Published Stories?

[Viperbound7]

I just had a random thought the other day. Has anyone on this site ever attempted to publish their stories as a book? Maybe as a collection of erotic short stories or something. Not sure if this is the section for it, but I wonder how feasible this idea would be for some of the more prolific writers.

[FelixSH]

[mention]bondagefreak[/mention] recently did this. But I guess it's too early, to draw a conclusion on the success.

[Anonit]

I have been writing bondage short stories (about 8k words) and publishing them on Amazon kindle. I only have one released so far but I have a few more almost ready to go.

[Viperbound7]

Oh nice! Has it gotten much attention or sales?

[Anonit]

Oh nice! Has it gotten much attention or sales?

Not a ton so far, but I only have one story published. It has quite a few KENP page reads, >100 even though it's only a 35 page story. I released it on Tuesday but the keywords/algorithm didn't really start making it show up in search results until Wednesday or Thursday. I'm about to release a sequel story with a sexier cover on it that will hopefully get more attention. No sales yet, but I have been enrolling the books on Kindle Unlimited so people can read for free. If you're curious about the publishing process I can tell you what I know. Feel free to PM me if you'd like a link to the story as well.

[bondagefreak]

Oh nice! Has it gotten much attention or sales?

That's not exactly how it works. There are tens of millions of works published on the larger self-publishing sites (like Kindle Amazon) and well over 99.9% of them will never make more than a handful of sales. 1 - Publishers don't usually understand what is required and 2 - They more often than not simply don't have the social media reach.

Unless you're willing to dish out a substantial amount of money on Ad Campaign investments (the minimum is 100 USD and obviously that amount will get you nowhere) your book or story will never bring you any sort of revenue worth mentioning. Ex: enrolling in KENP like [mention]Anonit[/mention] will yield you a fraction of a cent for every page read. The sales rate for KENP fluctuates every month: on good months 300 pages read will earn you a bit over a dollar, while on bad ones you'll earn under a USD.


In other words, the only way to make any sort of worthwhile revenue is to get a LOT of reads (thousands per day) and numerous daily sales. In short, unless you're writing something very mainstream (ex: M/F Romance, historical drama, crime-solving detective, etc), have a lot of social media connections with whom you share your book with to get good ratings (no ratings = no sales), and are willing to dish out the big bucks in order to fund an Ad campaign, self-publishing should not be done with the intent to make any money. If money is the end goal, the inevitable result is disappointment.

Really not trying to discourage anyone from making the attempt. Just being realistic and honest here.
It used to be a bit easier back in 2007-2010, but after 2010 the market quickly became heavily oversaturated.