 How To Make Money Writing Erotic Literature |
|
| If it is your dream to become a published author specialising in erotic literature – in other words, if you want to make money from your hobby - then this section of our website is going to be of enormous interest to you. It is divided into the following subjects: • The booming market for erotic literature • How one US based author makes $20,000 a month • What publishers are looking for • Seven ways to make money writing erotic literature • Going Professional…a Day in the Life of a Full-Time Sex Writer One of the single-biggest benefits offered by the Erotic Literature Creative Writing Course is that it includes full details of how to exploit your work for financial advantage. Indeed, the course covers:
Plus the course contains hundreds of useful sales orientated tips. The booming market for erotic literature Demand for erotic literature and sex writing has gone ballistic. Consider the sheer number of adult entertainment websites in the world. There are – literally – millions of them. And each and every one needs written material to accompany the pictures and videos. That’s before we talk about the film and video makers crying out for scripts; the book and magazine publishers desperate for stories, novels and poetry; the sex product manufacturers, retailers and catalogues panting for captions. Are there enough authors to meet this demand? No. Why not? For a variety of reasons. Most professional authors are prudes or consider the subject matter beneath them. Others have trouble producing material that is any good. A third group don’t understand how to find buyers for their work. Which leaves a fantastic opportunity for writers who have the inclination, ideas and persistence required to make a go of it. How one US based author makes $20,000 a month Gaby Zimmermann is a Los Angeles based writer who produces both serious literature (several collections of erotic poetry including: One Life, She Used To Be So Innocent, and My Secret Diary) and more hardcore material. She was a school administrator before she became a full time writer and she has been in the business since 1998. In 2005 Gaby started giving regular seminars to professional writers on making money writing about sex. As part of her presentation she sets out a typical month’s activity and income: Short story for a magazine - $200 ‘Fake’ problem letters and answers for a magazine - $500 25 short stories with a fetish theme for website - $8,300 1 x 15 minute group sex video script - $4,100 185 captions for a sex catalogue - $3,200 Copy for flagellation website - $1,000 Copy for bondage website - $1,400 3 short stories for magazine - $280 Copy for promotional video for TV - $800 It comes to $19,780 in a little over four weeks. Gaby freely admits that she is no literary genius. ‘My grammar isn’t so hot and nor is my spelling…but I love my subject, I work hard and I am persistent,’ she said in a recent interview with Writing Magazine. If Gaby – who never went to university – can do it, why not you? The fact is anyone who wants to can make money writing erotic literature. Of course, you must be able to deliver stories, articles and books that people want to read - and, with the help of the Erotic Literature Creative Writing Course, you will be able to do just that. However, it isn't a lack of skill that stops most writers from earning an income 'by their pen' - it is a lack of consistent determination. Time and again good writers give up because they received a few rejection slips, while less good writers who are willing to keep trying see piece after piece in print. Any writer worth his or her salt accepts rejection as being par for the course. They know that in most instances this isn't because there is anything wrong with what they have submitted but because they have sent their work to the wrong person, the wrong publisher or at the wrong time. So what is the most important attribute for a writer of erotic literature? A fertile imagination? No. A way with words? No. First-hand experience? Hardly - most writers make it up. The most important attribute you can develop is a belief in your self. Remember, if at first you don't succeed, you must try, try, try again. What publishers are looking for Editors will tell you that their biggest problem with authors is that they fail to deliver. The fact is: most authors are unreliable. Editors know that they can pay someone a few pounds an hour to lick a manuscript into shape. Anyone with a university education can tidy up the grammar and change the spelling. But only a few people have the creative temperament to come with powerful and imaginative stories. That's what publishers are looking for. Ideas. Not just publishers, film makers, catalogue owners, retailers and the rest… Seven ways to make money writing erotic literature 1. Sell your work to book publishers. Book publishers don’t just publish novels – they publish anthologies of short stories and other type of books, too. Furthermore, many conventional publishers are joining the more specialist erotica publishers to produce books aimed at this market. 2. Sell your work to magazines. Magazines don’t just buy short stories. They are interested in articles, essays and other features. They will also commission writers to produce other material such as the ‘readers’ letters’ sections of their publications. 3. Publish it yourself. Don’t knock it until you have tried it. Printing a paperback with a cover price of – say - £9.99 will probably cost you in the region of £1. Even allowing on giving 33% to a retailer (or for other marketing costs) there’s plenty of margin left for you. Many erotic fiction writers decide to go the self-publishing route selling their books via shops and the internet. The latter can be a huge source of business. 