In a closed thread, one member said she (I think, apologies if you’re a he) had self-published her own sexy stories and done well off it financially.
Given that I have a sizeable collection of my own erotic stories that were well received in circulation among a small group of friends, I am intrigued.
I would be very interested if that poster, or anyone else with knowledge, would be willing to share their experience in more detail.
I earn a good living publishing my own books. Mine are non-fiction, and nothing to do with erotica (at least not yet), but yes, it can be done. In fact, I’m very pleased I do it this way and have nothing to do with ‘proper’ publishers.
You have three problems or challenges to solve.
Writing and printing - getting your work into a reproducible and sell-able form.
Marketing and promotion. How will you find your readers? How will your readers find you?
Distribution and exchange. How the money gets to you, and how the book gets to the customer.
I could write for a month of Sundays on any of these subjects. Obviously, there are lots of different business models. Here’s your range of options.
Model 1. You type your stories up on a word processor. Photocopy them, staple the pages together. Sell to friends for cash. End of business model.
Model 2. You prepare your book of stories in a DTP program like Quark. Create cover artwork. Send to printer. Order 1000 copies, perfect bound. Delivered to your home or a warehouse or a third-party who will do the distribution for you. Set up website with an online shop to accept credit card transactions. Main bit of website: either DIY or pay someone to do it. Bit of website where your site interfaces with bank’s computer to accept credit card info: has to be done by a serious techie geek who knows what she’s doing. Market and promote via the internet version of word of mouth, posting to the right forums, a little advertising here and there. Customers come to your site, submit their order. You send out the books or send the shipping info to whomever is handling the distribution. You need to keep the paperwork clean and the tax man wants his share of your corporate profits. End of business model.
Any specific questions? I did it the long, hard, difficult way and it took me about 9 months to set my business up. But I’m glad I did. I’m making money even when I’m asleep!
I’ll say one thing about marketing and promotion right now, to cut through all the crap advice that’s out there. The only thing that really matters is: create a product that people want. If you create something people want, then ‘word of mouth’ will do the rest and you can get by with little by way of marketing and promotion. If you don’t make something people want, all the marketing in the world ain’t gonna help. You can hype yourself a few sales, at relatively high expense, but eventually words gets around.
Since this is about writing, I’ll move this thread to Cafe Society.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
Actually…it wasn’t intended to be about writing, more about publishing and hopefully earning some filthy lucre. 
Commerce rather than art, you see. Anyway…
Ianzin, thank you for your input. It sounds like you are sticking to the pretty traditional dead-tree type publishing, yes? In which case, it looks like you must be really confident and ready to back yourself financially. I mean, a thousand copies of even a smallish book, what, at a very minimum something like 2-3,000 to print?
At least having a garage full of books would provide a strong incentive to market the things…
I’ve also been wondering about some of the newer forms, like POD and e-books. It seems like a way to shift fulfillment & money collection off to someone else, while retaining ‘editorial’ control yourself. OTOH, I suspect you give up the vast majority of the potential profit that way, too.
You might try checking the Writer Beware section of the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) web site:
The links there to POD and Electronic Publishing will provide loads of info on the general topic of self-publishing. They are somewhat oriented toward f&sf, but have much wider applicability.
The other information provided include many things every writer should know.
What they will not tell you is where to find an audience for self-published erotica that one needs to spend money on, given the availabity of the free kind.
There are lots of possible business models and each has its pros and cons. I’d be happy to answer any specific questions you have. I looked at the various non-dead-tree options and decided they weren’t right for my business. Various reasons. #1 People in my market still want a physical, old-fashioned book. #2 Piracy. Anything in electronic form can be copied and pirated with a click of a mouse, and the copies are perfect. Physical books can be copied and pirated too, but it’s harder and the results are usually notably inferior. #3 Personal preference. I like producing actual books, and I find they open up more possibilities. I can take them to various point-of-sale markets. I can lend them to people. I can post them to influential commentators in relevant sectors of the media. #4 No software problems. When you try to publish in more or less any electronic format, you’ll end up dealing with half a dozen emails a day from customers complaining that they can’t open the thing properly, or it doesn’t load, or it’s corrupt, or it’s incompatible with some aspect of their hardware or software… it never stops.
