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Still not bad, either way.
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Apr 15, 2015 20:43
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1.34 isn't bad. march was my best month, and the bulk of it was from borrows. i just wonder how low it can go before people start pulling out (pretty low, i bet).
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Apr 15, 2015 21:52
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quote:July, 2014: $2,000,000 That's the total pool of $$$ for KU/KOLL each month since launch. I don't think we're going to see it drop below $1.30 for the foreseeable future. Amazon keeps pumping more and more into this, and it's a drop in the bucket for them compared to everything else they get by keeping readers away from B&N/Apple/actual stores.
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Apr 15, 2015 22:24
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Sundae posted:That's the total pool of $$$ for KU/KOLL each month since launch. I don't think we're going to see it drop below $1.30 for the foreseeable future. Amazon keeps pumping more and more into this, and it's a drop in the bucket for them compared to everything else they get by keeping readers away from B&N/Apple/actual stores. Just to satisfy my own curiosity I'd love to know if the growth in borrows is coming primarily from new users or are existing users just reading way more. Also I'd like to know how many months the average user subscribes to KU, especially broken down by what genres they primarily read.
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Apr 15, 2015 22:32
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I'd like to know that too, but I don't think we're ever going to get that sort of information from Amazon.
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Apr 16, 2015 00:24
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This is the greatest review I've ever gotten.
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Apr 16, 2015 01:33
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Haha I thought they removed the minimum word count for reviews.
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Apr 16, 2015 01:35
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I just got a strange review for my collection of movie reviews. Apparently they aren't feminist enough, and my horror movie reviews need trigger warnings.
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Apr 16, 2015 03:47
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hello! i was wondering how many hours a day do you all write?
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Apr 16, 2015 09:44
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EngineerSean posted:Haha I thought they removed the minimum word count for reviews. I think they did because I've got a couple of reviews that are about 8 words long. My guess is the dude was writing a review on his phone and just went nuts on the autocorrect.
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Apr 16, 2015 14:04
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The Gilded Age posted:hello! i was wondering how many hours a day do you all write? Hard to say. My day job swallows most of my life, but I try to squeeze in somewhere between 2-4 hours a day when I get home / on weekends. Some of that time is inevitably on Facebook doing anything BUT writing, however. My wife spends about ten hours per week on one of our pen-names and makes a small fortune off of it.
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Apr 16, 2015 14:12
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Sundae posted:My wife spends about ten hours per week on one of our pen-names and makes a small fortune off of it. What length stuff is she writing, and about how much is she publishing per month? Does the income really start ramping up when you hit a critical mass of "stuff published and available to buy"?
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Apr 16, 2015 14:21
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I pubbed 2 new ultra romances last week, I sold like 5 of them. Woo.
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Apr 16, 2015 14:28
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Mostly speed romance, but she also shares duties on full-length novels with me. She publishes approximately 30,000 words per month, typically in the form of 3-4 shorts. I can only speak for my own experience on the critical mass, but for us, it was less about mass and more about targeted market. Once we started hitting a targeted market and paid better attention to what we were doing, income grew substantially. Last month was approximately $8,900, for reference. Barring another Amazon apocalypse, we should easily break $10K this month.
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Apr 16, 2015 14:33
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angel opportunity posted:Does the income really start ramping up when you hit a critical mass of "stuff published and available to buy"? e: or so I have been told. Take this with a pinch of salt but I've heard scales similar to this in a few unrelated places. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 14:35
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The Gilded Age posted:hello! i was wondering how many hours a day do you all write? 6-8 hours a day, five days a week.
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Apr 16, 2015 15:09
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Bobby Deluxe posted:With speed-romance at least, you'll start to see enough to buy yourself a dvd a month at 5. At 8, a nice meal. Around 12 you'll be better off than you would on welfare. 16+ is minimum wage and 25+ is apparently when you start getting into 'maybe I should either quit my job or buy a yacht' territory. i've seen people claim they're making bank on 10 or so shorts, and people who are making almost nothing in the same number (me). seems like, what sundae said above, what matters more is marketing/targeting. then again, if you have 50 shorts and each gets 1-2 borrows/sales a day, that'll start to add up. my job picked up in the last two weeks, so my writing has taken a pretty big hit. i do at least 2k words a day, usually closer to 5, with the aim of getting out a 60k novel per month, and so far i'm on track. i haven't put out a new super romance in over a week, but they're like a fraction of what i'm making off my novels, so i don't have a lot of motivation to keep churning them out. then again, i'm only making a fraction of what some of you guys are, so it's all relative anyway!
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Apr 16, 2015 15:25
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One hour at a minimum. I aim for 1k a day. Somedays though it turns into much much more.
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Apr 16, 2015 15:42
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I try for 3k words a day, that's usually 3 hours or less.
