May Publishing Schedule & Your Opinion: Newsletter

First, a brief update. My titles are now available on Google Play! Check individual posts for links, if you're interested. The individual books can now be found much more easily with my swanky new books page. Anyway.

A proper newsletter may be incoming soon, but for now I'm still considering my options with regards to P.O Boxes and frequency of the newsletter. On one hand, I want to use it to alert my fans of my new work whenever it's published. On the other, I can't help but wonder if a weekly newsletter more or less just to say "Look at the new story I wrote" and not much else might be a bit too much. I don't know, and I have precious few places to get feedback.

I'm considering two models, and I would love feedback on either. In comments or mail.

One. Weekly newsletter, probably with a freebie or discounted title and the week's new release. This is good because it helps me get more eyes on a title when it's released, and it's also good because it prompts me to do more freebies/sales. Which benefits my readers! It's bad because, well, one newsletter a week. Would you feel like that'd be too spammy?

Two. Monthly newsletter, definitely with a freebie and one or more discounted titles, and both the past month's releases and the upcoming month's schedule. This is good because I won't be sending quite as many mails at people. I don't know if a weekly newsletter counts as spam, though. I'm uncertain, and that's really why I'm considering this option at all.

I'll keep pondering. Without further ado, the titles to be released in May.

May Releases:
4th: Another Rose (Virtual Me: Book Three) - Futanari/F, Submission, Oral
11th: Prayers of Perversion - Futanari/F, Clergy, Exhibitionism
18th: Caught Short - Futanari/F, Menage, Anal, Coercion
25th: Princess Sophie - Futanari/F, Monster, Dubcon, Breeding

Notes: After the hand injury I mentioned in last month's schedule and burning my finger in the middle of April, it was a bit of a struggle to catch back up on writing. As a result, my wordcount for April is not quite as impressive as I'd like, but at least I've got the stories I need done ready. And I'm also finally settling into a good groove.

On the sales front, I've seen a relatively steady increase. I'm uncertain if that's because of making Roguish Delight free earlier in the month, or just a result of having more titles out. Still a long way from making a living just from self-publishing, but it's going in the right direction. I doubt anyone's too interested in my gushing about sales and spreadsheet graph porn though, so I'll end it here. I hope May's stories are enjoyed by all. As always, check back on Sundays for specifics and links to the given story. :)

April Releases and Other Things

For the few, dedicated fans out there, I wanted to bring out a release schedule for the month. Since I can't run a newsletter just yet, this will simply have to do as a replacement for now. I'll probably also use these release schedule posts as an opportunity to briefly ramble about how the past month has been.

April Releases:

Rendezvous (Virtual Me 2) - 6th

A Twisted Pact (Futa/F succubus/mind control short story)- 13th

Hard Shoulder (Futa/F menage/breeding short story) - 20th

The Grove's Gift (Futa/F breeding fantasy erotica short story) - 27th

Notes: Due to a break from writing for the last week caused by an injured hand, I haven't been able to finish the fourth title for April just yet. On the positive side, maintaining a month's backlog of stories has allowed me to keep publishing in spite of being out the game for a good week. It feels like I'm finally doing better now, though. I expect I'll pick up writing again today or tomorrow, and then settle back into my schedule. I'll update this post with the final title for April once it's hammered out. In case anyone cares. :p

In other news, March was my best month ever for sales so far. And contained my best weeks, too. I don't want to gush too much since I know nobody but me really cares, but March more than doubled February's sales. It more than doubled my previous best month's sales, actually. I'll still need to sell 10 times what I did in March to live off this, but this is a great first step. I keep this graph of monthly sales, and after I plugged in March's numbers, everything else just flattened. With some luck, even March's pillar will be flattened before the year is out. :) As it is, though, I'm very satisfied with 80 sales. I doubt April will be quite as strong, but I can hope.

Two Months as a Published Indie Author

The amazement at this actually being real has sort of dimmed. Not that I'm not excited, I definitely am, but the weight and length of this project, my being a writer, has finally hit me. I don't think I'll hurt anyone by disclosing the size of my Amazon earnings for June and July. I ended up at around 18$ for June, and around 38$ for July.

