrivener.

I’ve put off digging into the Compile function and trying to figure out how to tell Scrivener to bundle the Amazon version with its files and then create a SmashWords version with its unique files, was a hill I didn’t anticipate having to climb.

Once I got it to work, it started to make sense, but it was a good thing we don’t have any small children as they would have their vocabulary increased with mostly four-letter words!

Scrivener doesn’t use Styles like every other word processing program, and there is apparently a way to do it with version 3 of the software, but I didn’t have time to dig into it. The same with the Table of Contents (TOC), and I did those manually, which meant I had to do them twice. Once for Amazon and once for SmashWords.

I think I’m about 90% of the way there and will try to figure out how to automate the final 10%, so Scrivener will spit out a complete file pretty much on its own. Maybe?

The SmashWords version slipped through their meatgrinder without an error, and I used Calibre to convert the .DOCX file to ePub, and that looked pretty good.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with Scrivener and how my first story in my Cuckold Club series turned out. The story is available for preorder now and will go live next weekend. I haven’t seen a big benefit to releasing a story for preorder, but I always release a new story on Friday as the publishers tend to hipe a story in the first few days, so I want to make sure the story is available on the weekend instead of letting it languish during the week.

Scrivener sells for fifty bucks for PC or Mac, and that, to me, is very reasonable for what it can do. True, they should probably hire a technical writer instead of using programmers. As a programmer, I can attest to the fact we create poor documentation.

In a past life, I did contract programming for several car manufacturers to create computer-based training courses (CBT). I worked with a team that included video crews and technical writers. I learned so much about technical writing from them, which has helped to this day.

Speaking of Amazon and SmashWords, I want to offer my latest thoughts on these two behemoths in the publishing world.

As I understand it, Amazon publishes about 70% of the eReader stories, and SmashWords is somewhere in the 30% balance of the market.

Depending on your story content, you need to utilize both to maximize your sales. Amazon is particularly sensitive to story content, and if your typical story is on one of the fringe topics, they will give you fits.

As we’ve discussed many times at ERWA, if your story is thrown in the dungeon, sales will suffer greatly. Buyers will have to have a link to the story or the exact title. Amazon will not offer up a story from the dungeon, which means the kiss of death in most cases.

SmashWords is extremely tolerant of story content and will often allow stories that violate their liberal limitations. A search of their bestseller list will usually include stories that would give Amazon censors the vapors.

Up to now, what I’ve done is to write a story that will skate through both publishers. This way, I don’t have to create two versions of the story. With SmashWords, there is a catch. If your story includes a fairly short list of no-no’s, then they will not push the story out for you.

If your SmashWord’s story is ranked premium, then they will publish it to Apple iBooks, B&N, Nook, Kobo, and others. Apple is somewhat sensitive to story content and the blurb. They have rejected several of my stories for being too explicit, and I’ve had no success in changing their minds.

Strickly from my personal sales, my SmashWords sales are solid from month to month, while Amazon varies with the length of time since the last release. In the last year, my Amazon sales have varied from 1 to 3 times my SmashWords sales.

SmashWords doesn’t seem to care how old a story is, just how popular it is. I have stories that are several years old and still relatively high on the charts. Amazon, on the other hand, will bounce all over the place.

When I release a story on Amazon, sales will shoot up and stay for several months. Then it will slowly drop until I publish a new story.

Having SmashWords push my stories out to Apple iBooks really helps me. Most months, my income from Apple is around 50% of my SmashWords sales.

Now that I’ve released my first story in the Cuckold Club series, I can go back and finish House Party 2, which is currently approaching 100,000 words. I’m looking to take Lisabet’s suggestion and break it up to two stories, HP2 and HP3.

That will help as I’ve tried to inject some angst into the House Party original story and now have to try and fix the problems I created. The primary characters, Foxy and Larry, in my stories, are fictionalized versions of Wifey and myself. In real life, we’re in the Lifestyle, and writing erotica was a way to talk about some of our adventures. While not trying to promote things we do, it has been a lot of fun for both of us.

In House Party, Foxy left Larry for another guy and moved to California. There was no fight, she just wanted to be on her own. Foxy and I met before she turned 21 and has never actually been on her own.

It’s difficult for me to write in problems as we’ve never had issues before, and my fictional Foxy and Larry are basic extensions of ourselves. They are pretty true to life beyond the fact I don’t have a strip club and more money than God. My wife is a gorgeous creature and exactly as portrayed in the stories, except not quite as far over the edge.

Anyway, I’m starting to ramble. In HP2/HP3, I’m trying to get them back together, while trying to deal with the extra women who have complicated the situation. Foxy now has a girlfriend, who is her love interest. Larry has a new squeeze and a MILF, who is his best friend’s wife.

If that sounds complicated, it really is, and I’m struggling to make everything work out. If I break HP2 in half, then I can publish the next excerpt, which will give me time to figure out how to make everything work out, without resorting to Judge Judy.