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Apr 16, 2015 18:00
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Honestly a word count is better for my motivation than a number of hours. I aim for 2k a day, 5 days a week (so ~40k a month). Anytime I used time I would just spend it gazing at the ceiling or browsing, then feel guilty for not doing any work. With a word goal, that time becomes "creative planning", because you still gotta pound out those words later. As much as we like to call this a business (and it really is), there is still a degree of art in writing a book, and you can't really force yourself to be creative. Or at least I can't.
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Apr 16, 2015 18:45
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ArchangeI posted:Honestly a word count is better for my motivation than a number of hours. Word count is a much better motivator since you can't just dick around until the time is up.
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Apr 16, 2015 19:31
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Technically I require a word count. It just takes me that long to get there after a day full of bullshit. 
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Apr 16, 2015 21:11
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I am now convinced that every single romance novel ever could be solved if the heroine and hero sat down with no distractions and spoke to each other like calm and rational adults for 5 minutes. 10 minutes tops.
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Apr 16, 2015 23:35
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psychopomp posted:6-8 hours a day, five days a week. Teach me your ways, sensai.
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Apr 16, 2015 23:49
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Stella Hayne posted:I am now convinced that every single romance novel ever could be solved if the heroine and hero sat down with no distractions and spoke to each other like calm and rational adults for 5 minutes. OR POISON.
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Apr 17, 2015 00:06
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Stella Hayne posted:I am now convinced that every single romance novel ever could be solved if the heroine and hero sat down with no distractions and spoke to each other like calm and rational adults for 5 minutes. When I met my wife, there was a scheme among my friends to try and get me hooked up with one of a list of five women. A list which she was not initially on. Literally the first thing I told her when we got together was the existence of this scheme and that she wasn't on it because I didn't think she was available. I've seen too many lovely movies where the girl finds stuff like this out and flips out. This would of course remove the tension from 90% of romances and destroy the industry.
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Apr 17, 2015 08:24
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I don't write romance (I write contemporary, suspense, and mystery) but I've always maintained that my books would be a LOT shorter if characters gave an honest answer when asked, "How are you doing? Are you OK?"
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Apr 17, 2015 13:18
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To be fair, a lot of the time people turn to books looking for simple problems with easy solutions that can eventually be solved without fuss. There is a lot of stupidity along the way but people are also quite happy to suspend disbelief about unreasonable character actions if it propels the narrative. It's a lot easier to drag on and then resolve satisfactorily a simple comical misunderstanding in a book than it is: "over the past twenty years, two careers and three children we have raised to adulthood together I can no longer divorce our problems from our sex life and the only time I can enjoy unfettered sex is with my infertile college ex-girlfriend. You discovered my infidelities and everything we have built over the past lifetime is crumbling around us but we can't make a clean break of it because when all is said and done we are both still hopelessly, miserably in love with each other and terrified of losing what little there is left to our relationship. Also youre still waiting to hear back from the doctor about that mammogram and my employer just axed the health insurance from my contract" But then it depends what sort of book you're looking for
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Apr 17, 2015 13:33
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What I'm trying to say, facetiousness aside, is that people are often looking for Small Problems in their books because they want to escape from the real world for a bit and it would suck to find out that all the unsolvable big ticket issues have followed them in. So even though its silly and requires suspension of disbelief, theyd rather see dumb problems blown out of proportion and that can be happily resolved than real unsolvable problems that remind them of how hosed reality is
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Apr 17, 2015 13:50
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I also think people are much more willing to suspend disbelief for a narrative. Especially in romance. When I used to read it heavily, it was comforting to know that eventually, the hero and heroine got together and had a happy ending. They're simple like that, but I can understand the draw to them. Especially with life as lovely as it is.
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Apr 17, 2015 14:03
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How much of y'all's real lives or those of people you know do you incorporate into (super) romance? I'm wondering if some people close to me will share some of their wilder ideas and stories, if I give them credit and/or part of the profit.
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Apr 17, 2015 20:09
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Mortley posted:How much of y'all's real lives or those of people you know do you incorporate into (super) romance? I'm wondering if some people close to me will share some of their wilder ideas and stories, if I give them credit and/or part of the profit. i told my mom that i've been writing romance novels and she looked me dead in the eye and said, "like, with sex?" that's not really an answer to your question, but it happened.
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Apr 17, 2015 20:27
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Mortley posted:How much of y'all's real lives or those of people you know do you incorporate into (super) romance? I'm wondering if some people close to me will share some of their wilder ideas and stories, if I give them credit and/or part of the profit. 0% for super romance. It tends to go the other direction. "Gee, that whatever I wrote was surprisingly hot. Wonder if the wife would go for it..." Then again, my social circle are largely prudes and engineers.
