Posts Tagged ‘future’
I thought I’d decided my next step – having heard about people who make a decent income from Kindle erotica, it seemed something worth trying.
Then I looked into it a bit further and found Kindle Unlimited has unlimited problems. Books being withdrawn, accounts shut down for activity the author has no control over, and the whole dodgy ‘pay per page view’ premise is giving me pause. The whole point of self-publishing for me is to avoid being at the mercy of other forces.
But on the other hand, it seems that you can’t earn any money without recourse to Amazon. So I’m back to pondering…
Am I What, Where, Who, Why?
Posted on: June 10, 2016
It’s taken me a while to come up with a plan.
Last year, I barely wrote a word. I don’t know if it was burn out, or if some vampire attacked me in my sleep and drained all the confidence out of me, but nothing was working and I had to stop even thinking about writing for a good, long time. The vampire didn’t even have the common decency to be sexy, the bastard. If it had been the Poldark one from Being Human I wouldn’t have minded so much.
This year, it’s a different story (thank god because the last one was very boring). Ideas are bursting out like the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la. But with the different story comes a different problem – what the hell do I do with them?
The erotica/erotic romance scene I entered eight years ago has gone through so many mutations that it’s now unrecognisable. Many of the imprints I liked to work with have shut down or changed in ways that don’t work for me.
Don’t get me wrong – there are imprints still running that I think do excellent work. Totally Bound is one of them – they have a great PR department, look lovely and publish some top-grade stuff. But with some others, there’s been a definite shift towards a softer approach, which I can cope with on some levels but not others (e.g. being asked to tone down my content so as not to scare the kink-curious post-50 Shades horses).
So I’ve decided to give self-publishing a serious go. It wasn’t something I ever really wanted to do, because I hate all the fiddle-faddle admin type stuff that goes along with it, but on the other hand, the freedom of it is something I need at the moment. A late-night Twitter conversation with Giselle Renarde and A.M. Hartnett (read their books!) gave me the final push, after much dithering.
So you can expect new material (along with some repackaged old material) in the near future – just as soon as I know what I’m doing.
Maybe not the ‘near’ future then…
Pin It To Win It
Posted on: April 16, 2016
Something must be done. That much is clear.
But what? I have no idea. So in the meantime I made a Pinterest account. I’ve no idea if this will help or hinder my profile – I imagine it’ll have no effect whatsoever, like everything else. But at least I can say I’ve been exploring the avenues.
I’m a little anxious about it. I mean, is it OK to just pin things willy-nilly? Are there image copyright issues I need to know about? What does it mean to ‘follow’ someone, as it doesn’t seem to involve getting any notifications or any actual interaction? As a person with very little visual sense, is this something I will get anything out of?
Is there a point to the pin?
I ought to be used to it by now.
Another erotica publisher going down the Swanee; it’s a familiar tale these days, almost a fable, as inevitable as death and taxes. But it still feels surprising and new. It still stings.
There’s an obvious lesson to draw from this: don’t start up an erotic imprint. The books that make it big in the genre nowadays do so without the shelter of that particular umbrella. They come from the romance direction, or the literary fiction direction, or the chick lit direction. Or, of course, the fanfiction direction *wink wink E L James*.
All of the others are self-published.
So is this what I should be doing? Or what?
Answers on a postcard. I wish. But those days are gone.
Answers in a gif meme.
The House of Elyot 