Yeah, in the grand "I want to make a living at this" scheme of things, that's pathetic. But from a more optimistic point of view, it's a doubling. In other words, this basically shows that I am doing what I'm supposed to. Things are moving as they're supposed to. Writing and releasing short stories is not about becoming rich, or selling 50.000 books overnight. It's about selling 5 copies a month of a story, every month.

So, as you slowly release more work, you slowly move closer to being able to make a living. I suppose I'm hoping that that's what's happening now. I'm releasing 1-2 stories a month, and I'm seeing the slow buildup of income from that. It's not glorious, but it's not meant to be. It's meant to be something I work hard at, like any other thing you want to make a living of, and then maybe in 3, 5 or 10 years, I'll be able to live off my writing.

This isn't just something I do as a passing fancy. I'm settling in for the long haul. My goal, with A Different Prince Charming added to my already available books, was to end up at 17 sales this month. That might be a weird number to you, but basically I wanted 15 sales from my already released stories, and then 2 from A Different Prince Charming, since it was released in the middle of the month. I ended up at 23 sales. Can't complain about that! With 4 stories now out, I'll be hoping for 20 sales next month, hopefully with a little added on from a new release.

Note: Going to combine this and the other report into one, from next month on. It's just easier.

Three Months

This month and a half, I worked on my first 2 paying commissions. One for a follower in the game Trials in Tainted Space (Yes, TiTS), and one for a friend of mine. The scenes I am writing for the follower may or may not be included in the game, that isn't up to me. Other than that, I got back on track with my writing a lot more, sticking to my writing goals.

I also tried using goonwrite.com for my covers for the first time, and was not disappointed. A Different Prince Charming, Becoming His and Solon's Maiden will all have covers from there.

Monthly Words

My goal for this month (Running from the middle of July to synch reports to months) continued to be 1000 words a day. I have written a total of 46.124 words, coming to 981 words/day. Beginning now, my goal will be to write 1250 words a day. While that may not seem like a huge increase, it does take my monthly goal from 31k~ to 38k~. Hopefully that'll motivate me a bit more without becoming too much.

What I Have Learned

The main lesson of the past roughly 1½ months has been that a word count goal of 1000 words a day is too little, now. With 3 hours of daily work and using the Pomodoro technique, I can write roughly 4500 words. While I cannot keep up this pace every single day, it does mean that I end up being -wildly- ahead of my goal. This, in turn, leads to difficulties motivating myself to write.

I won't bore any potential reader with the details of my spreadsheet record keeping, but I can tell very easily from them that I could have written more. Basically, I have a day where I write 4-6000 words, then maybe another day like that, and then I don't write for 2-5 days. Not because I don't want to, and often not because I don't have anything to write. It's simply because I feel like I am so vastly ahead that, well, why bother? I don't think I can readily change this part of myself. Rather, I'll simply have to move my daily/monthly word count goal up or down until I find a sweet spot that motivates but doesn't overwhelm.

At the end of the month, I also experienced a drop in wordcount. I have had and will continue to have family visits. This naturally lowers my wordcount on those days, but it also seems to mess with my internal balance. It drains me of energy, and leaves me unable to write for a while after. This is the reason why I fell a tiny bit short of the 1000 word/day goal this month. Still, it is something I will have to learn to manage, since being a hermit isn't an option. :)

Finished Work This Month

TiTS Commission Scenes written: 4 (Each between 2500-4000 words)
Solon's Maiden nearly finished.
Becoming His finished (Assassin story, being proof read)
A Different Prince Charming published.

Note: Going to combine this and the other report into one, from next month on. It's just easier.

One Month as a Published Indie Author

What a mouthful, that title. Which is fitting for the subject matter, of course. A month ago, I published my first short story: Purity Taken. A week later, I published a second book, two short stories combined into one. The month leading up to the release was an adventure of rediscovery for me. I had tons of ideas (I still do) and I wrote what I wanted to (I still do, mostly). 

Even though I told myself not to make a big deal of anything, not to expect anything, I still felt somewhat disappointed when both books were released to a thunderous emptiness of response. I didn't sell a thing, probably to do with my obscurity as an author and the fact that I offered both books for free from Smashwords until the 30th of June. I didn't -sell- anything, I should stress, but the books were still picked up, although not in huge numbers. Less than 10 copies in the first 2 days.

