The Erotica Handbook Read online

  The Erotica Handbook

  (How to Write Erotica)

  A GUIDE TO MAKING $100 AN HOUR

  WRITING EROTICA SHORT STORIES

  AND SELLING THEM ONLINE

  ___________________

  EMILY BAKER

  © 2016 Emily Baker. All rights reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author.

  All registered trademarks in this book are property of their respective owners.

  Edited by Dema Amirmoez.

  ASIN: B01BXR40AO

  All illustrations by Todd Parker unless otherwise noted.

  v.D.03-a

  Table of Contents

  Getting Started

  Introduction

  Why write erotica?

  What sort of income can I expect to earn in my first month?

  Don’t worry if you aren’t a great writer

  Choosing a pen name

  Writing

  Simple story formula (7 step outline)

  Step 1: Pick a niche

  Step 2: Create a main character

  Step 3: Get in the boat

  Step 4: Rock the boat

  Step 5: Build desire

  Step 6: Sex

  Step 7: Story resolution

  Coming up with hundreds of story ideas

  Best niches/kinks

  Choosing a title

  The most profitable word count

  What to do when you’re stuck: Five solid tips to getting past writer’s block

  Writing2,500 words per day (even when you don’t feel like it!)

  Monster mirroring technique

  Editing your own work

  Writing for Kindle Unlimited (doorstop strategy)

  Cover design

  Designing your cover

  Picking the right stock photo

  Finding a killer font

  Marketing

  Power of the blurb

  Book reviews

  Advanced reader copies

  Best social media platforms

  The trick to mailing lists is…

  Back matter magic

  Bundles are the key to riches

  Keyword wizard

  Thesaurus

  Nouns (body parts)

  Verbs

  Adjectives

  Everything Else

  Is it normal to masturbate to my own work?

  Why more stories is better than longer stories

  How to get your erotica out of the dungeon (adult filtering)

  What to do with underperforming titles

  Piracy

  I’ve read this book 200 times and my writing still sucks, how do I get better?

  How many books do I need to publish before I’m rich?

  Breaking the rules

  These books are not your children

  Glossary

  That’s all, folks!

  Getting Started

  Introduction

  You’re probably thinking, “Why does this book cover have pickles on it?” and we’ll get to that, but first I’d like to introduce myself.

  My name is Emily Baker. Four years ago I was 34, unemployed, and clinically depressed. Both I and my husband had been laid off from our jobs and things were bleak. Social assistance was threatening to cut us off unless we accepted minimum wage jobs. We had both been salespeople earning $40,000/year for a pharmaceutical company and even if both of us had taken those minimum wage jobs it wouldn’t have paid the bills.

  We had to walk away from out mortgage. And let me tell you, that is a painful thing to do. We moved in to my in-law’s basement and my husband found a job selling auto parts. It didn’t pay much. Barely enough to cover our rent, food, and the car. (Yes his parents charged us rent while we were struggling to get back on our feet.) I was spending every day scouring the internet looking for ways to make money, but I found that most of these “job opportunities” were scams.

  Then I got an email from my aunt. She’s 62 and I nearly blew milk of my nose when she told me she was a best-selling erotica author.

  “You have got to be shitting me,” I said. Or something like that. She chastised me for cursing and kept talking.

  She told me how she had been writing freelance short stories for decades and getting them published in magazines like Penthouse and Hustler.

  Then she said, “I’ll be in town next week, why don’t I drop by and teach you how to write erotica?”

  What are you nuts? I thought. I can’t write erotica. I don’t even know what erotica is!

  Turns out writing erotica is actually pretty simple. If you’ve ever watched a porn or had sex, or even fantasized about having sex, then you are qualified. “All you need to write erotica is desire and a pen.”

  My aunt explained there’s only one hurdle you need to jump in order to get started. And that’s dealing with the idea that you are now a producer of smut. There’s a lot of hypocrisy when it comes to naughty stories. Many polls show that while people are okay with pornography, somehow erotica crosses the line.

  Let’s settle this once and for all: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH EROTICA.

  Sex is a natural part of life.

  If you have a vivid imagination then writing erotica can be better than watching pornography because you have the power to dictate what happens to the actors. And there’s no feeling like having power over people.

  It had been a while since I felt powerful about anything, so I told my aunt, “Let’s do this,” and the rest is history.

  These days I barely do any writing at all. My income is almost completely passive. Every month I get a bunch of emails from Amazon telling me how much money they’ve just wired to my bank account. More or less one email for each country. America and the UK tend to buy the most erotica, but Australia has been doing well for me lately.

  Getting paid over and over again for creating a product that people enjoy is the best feeling in the world.

  I know what it’s like to stand in line at the food bank. I know what it’s like to deal with nasty people at the social assistance office.