Plus, I’m glad that my wife is a Luddite and refuses to read anything that’s not made of paper, else I’m afraid that she’ll be pissed at me. I haven’t shared the details of House Party and the marital breakup yet and am not sure if she’ll be happy with me about it.

At least I’ve got her new iPhone working, and so maybe she’ll cut me some slack if she finds out what our fictional selves have gotten tangled up in.

Until this time next month, I’m off like a prom dress! Catch my blog at: LarryArcher.blog

Larry Archer (and Foxy!)

What’s in My Toolbox

by | October 25, 2019 | , , , , | 8 Comments

For my ERWA blog posting this month, I’m going through the tools I normally use while scribbling out my smut stories. I’ve discovered that there are ways to save money, yet not scrimp on performance or capability.

Philosophy

The traditional way to publish a book involves the use of editors to proof your manuscript, graphics designers to create a cover, and a publishing house to put it all together. In a perfect world, this is the way to go, but unfortunately most of us live in the real world.

Assuming that our story sells for $2.99 or $3.99 and we have a 70% margin, then your profit from a $3 book is $2, and a $4 book is $3. I’m using rounded figures here and know this isn’t strictly correct.

For a cover, let’s assume a price of $50 to $200 per cover. In terms of sales this translates to 25 sales at $50/cover or 70-100 sales at $200/cover. The painful truth that most of us quickly learn, your sales on an erotic story will be slim. Then you have to ask yourself, how long will it take until my new story is in the black or when you stop bleeding money?

Until you become rich and famous or have a spouse who doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the credit card bill, the average beginning smut writer can’t afford the luxury of hiring outside help.

Getting your foot in the door can be a pricy first step unless you are willing to do the grunt work yourself. Designing a cover is not that hard if you are reasonably competent, and using inexpensive or free tools can get you started. Certainly a professional graphics designer or copy editor can do a better job, but I don’t think you should drive yourself into the poor house doing it.

Make sure that you join our group of talented people who write erotica. They can offer a lot of advice to both new and seasoned writers. Erotica Readers and Writers Association (ERWA) has been around for many years and should be high on your list of blogs to follow. https://erotica-readers.com/blog/

Hardware

I’ve always been a PC person and generally considered those who had drunk the Kool-Aid to be under the influence of Steve Jobs, even from the grave, but not any longer. Like many, I’ve been seduced and taken a bite out of the forbidden Apple. Like Adam and Eve, who just ran around naked in the woods and screwed all the time until they succumbed to the forbidden fruit. They took a bite of the Apple and found themselves outside the fence.

In 2012, when I first started writing porn, I realized that I needed a laptop that I could take to the bathroom when I had one of those urges. I have purchased three Ultrabooks or thin, light PC laptops for the successful executive on the go. Every time I bought one, I quickly realized that they were not very good. Buyer’s remorse quickly set in as I discovered their shortcomings.

The problems I discovered centered around a couple of necessary features for me. Touchpads under Windows sucked, and many people are plagued with “ghost” touches. The touchpad would do things by itself and drove me crazy. This is a common problem, and many users complain about it.

I finally figured out how to stop the problem, but by this time, I had moved on to my MacBook Air. Others have suggested that I use a mouse to eliminate the issues, but then you have to lug the mouse around and deal with it.

The other problem is battery life and performance with Windows laptops. If you don’t get a good CPU like an i7 processor, performance sucks. Battery life is always measured in a few hours. Manufacturers boast 8-10 hours of run time, but they typically lie. When you can only get maybe 3-4 hours, you’re as bad as someone with an iPhone. You walk around with the charger cord in your hand, looking for an outlet.

Foxy uses an iPhone 8S with 256 Gig of ram and constantly has it plugged in and complains about battery life. For a thousand-dollar phone, I’d expect more, but that’s what she wanted and who am I to complain. I’ve learned to just hand over my credit card and close my eyes. What I don’t know won’t hurt me.

My love affair with Apple started in 2012 with my purchase of a 2012 MacBook Air, which only has an i5 processor, but you’d think there was an i7 under the hood. As a touch typist, the MBA’s keyboard is the best I’ve ever seen. My mistakes dropped like a rock, and once I got used to the differences between the PC and Mac operating systems, I’ve never looked back, mostly.

In 2015, I upgraded to a new model MBA with 8 Gb of ram and gave my old Mac to Wifey. It works well with her iPhone and saves me a lot of time dealing with Mac to PC problems. My new Mac was just like the old one except for twice the memory. To be honest, I’ve never noticed any problems with the previous Mac’s 4 Gig of memory, but I’m a sucker for new stuff, especially if it’s shiny.