I started small. For the first edition of my first self-published book I just had a high street copy shop do 250 ring-bound copies. Not too much up-front investment, and the result was okay if not spectacularly beautiful. Only later did I graduate to producing my books via an offset litho printer, with semi-stiff glossy paperback covers in full colour. For this, the minimum cost-effective print run is around 500-750 copies, but I was able to order 1000 or 1500 at a time because my business was by then sufficiently well-established for me to know these quantities were viable. I don’t have to get swamped with stock. My printer has a plenty of spare warehouse space, and is happy to keep my printed stock for me, and send me a few hundred copies at a time for a very small extra delivery charge.
Incidentally, I now have customers in 36 different countries, all over the world! I’m not being boastful, I just want to encourage you by letting you know it can be done!
Well, yes, another aspect of the business model has to be the split between what you do yourself and what you ‘farm out’ to other people. This obviously affects how much work and responsibility you take on, and - correspondingly - what percentage of your own profits you retain. My own model is to rely as little as possible on anyone else, so I end up doing a lot of work but keeping a lot of the profit. This happens to suit me, but is also a function of living in England, where it is next to impossible to find anyone else you can rely on to do a competent job anyway. Given the time and trouble it would take to find someone to, say, handle my distribution, it’s cheaper and easier to just do it myself.
This is a very interesting thread for me. I have written a book on the history of women’s basketball at the University of Michigan, and am currently trying to get it published. It has been turned down by about a half dozen “traditional” publishers, including the University of Michigan Press (even though the book is about one of the university’s varsity teams, go freakin’ figure!).
I sent my proposal to an Ann Arbor-based self-publisher, not really knowing that they were a self-publisher. The lady who runs the company called me and offered a deal that would have cost me a little over $10,000 (I think it was for 3,000 copies of the book, maybe more than that…I do not have the letter with me right now). In any case, 10 grand is WAY more than I can afford to spend at this point. I want to believe that my book will sell, of course…I just do not know if I want to gamble 10 grand on it! Women’s sports are becoming more popular, on the other hand the Michigan women’s hoop program has not exactly won at quite the rate of, say Tennesee or Connecticut’s women’s hoop teams. They have a certain hard-core following (including me!) but usually do not draw very huge crowds except perhaps if they are playing Michigan State. Actually one of the reasons I wrote the book in the first place is to try to get more people to appreciate and support the team!
There are a few more “traditional” publishers that I wrote to but have not heard from yet. Perhaps one of them will be interested.
I have also begun to look into having the manuscript published as a series of articles in some sports or Michigan-related periodical. I might not make as much if any money doing this, but I feel that the story is an important one to tell and I want to get it out there one way or another.
Ianzin: You mention that you went to a copy shop and had them run 250 copies of your book to start. I am also thinking of something like this. How much did it cost you for the initial run of 250 (and how many pages was your book?)? I see that you are in England so I would have to convert pounds to dollars, but at least I could get some kind of guesstimate of what it might cost to have Kinko’s (do you have Kinko’s copy shops in England?) do a small run of my book.
I am really glad I stumbled upon this thread!
Jerrybear, $10 000 is an insane amount to spend. Avoid vanity publishers like the plague. With the publishers who turned you down, did they give you any hints why? Sometimes a book which is worthy doesn’t get a place because their lists are already full. I think the idea of submitting to magazines is a terrific idea. If you sell there, you still have the idea to use in the book and you can use the tearsheets to show an editor there is interest in the book
Ianzin has said the most important thing though that you need to know who your market is and how you can reach them. We stick to traditional publishers because it is very hard to sell self published children’s books and the distributors usually won’t touch them. I think there’s a lot of potential in epublishing but it’s not yet at the point that most authors can use it.
We don’t actually have the Kinko’s chain here, but we have any number of other chains that do the same thing. But rather than me trying to recall how much something cost me over here a few years ago, wouldn’t it be simpler to just ask Kinko’s for an estimate? Just phone them, give them the page count and what sort of binding or covers you want, and they’ll tell you how much it will cost.
The U of M book is a prime candidate for self-publishing, especially if you put it in bookstores in the Ann Arbor area.
What you need is a printer – not a publisher. You can go the Kinko’s route and spiral bind the book, or you could go to a commercial printer and have them perfect bind it. Try looking for it in the Yellow Pages.
I see that Kinko’s lists themselves as a book printer, so maybe that’s a way to go. Print as many copies as you can afford, put them in every bookstore in the area, and find ways to publicize them (try being a guest on local radio shows).