The Process

I have set up accounts everywhere I should. Smashwords, Draft2Digital, Goodreads (Very confusing site in terms of how its discussions work) and even Amazon. I have yet to try and publish anything, but still, it is a good thing to sit down and reflect on what it is I am trying to do, and how I should do it.

The most basic thing an erotic author must do, the most basic thing any author must do, is write. I have set myself the goal of writing at least 1000+ words a day. Not necessarily as a part of a story, at least not yet, just words. To get into the habit of writing something every day is so important that it will be my primary purpose for the first two weeks. Not everything can be published, no writer I  have ever heard of has had everything they have ever written published. You write everything you can, and then you find the gems in what you did write. If you do not write, you cannot find the gems.

The topic of Goodreads discussions was raised on darknest a while ago, and I had trouble with thinking of it as useful promotion. Some people can jump into a discussion and subtly (Or not very subtly) insert their own works. I cannot do this. I feel fake, hollow, wrong. Still, at some point, I will have to get into the publicity circuit in some way. If I get to 10 published works, I will look into finding places that review my kind of writing.

Any author should have an editor, and I have none, right now, and I am not good at self-editing. I used to know someone who was excellent, but I fell out of contact with him. I will try to reach out to him again once I have a draft of something. If I cannot find him, I will have to look for someone else. If I am selling this stuff, what is the proper way of handling an editor? Give him/her a percentage? Pay a flat amount? Will people do it for free? I will have to find out. It would feel wrong for me to ask someone to edit something that is to be sold without recognizing their contribution to it in some real (Monetary) way.

Lastly, I will have to research the "competition" out there. How they do their covers, how they do their blurbs, how they manage their tags and titles. I would dearly love to have personalized covers drawn for each released story, but it just is not feasible to get an artist to draw something for anywhere from 50$ to 100$ for these stories, when I do not expect to make even 10$ a month from the first few releases. I would like to hope that one day, I earn enough from this business to be able to spend that amount of money on a cover.

I must admit, I am worried. Worried that I'm really not as good as I accepted people thought I was. Perhaps it is just because of my lack of recent practice in writing, but what I wrote yesterday did not resonate with me the way some of my past works have. Still, I'm not about to give up. I know it takes time, a long time, to get back to where I once, perhaps, was.

An example of past work: http://pastebin.com/ELWP9SDU - Please bear in mind, it's rather dark.

The List

• Write 1000+ words every day
• Look into review sites to get works reviewed at around 10 works
• Find an editor, look into how to handle payment
• Look into getting covers. Stock image sites.