Interested in learning how you can be a successful self published erotica author?
Well, this is the perfect blog post for you because I’ll break down the five things you need to do to be successful.
Over the past 2 – 3 years I have coached hundreds of students in the Erotica Academy Course and I have seen some common elements with the students that succeed.
And I am going to share those insights with you in this post.
Here are 5 things you need to do to be a successful self published erotica author!
1. Publish consistently
Publishing is number one on this list for a reason.
One of the best ways for you to make money in this business is to publish consistently.
If you don’t publish consistently, it will be VERY hard to build a fan base and get consistent sale.
All of the top authors in every niche and genre have one thing in common: they have a set publishing schedule.
In general, I recommend publishing 2 times a week with a new pen name.
Once you are more established (i.e. 30+ books), you can slowdown the publishing schedule.
I know keeping up with a publication schedule is insanely hard.
I find it super difficult sometimes because life gets in the way. But if you publish consistently, you WILL get results.
I’m not promising specific results obviously (like a dollar amount), but your income will improve from where it is at now.
P.S. check out this post to learn my strategy for writing 2 books a week!
2. Pick your niche carefully
Niche selection is super important to your success.
There are dozens and dozens of erotica niches on Amazon, BUT not all of them are worthwhile to pursuit.
If you pick a niche that is too competitive, it’ll be hard to stand out.
And if you pick a niche that is too narrow, your audience will be capped and it will be hard to make money past a certain point.
Further, I know a lot of people like to focus on “hot” niches. But I like to focus on “evergreen niches” – mean niches that will still be popular 5+ years from now.
So it is important for you to pick something in the godilocks zone.
3. Book covers
Book covers are important because people are very visual creatures.
When they scroll through the search results in Amazon, they are looking primarily at the covers of the books.
So if your book doesn’t look halfway decent, it will be very hard to sell many copies.
Yes, people DO judge a book by its cover.
In fact, book covers are one of the things you need to master to sell a lot of books on Amazon.
I would recommend either designing your own covers or hiring someone to do it.
You can design your own covers with PicMonkey or Canva – both are great software that I use and are relatively inexpensive.
And I also use Photoshop to create paperback books.
If you want to hire someone to design covers, I would suggest using Fiverr – you can get someone to design it for $10 -$30 bucks.
But under no circumstance should you EVER use Amazon’s built in cover design tool.
It is absolutely horrible.
In fact, in all my years of researching niches and reading books on Amazon, I have ONLY seen one author do well with covers created from the Amazon design tool.
4. Keywords, Keywords, & Keywords!
Selecting proper keywords for your books is important.
The right keywords could mean the difference between appearing on page 2 of Amazon instead of page 20.
If you can land several books on the first 10 pages of the search results, it would be very hard for you not to sell many books.
In fact, one of my pen names regularly has 3 – 5 books within the top 10 pages of the search results for that particular niche.
It doesn’t matter how good your story is or how good of a writer you are…If people can’t find your books in Amazon’s search results, no one can buy it!
As a result, spending some time researching keywords is important.
5. Spying on the competition
This is one thing I don’t see a lot of new authors doing, but it can be a great way to make more money.
And this is something I do when I research a new niche to write in.
One thing I would suggest is to read up on your competitors once in a while.
This allows you to get some information about what is happening to the niche (as they do evolve sometimes).
Secondly, it allows you to get ideas from other people who are making good money.
When you are reading your competitors, take notes on:
- How their stories are structured and how long they are
- Keywords that they use in their description, title, and book cover
- How their book covers are designed
- Whether or not they have an email list or website.
How To Be A Successful Self Published Erotica Author – Final Thoughts
Overall, if you follow these five guidelines of mine, it will be hard for you not to succeed.
I have been coaching new erotica authors for years now and my successful students ALL follow these 5 principles.
One of my students even achieved a 6x return on the course within months of implementing these principles!
Anyways, I hope these little tips help you get your publishing business off the ground.