I’ve got money in my bank account for my writing and have been thinking about upgrading, but the new style keyboard scares me. My 2015 Mac is doing well, and I’ve been thinking about swapping out the 256 Gb hard disk for a 1-Tb disk, which is pretty reasonable. Not that I need it, but it would be something new.

One other neat thing about the MBA is that it boots instantly when you raise the lid and doesn’t drain the battery like a Windows laptop does. Fast Start is turned on by default, and that means when you power off, you don’t really power off but enter a hybrid state that allows the computer to boot faster. The downside is that the laptop is constantly using power and will rarely go more than two days without exhausting the battery. My Mac will go for several weeks at least by just closing the lid, with minimal battery loss.

But I have found that there are reasonable alternatives for those who like the Windows operating system. A couple of years back, they took away my work Toshiba laptop and gave me an iPad, which works for 95% of my needs when I’m away from my desktop PC.

A few months ago, I was running a test and needed a PC for the field. Our IT department loaned me a Lenovo business laptop, and I promptly fell in love. It has an older style keyboard that is a joy to type on. It reminds me of my old Dell keyboard, except this one doesn’t clack when you type on it.

The Lenovo is not as skinny and light as a modern Windows ultrabook but is not bad. It probably weighs a pound or so more than my MacBook Air but still not objectionable. Looking through refurbished laptops on Amazon, I discovered that I could buy a 4 year old Lenovo T450s for $315 used and rebuilt with Windows 10 Pro installed.

I’d never bought a used laptop before but liked the one at work so much, I sprung for the unit. It has an i7 processor, 250 Gb solid-state hard disc, and 4 Gb of ram. The unit is probably 4 or 5 years old but looks perfect. Naturally, both of the batteries had degraded to about 75% of new, and I ordered replacement batteries for the unit. While I had the back off, I added 16 Gb of ram to bring the unit up to 20 Gb of ram.

Now I have about $450 invested in the unit with new batteries and lots of ram. I consider this a better alternative than spending almost $2 grand on a high-end laptop. Plus, this thing has huge batteries and will run all day without requiring a charge.

I prefer my MacBook Air as it is lighter and has a phenomenal battery life. The Mac operating system is a form of Unix (Linux) and is more efficient than a Windows computer. On top of that, when you open the lid, the sign-in window shows up instantly. Even if you let it sleep overnight, the boot time is maybe 10-15 seconds, which blows my Windows 10 Pro laptop completely away. Unfortunately, some of the engineering software I use is only available on a Windows machine, so I flip back and forth as needed.

If you are on a tight budget and you need a computer, take a look at refurbished units. I’ve have been pleased with my used computer, and if you grab something with an i7 processor, it will be plenty fast even if it’s a few years old. Make sure you get a solid-state hard disk.

Less expensive laptops are available, such as a Chrome unit, but often have limitations and are slower than a more top of the line unit. By purchasing a used business-grade laptop, I get a unit that is durable and provides power and capability at a reasonable cost.

Word Processing Software

I use Microsoft Word for word processing, but it can be expensive. Now the new Microsoft Office 365 is just a rental that costs you about $120 per year. Renting software pisses, me off and I refuse to upgrade as I want to own the software. Depending on which computer I’m using, I run Office 2016 or 2019, but there are cheaper alternatives.

LibreOffice is a good free alternative that is available for both PCs and Macs. It’s virtually identical to Word, that is except for the Free part! LibreOffice comes with an office suite like Microsoft Office. https://www.libreoffice.org/

I’m also experimenting with Scrivener, which a lot of people like. You can buy it for either PC or Mac for about $50 each. They are beta testing the new Windows version, and you can download the beta version for free until they come out with the final release. If you are running Windows, it’s a good way to grab a word processor for free and will only cost you about $50 sometime in the future, if you like it. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/

Scrivener is kind of cool in that each chapter can be a separate document and allows the writer to deal with a story in parts, yet the software bundles everything together to output. You can also export to Word format to publish. It will publish to electronic book formats, but I’ve haven’t been that adventuresome yet.

Scrivener is a total solution to publishing by giving a writer the ability to build a completed manuscript from the parts, such as cover, front matter, body, and back matter. Plus, it can be set up to publish to different formats with a compiler option.

I’m writing the follow up to House Party, called cleverly House Party 2, using Scrivener, which has been an interesting challenge. There are enough differences to make the program different from Word, and I’m still not sure if I’ll like it going forward but am a glutton for punishment.

Graphics Processing

Having some good graphics tools are a requirement for the Indie writer, in my opinion. While an author can outsource the creation of the cover to a graphics artist, that cost can be difficult to make up with sales.

