As a self-published author on Amazon and Smashwords, I get a lot of messages asking for my recommendations and advice about breaking into this weird world. I get asked whether it’s possible to make a living doing it? What are the pitfalls and hurdles? How do you market? How do you write? What is “going wide”? Is it worth it?

Well, I thought I’d write down some recommendations into a (lengthy) blog post, the idea being to keep everything in one place so that I can point people to it in the future and maybe encourage others who were thinking of doing so to give it a shot. I should point out that I already have a self-help book out on this topic, which goes into far more detail than I ever could here. Check it out on Amazon… it’s practical, realistic and written for the complete beginner!

So… you want to get into publishing erotic fiction and, maybe, earn a bit of money? Well, here are my top 10 pieces of advice for an aspiring smut pedlar…

1) Firstly, all you need to publish erotic fiction is a) a dirty mind b) the ability to write. You don’t need money. You don’t need an agent, or a book deal. An internet connection helps, but I suppose you could even publish from a public library (don’t get caught!) The barrier for entry to erotic fiction is incredibly low, so a lot of people do it and the market is really saturated. You don’t even need to be as good of a writer as in other genres, as the accepted standard is pretty low. If you know what a paragraph is, and how to use it, you’re already better than half of the writers out there.

2) If you think that publishing erotic fiction is easy money, a get rich quick scheme, then think again. Back in the old days, the days that gruff old timers like me talk about with hushed reverence, that may have been the case, but no longer. The number of erotic stories published on Amazon per day numbers in the thousands. Authors have saturated every niche to the point of asphyxiation. Self-publishing smut is no longer “get rich quick”, it’s “get poor slowly”. And it requires a huge amount of effort. For example, I publish incredibly slowly in comparison to others – about two titles a month – and I aim to write 1000-2000 words a day. That means getting up two hours before work, committing to getting horny for an hour each and every day and writing something.

3) Publishing is everything. If a book fails – don’t labor over why, don’t try to fix it, don’t hope it suddenly makes you the next E.L. James – it won’t. Write another. The only way forward is to write another, iterating your process if needed, hammering down on successes if you can.

4) Title and cover matter far more than actual story! As weird as it sounds, a perfectly written, clever, witty commentary on modern sexual experiences with super hot sex and dripping wet prose will sell precisely nothing if it has a title that isn’t bang on the nose and utterly explicit. Your English major brain may long to call your work something beautiful and poignant like “The Adulation of Self” but you’ll sell far more copies if you call it “Becky’s Public Bathroom Finger Bang Orgy”.

5) Amazon… Now, you’ll make most of your money from Amazon, like it or not. Whatever your personal feelings about the retail giant are, they sure host a good smut market. Kindle has far, far more readers than anywhere else and you need to make your peace with them if you’re ever going to see any success. That said, Amazon has some pretty opaque and really draconian policies around what they will and won’t sell. This means that covers can be sexy, but not dirty (no nipples, genitalia etc). Titles and blurbs have a long list of forbidden words and themes. Stories can’t contain any hint of non-consent, bestiality, incest or any other illegal content. If you mess up, they’ll ban you and confiscate all of your royalties. Worse of all, they won’t tell you why or give you a chance to make amends. So BE CAREFUL out there!

6) What about other marketplaces? Well, they’re all, inevitably, going to be smaller potatoes than Amazon. But if you’re looking to publish super-dirty stories, taboo generally, you might want to look at niche marketplaces like Lott’s Cave or Excessia. Smashwords is also good, and will distribute your story to Kobo, B&N, Apple etc., provided it meets their content guidelines. SW themselves will publish the super dirty stuff as well – just take a look at the titles of some of their recent erotica books – eye watering!

7) I said above that writing and a dirty thought are all you need. Well, that’s technically true, but if you want to actually sell anything, you also need marketing. Luckily, in the days of social media, this is a lot easier. But it’s also worth establishing your own mailing list to hook regular readers and provide a channel of communication to guaranteed buyers. Other than that – Twitter is okay, Facebook is good for engagement, Tumblr is, sadly, no good for adult content (though some fetish stuff still gets through).

8) Other authors have a different take on this one, and I guess it depends on what your overall goal is, but my advice is to write only what turns you on. It may not be the biggest selling kink, it may not have the mass appeal of stuff like billionaire alpha or shifter stories, but it sure shows when you’re not aroused! Your writing suffers, your characters are flat and unlikable, your stories are generally worse. Conversely, if you’re as turned on by a story as you expect your readers to be, your prose comes alive! It may be tempting to try to “fake it till you make it”, but you will burn out faster and you will produce worse work. As an example, I have a lacklustre werewolf story that I keep published on my Amazon store as a constant reminder to stick to what I know! That book has sold about two copies in four years.

9) A mistake that a lot of authors make is to expect results after their first book, and then get discouraged if it doesn’t sell. Well, I’m here with bad news… YOUR FIRST BOOK WILL FAIL. I say that from experience. Your second book will also probably fail, your third too and probably your tenth. We have a saying in the erotic author community that you shouldn’t expect to see any real success until you’ve published your “dirty thirty” – that is, thirty stories. Not because there is something magical about having thirty publications, but because it will take you that long to identify a good niche, to perfect your blurbs and your covers, to work out your production process, to get to grips with marketing. For some, it happens sooner; for others, it never happens… but, chances are, at some point, you’ll see a glimmer of hope in a book that you publish, a suggestion that maybe there’s something in this…

10) Finally – the bottom line: how much can you expect to earn? Well, I hate to tell you this, but you’re probably not going to be making a living from erotica. Maybe you could if you moved into romance, but erotica, not so much. It’s just too crowded. That said, what you could do is earn a reliable couple of hundred books a month – provided you keep up production and generate a following. I’ve been at it for four years and I earn a comfortable amount of money that pays my bills every month. But I still have a day job. I suspect I could probably scrape by if I went full time and ramped up production… but who wants to write about that many orgasms?

Ultimately, publishing should be fun. And it really can be, provided you stay grounded and don’t have too many high expectations. The idea that people are getting off reading words that you’ve written can be a real turn on, and there’s nothing quite like the thrill of hitting “publish” on a new book, or seeing the sales start to trickle in for it.

Now go, write something! And good luck!