  I’ve been down that road and I’m telling you, it doesn’t have to stay that way forever. You can pull yourself out of the gutter. You can make a living writing erotica short stories from home. If I can do this, you can do this.

  If you have access to the internet and a word processor you are already further ahead than I was when I first started writing.

  Okay, let’s get started.

  -Emily Baker

  Why write erotica?

  It’s easy: You know what sex is, right? You’re already most of the way there. We’ll cover everything in the writing section, but I want you to know, right off the bat, that writing erotica is easy. It’s the easiest form of fiction you will ever write. It’s so easy that my aunt, who never even finished high school, wrote erotic short stories her entire life and is now retired and living on a ranch in Oregon. The American Dream is still alive. With hard work, tenacity, and creativity you can achieve financial independence.

  It sells: Erotica is the only genre on Amazon where a new author can write a short story that’s only 2,500 words long and sell it for $2.99. That’s insane. Some authors spend years writing and editing their 150,000 word fantasy epic only to find out it’s junk and never sell a single copy. Even if they do sell any copies they’re probably still only getting between $2.99 and $4.99. Sure, they’re creating art. But The Erotica Handbook is not about making art, it’s about making money. I can’t pay my cellphone bill with art.

  It’s fast: I write 2,500 words a day, no exceptions. That means that every couple of days I’m creating
a money-generating asset that will passively earn me income for the rest of my life. The minimum length of a short story on Amazon is 2,500 words. If you want, you can create and publish a story every single day! With the recent changes to Kindle Unlimited, 2,500 is a little short, but I know some authors who are still quite successful in this area. Don’t worry about running out of ideas. In the writing section I will teach you how to generate an infinite amount of ideas for erotica short stories.

  Writing erotica is easy, it makes lots of money, and you can write and publish a story in less than four hours. So why not give it a shot? You’ve got nothing to lose.

  Even if you’re working full-time you can write erotica. I do a lot of my writing (and most of my editing) on my smart phone. Just whip it out when you’re on a break and get a few words down. Save it to the cloud and you won’t even have to worry about backing up your work.

  You can bundle it: Some days you just won’t feel like writing, but through the magic of bundles you can still create an income-generating asset. Bundles are easy to create and Kindle Unlimited users love them (because they love discounts, and bundled stories take up less room on their devices). Bundles also make a ton of money so I have a feeling you will love them as well.

  What sort of income can I expect to earn in my first month?

  My first story erotica short story took twelve hours to write. The cover took five hours to design on my crappy laptop. Writing the blurb and picking my keywords took another two hours. It made $2.

  I was pretty devastated. I bought a huge bottle of vodka and a frozen pizza and drank until I blacked out. When I woke up I found the charred pizza in my oven. I’d forgotten to eat it or even turn the oven off. If my in-laws hadn’t been in Hawaii I would have gotten in major shit. I poured what was left of the liquor down the train and went back to sleep.

  When I woke up around 5PM (disgusting, I know) I phoned and my aunt told her I had failed.

  She said, “Don’t worry about it. Nobody knocks it out of the park on their first at bat.”

  “But I suck.”

  “You don’t suck.”

  “I suck,” I said, wondering if I had any money left in my bank account for another bottle of vodka. I couldn’t help it. Looking back I was probably an alcoholic. I was self-medicating to get rid of the pain.

  “Did you learn anything?” said my aunt.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s only a failure if you don’t learn anything.” For some reason that really resonated with me. My aunt went on to explain that failure is a part of life. It’s natural. Everybody fails. Just look at Abraham Lincoln. The guy’s life was a train wreck and then he became president and abolished slavery. What’s important is he kept slogging through the muck. Even though he wanted to quit he kept on going. Kept working. Kept pushing.

  She was right. I had learned something. I learned my cover designing skills were abysmal. Despite my work history in sales, my blurb (the short description of my book, which is a SALES THING WHICH I SHOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD AT) was pitiful. It sounded like I was trying to sell vacuum cleaners.

  I accepted that I really didn’t know anything about design, or book sales. I went back to the drawing board. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel I started studying what works and what doesn’t. And that’s what this book is. A collection of ideas and tricks that I’ve been perfecting for four years.

  Every trick in this book has been tested and refined to perfection. It took me four years to learn this stuff and it will only take you the time it takes to finish this book. (Though when you finish this book and have written a couple erotica stories, you should definitely re-read The Erotica Handbook. You might have missed something or an idea might not resonate with you until you’ve written a few stories.)

  Once you’ve established yourself it is not uncommon for a 7,500 word story to earn $1,000 over the course of a year. That’s each year. Every year until you die. If you can write just eight of these stories it’ll be like you’re earning minimum wage just for sitting on your butt.