To replace PhotoShop try GIMP, which is very close to PhotoShop except being free. Download a copy at https://www.gimp.org/

To design your covers, give InkScape a try. InkScape is similar to CorelDraw but free and not hundreds of dollars. https://inkscape.org/

Another good one is Canva, an online cover designer. It’s somewhat limited as you have to pick a template and change it to your story’s details, but it’s free. https://www.canva.com/create/book-covers/

For resizing images, you can’t beat IrfanView, https://www.irfanview.com

To convert document files to ePub, MOBI, or PDF, grab a copy of Calibre. https://calibre-ebook.com/

All the software mentioned above is free and can be downloaded from the Internet. Certainly, commercial software will likely have a few more bells and whistles, but for the struggling artist they can fit your needs. I use mostly open-source (free) software except for a couple, but I pay the bills, and Foxy doesn’t have to bother her pretty little head about where our money goes!

Addendum 2019-10-26 – Mom always told me that if I kept on playing with myself, I’d go blind. I’ve always said, I’d just do it until I needed glasses! I now think it’s affected my brain as I missed a couple of things that are not really associated with writing smut but I consider necessary.

NAS Drive – If you have a network at home, which most of us with cable do, you should invest in a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device with RAID. A NAS drive is similar to the USB portable drives people use to backup or store important files such as pictures and videos from your wife’s first gangbang. A NAS drive will have an RJ-45 network jack that looks like an oversized telephone jack (you remember those don’t you?).

Plugging it into your router or a switch if you have a wired network, will allow backups from any device connected to your home wifi or network. The trick is to get a NAS drive with RAID 0. RAID means that the storage device has two physical hard disks inside that are the same size. With RAID, saving a file to the NAS drive means that the unit automatically writes a copy to the second hard disk. The non-techy explanation is there are two copies to every file, stored on different hard disks. So unless the unit is destroyed with a hammer, it’s virtually impossible to lose files if the hard disk crashes. Always remember, it’s not if a hard disk will fail, it’s when the hard disk is going to fail.

If a hard disk fails on the NAS drive, just unplug the bad hard disk and plug in a new disk of the same size or bigger. The NAS drive will automatically format and use the new hard disk by copying all the files from the original drive to it. This takes a few days as it’s done in the background but the drive will continue to work normally.

NAS drives are not cheap but what’s your data worth? I have a Qnap T-420 which holds 4 hard disks. I’ve currently got 2 – 2Tb and 2 – 4Tb drives in it. Using RAID the capacity of the unit is half the installed storage, so in my case, I have a 2 Tb file system for my writing and personal records and a 4Tb drive for scanned images and video. I also store my pictures from my DSLR and our cell phones there.

FastCopy – I use the FastCopy shareware software to backup my files from my desktop and laptop computers. FastCopy is supposed to be the fastest copy utility around and it only copies files that have changed or are new. It skips the existing files so you can just tell FastCopy to copy from folder to folder, which just takes a few clicks. I write batch files and put them on my desktop to backup my computers. The site to download from is partially in Japanese but with a little head-scratching you can figure out how to download an English version. https://fastcopy.jp/en/

Crystal Disk Info – This handy little utility will read the status of your attached hard disks and tell you if any are having problems. When you run it, it will scan all of the connected disk drives and display the health status of each. If you start seeing warning messages, immediately buy a replacement drive and copy the files to the new drive. Typically, you never get warnings when your hard disk is having problems as it will retry to read a bad sector until it manages to get the data. But then one day, it cannot and you are typically history at that point. By watching the Power On hours and if the status changes from good, then you’re okay. A rule of thumb that I use is to replace an external USB hard disk at around 12,000 run hours or an internal at 18,000 – 20,000 hours even if you don’t see problems. These days an 8-Tb USB drive is about $150 so it’s not that expensive to swap them out. A good 4-Tb internal drive is about $85 also. https://crystalmark.info/en/

Sorry, I didn’t think about those at the time I was writing my monthly blog issue but feel that these are also important.

That’s it for this month, and follow me for more ramblings from the dirty mind of Larry Archer. My personal blog is https://LarryArcher.blog.

Timeless Classics

by | December 21, 2018 | | 6 Comments

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Roman Polanski’s renowned psychological horror film “Rosemary’s Baby”. I saw it within a few years of its release; to celebrate the fifty year milestone I watched it again at a local “classic films” club.

The movie stands up to the test of time pretty well. It still evokes a stifling sense of inescapable evil, set against incongruous but brilliant humor. Mia Farrow’s terror and resolve remain palpable and convincing, even if her submissiveness to her handsome, gregarious husband seems old-fashioned.

I couldn’t help notice, however, some critical ways in which the plot depends on the time period. In one point fairly late in the film, the heroine slips from the clutches of the coven who wants her baby and rushes to find a phone booth. (The coven is listening in on her home telephone.) Sure she’s being pursued, she waits nervously for the current occupant of the booth to conclude his call, before barricading herself inside. She calls a seemingly sympathetic doctor, only to find he is with a patient. Sweating with fear, she pretends to be on the line to discourage other people who want to use the facility, until the doctor returns her call.

