When I started writing smut in 2016, the Romance genre accounted for 23% of the total fiction market. Self-publishing had never been easier, and the standards of the consumer were, to put it kindly, unexacting. See, when it comes to writing erotica, it's not so much how you write but what you write about. Proper grammar and punctuation are a plus, but the real money is in finding the kinks, crafting a compelling hook, and making sure everyone gets an HEA (happily ever after).
Now, the discerning reader might scoff at this and say, "I prefer my endings to be realistic! Not every romance ends with a neat little bow, you know!"
Not in real life, no, but Romance is not real life. In fact, people are paying good money to get the hell out of real life and enjoy the fantasy. Discerning readers will love you for crafting believable endings that don't pair the bad-boy-billionaire-with-a-heart-of-gold with the object of his infatuation, but general audiences will not. In this business, you can carve out a dedicated niche of literary fans or you can make stupid amounts of money by catering to the happy ending crowd.
It's up to you, of course, but there's the bottom line to consider.
This may sound a bit cutthroat, but think about the expenses of the self-published author:
There's the time spent just writing the damn thing
There's the money you fork over for stock photos and fonts to design your own cover, or
The money you fork over to professionals to design your cover
There's advertising on social media and amongst various websites, newsletters, and email lists
There's the time spent with distributors that may or may not format your book correctly on the major platforms and the hours lost agonizing over a paragraph break that's not supposed to be there
There's the time spent figuring out what your next book is going to be and consulting your spreadsheet of names to make sure you haven't already written a dozen Ryans, Sarahs, Jessicas, and Johns
And finally, there's the time spent researching genre conventions (as in: am I writing a shifter love triangle, a billionaire fantasy, something with futanari, or is this going to be a quick 5K story while I plot out the next big one?)
If you're willing to go through all of that, it may not be worth it to write the story you want. Yes, it's nice to get fan letters from the two people who love your smut, but it's not so nice to see the book drop down Amazon's ratings week after week because you decided to take a chance on a story that can't be easily categorized.
So how did I get into this business of love? Well, self-publishing Working Class Villain was the gateway. When you're doing as much research as you can on taking your book from manuscript to Amazon, you discover that Romance is the biggest business in the market. Me, being a proud and doughty writer, I figured I could easily make a quick buck while I planned my next great American novel.
I didn't know if I could make an actual living in the smut business, but I hoped I could churn out enough mediocre novels to generate a passive income. Because, from a capitalist perspective, there really is nothing better than making money in your sleep. When I was first starting out in the self-publishing biz, I got an intense thrill whenever I got a ping that someone had bought one of my books.
Truth be told, I still do.
You typically sell these things for $2.99-$4.99 a pop, so your royalty from a single sale is not much. But it's always gratifying to know someone is paying you for words you wrote. And when they leave nice reviews, it's even sweeter.
During my time in the trenches, roughly 2016-2019, I wrote about 125 books of smut, 12 of which I produced as audiobooks. That sounds like a lot, but a self-published "book" is not quite what you'd imagine picking off the shelf of your local Barnes & Noble. Some of these books were indeed full-length novels, averaging around 50,000 words. The majority, however, were usually between 10,000-20,000 words, and several "quickies" were in the under 10,000-word range.
Because what are people after? Some are after a simple release, a quick tale that pushes their sensual buttons and delivers a satisfying climax. I place this type of short story into the general "smut" category. Those who are after a fuller story, who want something between 10,000 and 20,000 words, that I consider "erotica." It's a little too lurid to call pure Romance, because that's not enough time to really offer more than a series of hot encounters between our leads and a basic plot that gets you from beginning to end. Once you hit the 20,000+ realm, that's something you can comfortably call "Romance." It tends to have more characters, more stakes, and enough wiggle room to fit major plot developments in addition to the shagging.
Of course, these are my terms, and the multitude of authors and readers out there have their own ideas concerning what is what.
As to how I fared in those trenches? Pretty well, I think. I never made enough to call it a living, but I amassed some fans and became enough of a known quantity to collaborate with other authors on anthologies. The books are still selling on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Apple, and wherever naughty literature is sold. The most surprising thing has been their continued profit, long after my marketing days were done.
My books still rack up expenses today, because I need to pay for my web domains and my minimal advertising, but these expenses are usually covered by the time my February royalties roll in. As to the legacy of my several pen names, that’s something to ponder in another blog post - because I wasn’t always keen on what I wrote.
But it did teach me a lot about the business of writing. If nothing else, I can brag that writing is my business.