  But don’t think that just because every story you write isn’t a best-seller that you’re a failure. A baseball player doesn’t measure his success on the number of homeruns he hits. Singles, doubles, and triples are all valuable and everything adds up and contributes to your bottom line.

  Don’t worry if you aren’t a great writer

  Guess what? Neither am I. Neither is my aunt.

  Erotica is not a genre that has anything to do with great writing. There are no “great” erotica writers in the same way that there are no “great” pornography films. They don’t win Oscars. Their scripts are not studied. The dialogue is not quote-worthy.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Erotica is not about great writing. Erotica is about one thing only: Arousal, or in other words, making your reader horny. It doesn’t matter if your writing has plot holes or a simple vocabulary. Would you care about these things in a porno film? Of course not.

  You don’t even need a unique idea. There’s only idea when it comes to erotica and it’s: PEOPLE AND SEX. It is, of course, slightly more complicated than that, but in the writing section we will cover everything. I will provide you with a simple method to pump out a story every single day.

  There might not be any “great” erotica writers but there are lots of determined ones. A determined writer is someone who has no idea what they’re doing but takes a stab at it anyway. A determined writer has a full-time job and a boatload of other responsibilities but still finds time to scribble down a couple hundred words before they go to sleep.

  Nobody starts out as a great anything. It is only through hard work, determination, and self-respect that they become great.

  Every time you sit down to write you are stepping into the arena. You can only lose the fight if you drop your sword in the sand and walk away. Believe in yourself and you will never fight alone. The muse will fight beside you and together you will emerge victorious.

  Every year thousands of people sit down to write a story, but it is only the warriors who survive long enough to publish. You will be scarred. Bloodied. Driven to madness and anxiety. But if you keep writing, keep fighting, you are going to win.

  Victory in writing is inevitable. Remember that. Write it on a post-it-note and put it on your computer monitor.

  Choosing a pen name

  You need a pen name. No question. Especially if you’re a man. At the conventions in New York and Chicago I’ve met lots of male erotica writers and 99% of them use a female pen name. Most erotica is consumed by women and polls show they prefer that it was written by a woman.

  A pen name also provides a layer of privacy so the internet weirdoes don’t track you down and harass your family. This has happened to people I know. Don’t mess around with this. Just use a pen name and you’ll be safe.

  Thankfully, Amazon makes it very easy to create a pen name. When you go to publish your book you simply make up a pen name, and put in the Contributors section as the author. It’s that easy. If you’ve got an author page account (which I definitely recommend) you just add your book like you normally do. Amazon will notice that the pen name does not match your account name and ask, “Is this a pen name?” You click Yes, and presto, Amazon will generate a separate author page for that pen name.

  Don’t worry about people stealing your work because you’re using a pen name. It doesn’t happen. Amazon has a very good copyright protection system and if someone uploads your book under another name they will get their account blocked. Besides, most erotica stories are so short it’s 100x easier just to write your own stuff than steal it.

  Aside from privacy, a pen name allows you to explore different genres. You can use one pen name for your soccer mom stories, and another for your lesbian monster stuff, or whatever. You understand. It also allows you to explore completely different topics. I’ve got a couple cookbooks under my belt, and the old grannies that buy those books probably wouldn’t want to be browsing my ca
talogue of cupcake recipes and run into lesbian erotica.

  Imagine the shock.

  That’s what you’re trying to avoid, because that’s the shock your vanilla erotica reader might experience if they find out you into writing alien abduction stories.

  Catalogue shock is bad. It makes people hit the back button and leave bad reviews.

  I started out by publishing everything under the same pen name and this was a mistake. People started leaving me reviews like, “I thought this was going to be a lesbian story, but it was about werewolves, what the hell?”

  How to actually choose a pen name? Pretty easy. Hit up Google and look for some random name generators. Keep generating names until you find one you like. I recommend a shorter name than a longer one. This is because long names get squished on the book cover. You want readers to easily identify your work when they see your books in the search listings.

  My split testing has shown that your pen name should be a reflection of the genre. If you’re writing paranormal erotica, then names like Moon are better than Jones or Smith. But if you’re writing a story about a stay-at-home soccer mom who can’t keep her eyes off the pool boy...then something ordinary is better.

  “Enough jabbering about pen names!”

  Okay, okay. Let’s get on to meat of the thing: Writing.

  Writing

  Simple story formula (7 step outline)

  Pick a niche.

  Create a main character.

  Get in the boat.

  Rock the boat.

  Build desire.

  Sex.

  Story resolution.

  That’s it. It’s that simple. We’re not writing a romance novel here. We don’t need personal growth and plot twists. All we need is a couple of sexy characters who are going to bang for your reader’s enjoyment.