As I watched this scene, I found myself thinking “Why doesn’t she just use her cell phone?” But of course that’s nonsense. Those of us who watched this in 1968 could not have imagined how mobile devices would transform our daily lives. If Mia had a mobile, she might have escaped.

Technology has changed radically, and changed our habits and assumptions along with it. We can expect that this trend will continue, and very likely accelerate. However society looks today, we can be certain it will be different next year, and maybe unrecognizable in five years.

What does this mean for writers? Well—my first novel Raw Silk was originally published in 1999, almost twenty years ago. At that time, it would have been labeled as contemporary. Since my heroine Kate is a software developer, the book includes exchanges of email messages (which was part of my life even then), but there’s no Web and no cell phones. Bangkok (where the novel is set) has no public transit aside from buses and taxis. (On my latest visit, I discovered there are three subway lines in operation, with another four or five under construction.) In Raw Silk, people actually write one another physical letters, on paper, in order to communicate.

I’ve revised and republished this book three times. Each time it seemed a bit more dated. I wrestled with the question of whether I should try to bring it into the twenty first century. Finally, I decided to deliberately anchor it in a particular period, a year or two after the time it was written. I peppered the text with a historical, cultural and technology references that make it clear this is not a contemporary erotic romance.

A similar problem arose with my erotic thriller Exposure, first released in 2009. For my latest revamp (2014), I chose to update it to the present (more or less). I inserted appropriate technology where necessary to be convincing. I was helped by the fact that my main character Stella is working class with little disposable income. In any case, she’s not the type to go gaga about gadgets.

I have to wonder, though, how readers five or ten years in the future will react to the books we are writing now. (This assumes, of course, that people will still be reading in a decade.) Will our plots seem contrived? Will our conflicts be incomprehensible? For instance (let’s be optimistic), suppose that the current movement toward acceptance of varying forms of sexual orientation continues. Many gay romance stories revolve around the need for the characters to keep their relationships hidden from society. Readers who come of age in a world where same-sex attraction is viewed as normal and commonplace will not be able to appreciate the angst that propels these stories today. The tales will lose their meaning, or at very least, will seem like quaint period pieces.

Or consider another, more pessimistic scenario. In ten years, surveillance by states or by corporations may become so pervasive that privacy will cease to exist. A story about an illicit affair will seem unbelievable to someone who has grown up in a world where it is literally impossible to do anything in secret.

I became sexually active after the invention of the Pill and before AIDS. At that time, popular culture was not nearly as saturated with sexual content as it is today. I know I have a different attitude toward sex than a millennial. For me, sex has always been special, a unique and thrilling adventure. At the same time being sexually active was far less risky for me than for my mother or my daughter (if I had one).

So, could I write erotica that my hypothetical daughter could appreciate? Or are my attitudes and assumptions likely to seem strange and foreign? (When I recently posted a flasher in Storytime that referred to the sixties film icon James Dean, who embodies, for me, a certain bad boy sexual vibe, some members of the list didn’t recognize the allusion.)

We still read books from previous centuries of course (or at least I do), some of which we label as classics. I wonder what makes them “classic”. Perhaps there is some sort of universality in these works that somehow bridges the cultural gap between the author’s time and our own. Do emotions remain fundamentally the same even as society changes? Is that why we can still identify with characters like Emma Woodhouse, Sydney Carton, or Jane Eyre? One has to wonder, though, about how our experience in reading these tales compares with reactions of readers for whom they were contemporary. Perhaps we’re grasping only a small part of what the author intended.

In any case, I don’t delude myself that my own oeuvre incorporates much in the way of fundamental truths or themes that transcend time. Nevertheless, I’m in this for the long haul (nineteen years and counting), so I’d like to write stories that will be appreciated not only today but in the future as well. I wish I knew the trick to this. Right now, as in so many other things, I’m just acting on instinct.

 

Successful Synopses

by | July 21, 2016 | | 0 Comments

By
Lisabet Sarai

Writing
a novel is an heroic endeavor. It takes not only imagination and
creativity, but also more prosaic virtues such as perseverance,
discipline, and attention to detail. Anyone who can generate 60,000
to 100,000 words without giving up in self-disgust has my admiration.
I’ve done it myself, so I know how difficult it is. Yet many
novelists quail in the face of a far less daunting task: producing a
few thousand words for a synopsis of their work that is often
required by publishers.

I
think that one reason why so many writers claim to have trouble with
synopses is that they may have misconceptions about what a synopsis
is supposed to accomplish. Also, this may be a forest-and-trees
phenomenon. Novelists are so deeply involved in the complexities of
their fictional worlds, they may have a hard time pulling back and
taking a more generalized view.

What
is a Synopsis?

A
synopsis is a summary of a longer work—for
purposes of this article, a novel or novella. Publishers have
different standards for the length and format of a synopsis. One
common format is a chapter-by-chapter summary, with one or two
paragraphs per chapter. Assuming 200 words per paragraph and 10 to 20
chapters, the length of a typical synopsis will be in the same range
as the average short story: 2000 to 4000 words.

