It can be frustrating when this happens. You worked hard to come up with a good story and spend hours and hours drafting and editing.
Then when you hit publish…and nothing happens! No sales! You wait a day…then a week…then a month. No sales come in!
You might have even paid an editor or paid a designer for a book cover. So you’re already in the hole before you publish!
It’s frustrating…but it happens to the best of us. What in the world is going on? Well, this post will help explain 10 reasons why your erotica ebooks aren’t selling.
1. You picked a bad niche
Picking a niche is pretty important when it comes to eBook sales. Niches come in all different sizes. Some niches are big, but they are very competitive.
As a result, unless you are an established author with dozens and dozens of books, you’re books will get lost in the search results.
Picking a good niche requires a lot of research, which most people don’t want to put in. Most people just write about the fetishes or stories that interest them instead of considering what the market (i.e their customers) want.
Focus on good niches and your sales will pick up.
2. Bad cover design
Every time I go to the grocery store to pick up wine for a dinner party I’m mostly picking bottles based on their price and design.
If the price is below $10 bucks and the label looks fancy, I’m grabbing it! It’s pretty much the same thing when it comes to erotica eBook sales.
A bad cover design can definitely kill your book sales. Despite what people say, people DO judge a book by its cover!
If don’t think you can design a good cover, you can hire someone from Fiverr to do it for around $5 – $20. However, designing your own covers will save you a lot of money in the long-run.
I design book covers with PicMonkey and get my stock photos from Deposit Photos.
Related Post: How To Design A Kick Ass Cover That Sells!
3. Bad keywords
Keywords are important when it comes to sales!
In fact, if you get your keywords wrong, nothing else you do will matter much.
Keyword selection is incredibly important to pop up first on Amazon search results and to get organic SEO traffic from Google search results.
The best advice I can give is to use keywords that customers would use to find books in that particular niche.
P.S. be sure to check out my keyword templates.
These are keywords for different niches that I personally researched and tested. If you want to get an unfair advantage over other authors, check it out!
4. Inconsistent publishing schedule
Publishing consistently is very, very important to gaining sales momentum (especially when you are a new author).
No one customer wants to see you publish 5 books and then take a six month vacation before you put out anything new.
If you aren’t publishing consistently, don’t expect to have consistent sales! The only time you can take the breaks off your publishing schedule is when you have a big catalog (20+ books).
I would highly recommend publishing 2 – 3 books per week when you are first starting out.
5. Poor title
Having a bad title can be an absolute sales killer. The point of a title is to (1) entice customers to buy and (2) describe what your book is all about in a few words.
Say you are writing a story in the BDSM niche about a woman being taken by her billionaire boss.
A poor title would be something like: “Taken by Julian”
The title is bad because it’s not enticing and most importantly, it doesn’t even tell you what niche the book is in. If the title doesn’t pull in a reader’s curiosity, they won’t click through and read the description!
A better title would be something like: “Taken By My Billionaire Boss.”
6. Book description
A good book description is important to sell a customer your book. Once they click on your cover, the next thing they will do is read the description.
Most authors spend 5+ hours writing a short erotica book, but only put in 5 minutes to actually write the description!
The description is supposed to sell customers the book!
Here are two tips I have for writing great descriptions. First, don’t give away the whole story. Most people have a tendency of recapping each chapter, but this ends up telling the whole story so there’s no incentive for the customer to buy!
Second, don’t have a long description. Ideally, the description will be less than 200 words. If you have a long description, no one is going to read it.
7. You got tossed in the adult dungeon
This one is pretty self explanatory, but if you got tossed in the adult dungeon, your books will not be visible in Amazon search results.
You can check to see if your books are in the adult dungeon using this link.
8. Story content is no good
If your story content isn’t good, customers aren’t going to buy more of your books. In fact, they might actually return books!
Make sure your books are relatively free of grammar errors. Also, make sure the story flows well and has adequate build up to the climax of the story (when the main characters consummate sex).
9. Book pricing
Obviously, pricing can have a big impact on your ebook sales. If your sales price is too high, you won’t sell many copies.
Conversely, if your sales price is too low, you’ll be leaving money on the table.
There are two debated price points erotica authors swear by: $0.99 and $2.99.
In my experience, $2.99 is the best sales price to maximize sales.
Increase Your eBooks Sales Today!
If you’re a new erotica author struggling to make sales, I do offer consulting services to help you out. Contact me and let me know what your problem is and I’ll send you a quote.
Also, if you want to start making big money selling erotica on Amazon, I would highly recommend getting the Erotica Academy Course.
I’ll teach you my Secret Formula to research, write, and sell Erotica eBooks on Amazon so you’ll make money even in your sleep!
Click here to get the Erotica Academy Course!