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Apr 17, 2015 20:45
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Mortley posted:How much of y'all's real lives or those of people you know do you incorporate into (super) romance? I'm wondering if some people close to me will share some of their wilder ideas and stories, if I give them credit and/or part of the profit. This is a recipe for disaster, just make up stories.
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Apr 17, 2015 20:56
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I've even been avoiding the first names of anyone I know and still see, just in case. If anyone found out I do this and found out their name was in it, I can see how that would be weird. I stunt published two collections of short stories and have been telling everyone that they're the ones i'm selling. I tell people I'm making money from proofing the HTML layouts for Amazon self-publishing, and their eyes kind of go blank halfway through.
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Apr 17, 2015 21:09
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I made the mistake of telling a couple of my girlfriend's friends about my plans a while back and they've been bugging to read them ever since, and (I just found out last week) introducing me to THEIR friends as "the erotica guy" - even though it's something that came up in passing literally a year ago as I was talking about quitting my job. I try to put them off for a while and then I eventually show them a tame example, which shortly afterwards leads them to shut up as they realise that yeah, they really aren't the target market. It's not even anything extreme, most people just aren't as hip as they like to think they are. And we're just talking about words on a page, I can't imagine what they'd do if they met someone actually into BDSM or swinging etc. It reminds me of the time a very naive and bland friend found out I was doing something not so legal (years ago) and then wouldn't stop blabbing about it to everyone she met. People love vicarious 'otherness' or edginess that doesn't reflect on or compromise them. It's far safer and easier to keep it private unless you're willing to own it in its full extent - not just what it literally is and the fact that you're not ashamed of it, but what less close friends (or strangers) will think of you when you're not there to explain in careful detail your philosophy on it. Even smart people become dumb gossipy teenage idiots when they get bored enough and they're not super close friends with anybody involved. I couldn't imagine having to complement the "Okay it's just sex, grow up" shrug with a bunch of "Oh yeah tell me more about your sex life or personal fantasies so I can literally convert that into a hugely intimate wall of text that is bound to get super awkward one way or another".
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Apr 17, 2015 21:24
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I self published a few things way back in 2010 in one of the original incarnations of this thread. I wound up taking some time off from self publishing due to personal life reasons, and pulled my stuff from shelves, though I've still been working on improving my writing. I'm thinking of getting back into the game, however, the three novels I had up had middling reviews - the usual mix of "not bad but has editing errors". My first go through I didn't get any line/copy editing - if I do wind up getting back into it I'm doing it completely differently, but I'm wondering if that sort of baggage is going to completely weigh me down and if I should start fresh on new pen name. I liked the novels well enough, but if the weak reviews are going to be a stone around my neck... I'm not really certain what I want to do at this point, but getting a feel for how to approach if I did is a lot better than jumping in like I did last time should I do it.
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Apr 17, 2015 22:14
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I've been seeing a lot of buzz on the subreddit about using keywords spaced like this: keyword/keyword/etc and using up the whole space for a keyword so that you maximize your allotted keywords. What do you guys think? It seems like a way to edge around the limit. Was there anything Amazon said about it? I've looked but it all looks pretty vague (which is not surprising for Amazon).
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Apr 18, 2015 04:46
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:To be fair, a lot of the time people turn to books looking for simple problems with easy solutions that can eventually be solved without fuss. There is a lot of stupidity along the way but people are also quite happy to suspend disbelief about unreasonable character actions if it propels the narrative. Unnngh keep going, I'm almost there edit: On the topic of sharing your writing career with people in your real life... My partner and a couple intimate friends know what I do (and have always been supportive and tactful in mixed company). Generally in conversations with friends and acquaintances, however, my strategy is to try to bore everyone to death with talk of freelance writing gigs and technical articles and web copy and blah blah blah until they yawn and move on to greener conversational pastures. As my career transitions from primarily ultra-romance to primarily romance, I see that dynamic changing pretty quickly. Writing "stuff like that Twilight thing all the kids like" is several orders of magnitude less embarrassing to chat about than "stories where tentacle aliens do butt stuff to spacemen." Trustworthy fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Apr 18, 2015 |
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Apr 18, 2015 18:53
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Trustworthy posted:As my career transitions from primarily ultra-romance to primarily romance, I see that dynamic changing pretty quickly. Writing "stuff like that Twilight thing all the kids like" is several orders of magnitude less embarrassing to chat about than "stories where tentacle aliens do butt stuff to spacemen." Yeah, but that's not nearly as entertaining, I imagine. Some of the shorts I cranked out when I was in the thick of the 2012 boom were out there, but I remember them being really fun, too. Still, there's something to be said for being able to actually talk about work with people. Then again, my dad still thinks I'm writing historically inspired fiction novels, so v  v
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Apr 18, 2015 19:57
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