I was told to expect this, of course. I tried very hard to tune my expectations with the harsh reality that most indie authors face: Obscurity. It didn't work so well, and the fact that I had workers and a torrent of family obligations in the week after releasing Purity Taken didn't help me feel any more comfortable about publishing or writing in general. I struggled just to keep up.

Even once the workers and family obligations were done, I had difficulty focusing on writing, and when I left for a 2-week holiday in the country, for the longest time (Over a week) I didn't write at all. But, you know what? During all of this, during my own troubles, due to a mixture of motivational issues and neurotic issues, my books steadily sold on Amazon. Not tons, but it seems to average out to around 1 book every other day between the two of them. Roughly. That's -good-. Selling more than 5 copies per month per book on average is -good-.

And this is incredibly encouraging and motivating to me, of course. Not to mention that I have a longer story that will soon be ready for editing and proofing. I managed to look ahead and realize that a period like the one I went through here could and would happen, so I had "Cheating in the Caribbean" saved up and ready for release. Even though I have written very little, my public output will not be noticeably impacted. And the books I do have out don't care if I'm having an episode or not.

So, the first month published has been both eye-opening and encouraging. Eye-opening due to facing the realities both good and bad of publishing, and encouraging because of some of those realizations. I look forward to my next month, and with a little luck, I'll be on track to release 2 stories as well this month, with 1 already done and 1 well on its way. My desired pace when I started was 2 stories a month, so that's good.

For now, my goal is to be able to afford good covers. There's a site out there that offers decent, premade covers for 30$ apiece. Certainly more expensive than what home-made ones based on stock images would cost, but also more professional-looking. The sales from the latter half of June add up to about half of what I'd need for one cover, though, so until I'm earning 60$ a month on my writing, I'll have to get by with making my own covers. If my current sales trends continue, that 60$ a month may only be 1½-2 months away, at which point I can start getting professional covers for all of my releases.

Oh, and on a last note, I'll be extending the time-period of the next report to around the 1st of September, just to make it easier for me, and to synch up with various other things.

Two Months

Wow. In the quiet recesses of my mind, I didn't really believe I'd make it 2 months into this try at rekindling my fire for writing, but somehow I have managed to hold on through a somewhat tumultuous existence. I have managed to stick to continuous writing in a way that I never have previously, and I take that as a good sign. I have also published my first works, and am on track to publish more, at least one, preferably two, a month.

It is currently my goal to build up a small back log of short stories, to give myself 2-3 months of breathing room where I will instead be working on a novel. For the coming month, though, I will be releasing "Cheating in the Caribbean," a short Futa/F story, predictably about cheating. In this case, about cheating on a woman's boyfriend while on vacation on a Caribbean island. I'll also be releasing an as of yet untitled M/F work about a female assassin and the man she meets on a job later in the month.

I've also decided that instead of having these reports in the middle of each month, I'm going to be extending the next "monthly" report's time-period so that I can publish it closer to the 1st September rather than somewhere around the 16th of August. But to get to the point of this post, what has happened in the month that passed?

Monthly Words

My goal for this month continued to be 1000 words a day. I have written a total of around 18.000 words, coming to roughly 592 words/day. I will continue to keep my word count goal at 1000 for one more month, before moving up to 1250/day.

Now, the words per day figure will be conflicting with what I'll talk about below, but I'll describe what happened briefly. In the first part of the month, everything was going swimmingly. I wrote tons, and felt good about writing and life, and found a good schedule for writing when I don't have anything else going on.

Then construction workers, family stuff and holidays happened. In terms of written words, this month has been a disaster. Still, I learned many valuable things both from doing (Writing) and from reading blogs. I got back into the groove a bit at the end as well, so I believe I can bounce back for the next report and get ready to move on to 1250 words/day. I already write far more than that on the days where I write. It's the interruptions that cost me.

What I Have Learned

I suppose it's not a new revelation to me that I am a private/introvert and often anxious creature. With workers and a torrent of family obligations during most of one week of this month, I had serious trouble finding myself in a place where I felt like writing at all. I pushed myself to write anyway, and I discovered that what I wrote in such an uneven state of mind is not bad work.