You
should of course always consult your target publisher’s guidelines
before creating the synopsis. Some publishers want more detail, while
others may ask for less.

Although
a synopsis is of comparable length to a story, the similarities end
there. A synopsis does not need to establish the setting, set a mood,
or develop characters. Fundamentally, a synopsis is about plot. It is
a prose outline of the major events in your novel. Your synopsis
needs to introduce and identify your major characters, then explain
what they do or experience during the course of the novel. Given the
constraints of word count, your synopsis should not include much
description or backstory. It does not need to create suspense. It
should never contain dialogue.

The
purpose of a synopsis is to convey information to the publisher (or
editor or agent). The synopsis allows the publisher to evaluate
whether the action flow of your novel makes sense, and whether it
will be of interest to their target audience. If your novel is not
yet completed, the synopsis also demonstrates that you have worked
out the resolution for the conflicts and problems that you introduce
in your early chapters. (It’s sometimes possible to sell an
incomplete novel on speculation, based on initial chapters plus a
synopsis. In fact, I’ve sold four of my novels in this manner.)

A
synopsis is part of your marketing package, but it is not intended to
demonstrate your fabulous writing style. Your sample chapters should
do this. (Of course, the synopsis must be free of spelling and
grammar errors, but that should be true of every bit of writing you
show to the world.)

A
synopsis is also different from a “blurb”—the
few brief come-on paragraphs included on the buy page or the back
cover. A blurb is intended for readers, not publishers or editors.
Blurbs (which I find much harder to write than synopses) must be
clever and engaging. They’re designed to hook potential readers and
to make them want to read your book. A synopsis, in contrast, needs
does not need to be particularly snappy or creative. Rather, it needs
to be clear and comprehensible, communicating the essential structure
of your novel while leaving out extraneous details.

How
to Write a Synopsis

There
are a variety of strategies that can be applied to creating a
synopsis. They vary somewhat, depending on whether your novel is
already complete or you’re writing a synopsis for a speculative
submission. Different strategies might feel more natural, depending
on your cognitive style: linear and hierarchical versus non-linear
and associative.

1.
The outline approach.

This
strategy works well for linear thinkers. Create an outline of your
novel. Create a major item for each chapter. Within each major
section, list in order the most important events that occur in that
chapter as sub-items. Try to limit the number of sub-items to three
or four. Focus on the one chapter you are considering. Don’t go back
or forward in the narrative flow.

Once
you have your outline, turn each major section into a paragraph. Each
sub-item should generate one or at most two sentences.

The
result of this process will be a synopsis, but it may be hard to
follow because it is missing transitions. Go back and add, as
necessary, sentences that link chapter events back to previous
chapters.

Once
you have tried this approach a few times, you’ll probably discover
that you don’t need to create the intermediate outline. You will be
able to move directly from a mental summary of the major events in a
chapter to the sentences of the synopsis.

A
variant to this approach is to use the scene breaks in your chapters
to identify the sub-items. In other words, one scene will become one
sentence in the synopsis.

2.
The Post-it Note approach.

Some
writers do not feel comfortable with outlines, either when creating
their stories or afterwards. Yet a synopsis is, structurally
speaking, an outline. For non-linear thinkers, the scene-based
strategy, in particular, may feel terribly artificial. For these
authors, the Post-it Note approach may be more natural.

Sit
down with a pad of Post-it Notes. Start thinking about your novel. On
each Post-it Note, write down one story point that you think is
important to your novel. Don’t worry about temporal order; just jot
down your first impressions. However, you should try to focus on
actions or events rather than characters or setting.

Continue
until you have twenty or thirty items on your Post-It Notes. Then go
back and arrange them into the time sequence in which they occur in
your novel. Next, survey your notes and satisfy yourself that all
items are equally important. Try to remove items that are not
critical to the plot, even if they illuminate the characters or
perform some other narrative function.

Finally,
turn each of your notes into a sentence or two. Fill in transitions
as necessary. The result should be a reasonably coherent summary of
the major happenings in your book.

3.
The dictation approach

You’ve
lived with your novel for a long time. Now, tell the story of to
someone else. Record your narration. Then go back and transcribe your
oral recounting of the tale.

When
they tell a story out loud, people often discover a natural ability
to select relevant detail and to focus attention on the essentials. A
real audience will provide feedback, in their expressions and body
language, that will help you to realize when you’re getting into too
much detail and when you are missing connections.

This
strategy is particularly appropriate for unfinished novels. As you
tell the story, you may find yourself making decisions about the
course of the plot.

Some
Common Problems in Creating Synopses

There
are a variety of issues that can arise when following the strategies
above. Some of these are general, while others are specific to
writing synopses of erotica or erotic romance.