4. Create your own website. Nowadays you can build a website for a few hundred pounds – or you can get someone else to do it for you, for not much more. Erotic literature web sites make money by various means: • They sometimes charge subscribers. • They sell advertising. • They take commission for every visitor they introduce to other sites. • They take commission on other sales such as on videos or books. We know of one erotic literature web site that is generating £17,500 of revenue a month for its owner…and he is running it from home. 5. Sell your work to other website owners. The successful ‘adult’ websites are desperate for stories to offer to their subscribers. So desperate that recently they have started commissioning authors to produce stories for them. Visit any of these sites to see what we mean. You’ll find hundreds of thousands of stories covering every area of interest. The owners of these pay-to-subscribe websites haven’t got the time to waste waiting to get stories for free. It is worth their while (look at the money they are making) to commission authors to write for them. 6. Sell your work to film and video companies. All those ‘adult’ videos have to have scripts, you know. As do the promotions for adult chat lines and other adult services on digital TV. As a professional sex writer you can clean up writing film and TV scripts. 7. Sell your work to retailers, manufacturers and catalogue operators How many companies do you think there are in the world manufacturing and/or selling sex toys and other adult products? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? Closer to ONE MILLION. They need product descriptions and captions and you could be providing them. Expect to earn an average of £10 - £200 a caption. Going Professional…a Day in the Life of a Full-Time Sex Writer David Stoll, a full-time writer of erotica living in the Lake District, talks about a typical working day. ‘My first thought on waking is always one of profound gratitude. Until five years ago I was working as a low level accountant (I am not fully qualified) for what was then the Inland Revenue. What a horrible, boring, dispiriting, depressing job. Talk about a life of quiet desperation. Now, on the other hand, I spend my day doing something I love. In financial terms I am not much better off. But in terms of my happiness there is no comparison. I am not great in the mornings and I never get up much before 10. By the time I stagger out of bed my girlfriend, Skye, has already got herself up, got her daughter up, taken her daughter to school and been for a run. We have breakfast and read the paper for an hour before I drift off to my study. If I get started by 11 it is a good day. I begin by checking my answering machine and email to see if any of my clients have been in touch. My passion is writing short stories and novels but most of my income derives from one of two sources. The first is sponsorship. A number of manufacturers pay me to get their products mentioned online on notice boards, in stories, in blogs and so forth. The second is writing relatively serious articles for what we in the trade call the ‘stroke’ media. I have three sponsors at the moment paying me £75 a week each and I earn £400 a thousand words for my ‘erotic’ journalism. Between the two I make about £750 a week. My book income is about another £6000 a year so altogether I probably earn a bit over £40,000. Anyway, dealing with any inquiries usually takes me up until lunchtime. After lunch I start work in earnest. At the moment I am writing a series of six books for the Asian market. The idea was mine and I pitched it to a Hong Kong based publisher who snapped it up with an agreed advance of £3,000 a book. I am on the second volume at the moment and I have two more years to finish the remaining four. There is talk of a film deal. My way of working is to create an extremely rough draft – basically I put it all down in one long rush over a couple of weeks – and then to refine and refine it until I am happy with the end result. My written English is not brilliant so I pay an editor to re-work everything for me before I submit it. When I began writing I had almost no personal experience of many of the different things I was describing. I hadn’t been properly in love. I didn’t understand what it meant to delay pleasure, to entice, to excite. I had a very brief homosexual relationship as a teenager and then the same girlfriend for a decade and I wouldn’t have known passion if it had jumped up and bitten me. Fact is, at 30 I had only slept with three people! So it was all pretty much stuff in my head. I wrote for several years without showing anyone what I was doing. Then I enrolled on the Wade Course and also signed up for some local creative writing programmes. After that it was probably six months before I received my first cheque. Hardly a case of getting rich quick. Once I was a published author I took myself off to some of the adult entertainment conferences, seminars and trade shows. It is an extremely professional, friendly and well-organised industry. There I started to meet like-minded people and also publishers, web site owners and manufacturers. I also had a number of more exotic encounters that certainly helped me develop my writing. One of those encounters, by the way, was with Skye who I met at – well – a sort of informal orgy in Copenhagen. I stop work between 5pm and about 8pm to hang out with Skye and her daughter, take the dog for a walk and have a bit of supper. I then return to my study and put in another few hours. I suppose I write for a total of about six hours a day. Skye falls asleep about 10 ish. One of the effects of writing about sex all day is that by the time I slip into bed at about 1 or 2 in the morning I am feeling extremely ardent. Skye, refreshed by a few hours sleep, never objects when I wake her up.’ |
|