The unequivocally most important part of this past month, though, was my decision to attempt to stick to a schedule of early-day/morning writing on the days where I do write. This way, I will usually have my 1000 words for the day done way before noon, giving me the rest of the day to do whatever I want. I have scheduled at least 1 hour of reading as well. What this has done is almost magical, for me. It has given me my passion for writing back. With the day's goal accomplished early, I managed to write far more in a given day than before. I was restless to write more, and more, and more.

Writers block is another thing I have worked on. I never really considered what I had writers block as much as a lack of motivation, but I have changed that view lately. It boils down to me, in the past, more often than not spending half or whole days thinking that I should get at least my 1000 words out of the way. I think so much about it, but I rarely tab into word for more than 2 seconds. My mind becomes negative about the whole thing.

I didn't sit down and force myself to focus on the page and the words that should flow onto it. This is something I have learned to change. The words are there, even if I don't feel in that magical state of mind that I previously thought necessary. The words will flow, as long as I sit down and focus. Once I get back to studying and working, this will be important, since my writing time will be greatly diminished.

Stories Written and Publishing Notes

Cheating in the Caribbean - To be published.
Assassin story (Part 1) - To be published

One Month

I started this blog because I wanted to have a record. To be able to go back in a year's time and see where I started, or in two years, or five. To that end, I'm going to be posting a monthly report, mainly just talking about my wordcount, what I've learned, and what stories I've finished/am working on.

When this blog was made, I hadn't written anything for over 2 years. I started back up because the dream of becoming a writer never left me, but just seemed unattainable. Until I read the indie publisher thread on Darknest. Suddenly, I had hope again. So much so that I launched myself into writing again as if I never took that years-long break.

Of course, thinking I could publish the first thing I wrote after my break was not just overly optimistic, it was fantasy. But I progressed fast over this first month, to the point where I now feel capable of producing writing of a quality worthy of being paid for. The last short story I finished this month, Purity Taken, is what I intend to be my first published work.

That will take formating and cover design, but I have confidence that I can start following the Month - Week - Day schedule of (At least) one ebook released a month, at least one blog post a week, at least 1000 words written a day. I may release some of this month's other work in a BDSM package-deal at some point later, too, but we'll see.

Monthly Words

My goal was 1000 words per day, every day. That didn't happen. My optimism had me blasting away at the keyboard at a rate I couldn't support from a cold start. That resulted in me taking two lengthy breaks (One of 3 days, another of 6), but I've decided to take it as a learning experience. While I'm still getting back into things, the best I can do for myself is to take 2 days a week off. I just can't expect to be a writing machine just yet, even if I want to.

This first month, I managed 27.636 words. I'm counting nothing but words in stories, here. I have written much, much more if blogs, forum posts and roleplay is counted, but it isn't, because I can't publish any of that. Anyway, rounded slightly, the above total puts me at 921 words per day. Considering that I spent almost a third of the month on break, I think that's alright. Not my goal, but it's close enough, giving me room to improve next month.

I have given a little thought to my long term goal, and come to the conclusion that I will try to add 250 words to my daily tally every 3 months, hopefully leaving me at 2000 words per day in a year.

What Have I Learned

Mainly things I used to know. I've rediscovered things like throwing away the much-dreaded first chapter, because it has a tendency to consist of a lot of telling of a given world rather than action. I've shrugged my habit of starting stories in an incredibly boring way to start with action instead. To start in a way that provokes interest and questions from the reader.

In other words, I need to adhere more to the screenwriting rules: Only include things that will be of direct importance to plot. If a delivery method can be done in multiple ways, choose the most simple and direct. If there are any segments that can be removed and still maintain plot integrity, do so.

In summary, the past month has been spent mostly rediscovering my old ways. How to write characters better and developing ideas. I don't think I've learned any groundbreaking new stuff, but that hasn't been the goal, either. The goal is simply to get into the habit of writing. I have much to improve on that front this next month, even if the word tally of the first puts up the lie that I did alright.

Short Stories written:

A Different Prince Charming (Futa/F, Fantasy, Rape)

Strobe Lights (M/M/F, M/F, Rape, Drugs)

Breakfast Bitch (Futa/F, D/s, Deepthroating)

Who You Are (Futa/F, D/s, Oral) - Continuation of Breakfast Bitch.

Purity Taken (M/F, Anal, BDSM, Breeding) - To be published