1.
The plot is not linear in time.

Some
novels contain frequent flashbacks that reveal information important
for future events. Other novels (particularly in the science fiction
or paranormal genres) may include parallel time lines. The guidelines
above suggest that the synopsis should be linear in time; how can you
deal with these aberrations?

My
recommendation is to linearize as much as possible. Describe the
prior events that are contained in the flashback before the events
that they influence. For parallel time lines, try to deal with each
one as a separate thread, and then include coordinating information
that helps the reader to relate them. This approach can also be
applied to novels in which several characters pursue separate
activities which ultimately connect.

Remember
that your goal is to explain the events of your plot, not to build
suspense or gradually reveal the nature of the truth. The sequence in
which you describe events in your synopsis does not need to match the
exposition in the novel itself.

All
this being said, there are certain novels—for
example, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife—which
can be extremely difficult to linearize. Even this novel, though,
could be summarized by breaking its narrative into several phases:
Claire’s childhood, Claire’s married days; Claire’s life after
Henry’s death.

2.
Many characters need to be introduced.

In
presenting the strategies above, I haven’t said anything at all about
characters. Yet characters are responsible for most of the events in
the plot; where do they fit in to the synopsis?

Typically,
a novel will have a few major characters. Your synopsis should
introduce them as early as possible, as soon as they begin to act or
affect others’ actions. You will need to provide some description for
each character; try to focus on the attributes and historical
information that is critical for the story. Usually, you can sum up a
character in a phrase or clause. Once you’ve introduced the
character, get on with the action.

If
your novel has many characters, you may not need to mention them all,
especially not by name. Restrict your introductions to the characters
who serve as the engine for your plot.

3.
Most of your novel is sex scenes.

In
many erotic novels, the primary action occurs in bed (or on the
kitchen table, in the shower, in the back room at the office, and so
on!) Clearly you can’t summarize the details of each scene, and
probably you wouldn’t want to:

“Lisa
sucks George’s cock until he comes. Then Roger comes out from the
broom closet and takes Lisa anally while George jacks off”…

So,
if you don’t want your synopsis to read like a list of body parts and
sex acts, what can you do?

For
each sex scene, ask yourself: what changed because of this scene? How
did this scene modify the relationship between the characters, or a
character’s self-image? This is what you need to describe in your
synopsis; the sex itself should get no more than a mention.

You
may want to highlight salient points. If this is a character’s first
experience with BDSM, for example, the audience may need to know.
However, it’s better to say too little about the sex than too much.
Once again, you’re not trying to arouse your reader (the publisher).
You’re trying to convey information, as succinctly as possible.

4.
Your novel isn’t finished.

How
can you summarize a novel that doesn’t yet exist? Clearly, you as the
author must have a plan for the plot, even if you haven’t yet
implemented it. This plan should be what you describe in the
synopsis.

Don’t
worry too much that you may change your mind later about the details,
or even about major issues like the ending. Your synopsis is not a
contract or a commitment. Publishers understand that writers
sometimes have new ideas.

Editing
Your Synopsis

Like
anything you write, your first draft of the synopsis will probably
need work. My synopses are always too long. I need to go back and
consider what can be cut. Another common problem is lack of
coherence. You need to communicate not only the story’s events but
how they are connected.

Get
someone else to read the synopsis, then find out if he or she has any
questions. That will help you identify points that you might have
omitted, or areas that you have not clearly explained.

Obviously
you want to spell check your synopsis and make sure that your grammar
is correct. With the synopsis, you are not trying to dazzle the
publisher with your literary brilliance. However, you do want to
impress the reader with your basic competence.

Examples

This
article is already much longer than it should be. However, if you’d
like to see some examples of synopses which have actually sold books
visit www.lisabetsarai.com/synopses.html. And please feel free to
comment or ask questions here on the blog.

Preparing For The Publication Of A New Novel

by | November 28, 2015 | | 5 Comments

Elizabeth Black
writes in a wide variety of genres including erotica, erotic romance, horror, and
dark fiction. She lives on the Massachusetts coast with her husband, son, and
her tuxedo cat, Lucky. Lucky needs playmates, so two kittens are in her near future. Visit her web site, her Facebook page, and her Amazon Author Page.

This picture above is of me, doing the Happy Dance.

After two years of submitting, one of my erotic romance
novels has finally been accepted by an excellent small press. This press has
already published four of my short stories in four anthologies, so we weren’t
strangers to each other. I don’t feel comfortable naming the publisher or the
title of the book yet since the deal isn’t finalized. I need to get my
contract, sign it, and return it. I will say that I’m over the moon about this
acceptance. I sent this book to over 70 agents and all the good erotic romance
publishers. Everyone rejected it. If this particular publisher hadn’t accepted
the book, I was going to shelve it. I had nowhere else to send it, and I loathe
self-publishing. So to say I’m very thrilled is an understatement.

Now for the real work – preparing the book for publication
and preparing myself for publicizing it. I know the title has to change. Any
book with the word “Threesome” in the title will be slapped with the
“Adult” label by Amazon and other distributors and relegated to the
“Erotica” category where it will die a quick and lonely death. If any
of that sort of censorship happens, my book won’t sell because the publishers
would have hidden it from searches. My current and potential readers won’t be
able to find it.  So I need a new title.

I want my cover to be sexy but not tacky. I’m not sure I want
any oiled male torsos on the cover. I like the cover of “Fifty Shades of
Grey”. It’s subtle and hot. I’ll talk to the publisher, but I’ll trust the
pub’s suggestions as to what kind of cover will sell the book.

I’ve already decided who I’d like to write the forward for
my book, but I need to ask her first. I hope she accepts. She’s an excellent,
award-winning erotic fiction writer who’s a great seller. She’d be perfect. I
also have a list of writers I’d like to contact to write blurbs for my book.
I’ll send an ARC of the book if they need it, or I could send a PDF of several
short stories in the likely event they want to read my works first but want
something shorter.

I’ll write a press release to send out to the local
newspapers. I’ve done this before for a charity anthology, so I know how to write
it. Now to get newspapers to write about me and/or the book.

I need to set up a list of reviewers to review the book.
I’ll send it to Night Owl Romance, Manic Readers, Dawn’s Reading Nook, and The
Romance Reviews, to start. I’m not sure where else to send it at this point,
but I do have a list of review sites buried on my computer somewhere. I’m also
going to get the book set up with NetGalley. I’m a member of Broad Universe, a
networking group for women writers. Broad Universe has a very good deal set up
where I can submit my book to NetGalley for a reduced price. I’m definitely
taking advantage of that. I’ll submit the book to Publisher’s Daily anyway. You
never know. I may get a review.

I also need to set up a newsletter. I plan on sending
newsletters out monthly and at times when something unique is going on, like
the release or special sales. I need to create or pay someone to create a
newsletter header. If I can’t do it myself, I’ll ask the woman who made my
excellent covers for my two erotic fairy tales, Trouble In Thigh High Boots (erotic Puss In Boots) and Climbing Her Tower (erotic Rapunzel). I’ve
subscribed to MailChimp awhile ago, but I’m not comfortable using it yet. Then
I need to get subscribers. How do I create a “sign up for my
newsletter” link on my web site and on my Facebook timeline? I need to
figure that out. If there are easier and better newsletter programs out there,
please let me know!

I need to plan live readings. I can go to Broad Universe for
this, since that group does group readings. I need to find the local erotic
fiction audiences and give readings to them. I could go to conventions like I
do every year, but the ones I go to are for science fiction, fantasy, and
horror. Smut wouldn’t fit in, although some local SF/F cons do include erotic
works. I need to find the romance and erotica conventions. Hopefully some of
them will be nearby.

I’d like to pay for some advertising, but I’d like the
advertising to give me results. I don’t want to throw away my money. I may buy
a spot on Night Owl Reviews’ web site and magazine. The Romance Reviews has
reasonable rates for advertising. I’ve had good results there when I advertised
my two erotic fairy tales. Is GoodReads advertising a good idea? What about
Facebook sponsored ads? Any other suggestions for good places for book
advertisements?

I need to set up one or two blog tours. I’ve done these in
the past on my own and while they’re a lot of work, I liked the results. I have
my old list of contacts and I’ll contact those people again for my blog tours.

Any other suggestions of promotions I left out? I don’t want
to miss anything!

I’m very excited about this acceptance. It comes on the
heels of one of my publishers closing its doors. That pub was supposed to
publish my first family saga/thriller novel in 2016, and now I have to start
from scratch again to find it a new home. More agent queries and small press
submissions. Sigh. That closing really discouraged me as have the usual
rejections I’ve received during this period. I haven’t written a novel in over
two years. I’ve had a handful of short stories published in anthologies though,
in both erotic fiction and horror categories. So my work is out there. Just not
my long work. I have several unfinished erotic novels sitting on my computer
that I haven’t felt like touching in all this time. I was very discouraged with
my writing career, so I haven’t had the desire to write much.  Now, my mojo is back. I have a m/m erotic
werewolf novel to finish. That one is loads of fun. A food porn erotic novel
needs me.  That one has a touch of magic
in it. Then there is the m/m erotic romance set in an exotic location. It also
has a touch of food porn. The novel I sold has food porn in it. I like food
porn.  🙂

So my writing career is looking up for 2016. Here’s hoping
the publisher treats the book well (I don’t doubt it will), and my promotions
give me lots of sales. That’s what I want and need – readers to buy and read
the book. I don’t want to lose my mojo. Not now, when everything looks so good.
What a great present for the holiday season. I’m psyched!

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

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