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On writing program chat, remember that JK Rowling wrote her first two harry potter novels by hand and then typed them up on a type writer. Point being, we can all get very into our tech, but it really doesn't matter that much. That being said... Scrivener all the way. The IOS app is also rock solid. If you time it right with NW, you can get the main computer program and the app for $45 bucks. Once bought, that's it. syncs between the main computer program and IOS with dropbox like a charm. And yes, if you're using a windows computer, it still works with IOS syncing.
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Sep 17, 2016 06:03
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LionArcher posted:On writing program chat, remember that JK Rowling wrote her first two harry potter novels by hand and then typed them up on a type writer. Point being, we can all get very into our tech, but it really doesn't matter that much. When Stephen King's Wang became a valuable collector's item he was wealthy enough to be able to auction it for charity.
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Sep 17, 2016 06:14
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I wrote an entire short story on my phone while pooping and that story made me some money. Makes me feel silly every time I'm browsing these dead forums on my phone.
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Sep 17, 2016 07:41
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I've written my past few novels on Google Docs with occasional paranoid backups to Dropbox and OneDrive. Even the free versions of all of these are big enough to hold all the writing you'll do in a lifetime (unless you're Isaac Asimov). GDocs also has automatic conversion to EPUB format built in, though in my experience it's a little wonky with fonts.
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Sep 17, 2016 20:47
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LionArcher posted:On writing program chat, remember that JK Rowling wrote her first two harry potter novels by hand and then typed them up on a type writer. Point being, we can all get very into our tech, but it really doesn't matter that much. George R. R. Martin wrote all the Song of Ice and Fire books in like Word Perfect 3.0 on some ancient DOS computer. He transfers the text off it with floppy disks.
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Sep 18, 2016 02:39
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When I still had a day job, I would write (with my thumbs) on my iPhone as an email that I would send to myself. Then, I would reply to the email and add a few paragraphs to it. When it was all done I edited it in Word 2010 using the Smashwords style guide. I did three books that and they still earn $50 or so a month since 2013. Don't get me wrong, I can pump out a LOT more work with a mechanical keyboard with and the grammarly plug in, but just do whatever gets words on the page first.
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Sep 18, 2016 03:08
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If you ain't rocking an Alphasmart Neo don't even try to be an author. Like, don't even come into my artisanal bespoke cafe. I will pour my guayusa tea all over your macbook pro, bitch.
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Sep 18, 2016 09:05
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Alphasmart? Maybe once you mature enough to appreciate a USB mechanical typewriter like myself, then you can cash in some street cred.
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Sep 18, 2016 14:15
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Aaronicon posted:Alphasmart? Maybe once you mature enough to appreciate a USB mechanical typewriter like myself, then you can cash in some street cred. Don't be mean, it was a fun project.
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Sep 18, 2016 20:07
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If you don't engrave your wax tablets with a bronze stylus that's money left on the table.
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Sep 18, 2016 20:27
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Readers can hire me by the week for tellings of my latest stories, in keeping with oral tradition.
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Sep 18, 2016 23:47
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Is it just me, or is this month seriously sucking rear end on Amazon?
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Sep 19, 2016 05:00
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Bardeh posted:Is it just me, or is this month seriously sucking rear end on Amazon? You are not alone.
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Sep 20, 2016 21:13
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Hey guys. This is my favorite thread on Something Awful and I feel proud of every person who has ever made a change based on something that someone told them in this thread. Good luck in the future and I hope all of you become great fiction writers.
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Sep 21, 2016 13:36
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Bardeh posted:Is it just me, or is this month seriously sucking rear end on Amazon? Up until the last week or so, yeah. The last couple of months in general have been dire. Sean I hope you're not bailing on SA, but if you are I just want you to know: you're an immensely helpful, insightful poster. The SA erotica thread crew changed my loving life - I'd still be slaving away in a call center somewhere if not for the tenbux I threw down on these forums over a decade ago. You guys are the best.
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Sep 22, 2016 01:30
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Yeah I'm really happy that GBS was shut down with zero notice and that people are finding it so funny. I think it's so funny that I'm not coming back. It'll be hilarious to me when Lowtax has to actually get a job after taking the last two decades off. I'll be checking in now and then until the election but I'm not reregistring after I get banned for my Trump avatar, or before that if I can't keep my mouth shut. I'm not sure who still posts here that has worked through the erotica renaissance but hopefully this thread doesn't die (or this entire subforum deleted for the lulz). EngineerSean fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Sep 22, 2016 |
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Sep 22, 2016 04:47
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Wait, what the gently caress? When did GBS disappear? Did he say why?
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Sep 22, 2016 04:54
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Dumb to post about GBS dieing in this thread but I'll do an on-topic post afterward. GBS was really, really, really bad. I've been on this forum for 12 years now and GBS was always kind of bad. It evolved through different stages of being super bad, but the most recent one has been the worst. My main fear with it being deleted is that really bad posters will spread into subforums that aren't lovely. There's no longer really any unifying reason for SA to have a "general" forum though. The idea of "internet nerd culture comedy forum" or whatever GBS started out as doesn't make sense when "internet comedy" isn't nerdy or niche anymore and is super mainstream. GBS 1.0 was turning into a lovely version of D&D and GBS 2.0 was turning into a bunch of unfunny people trying really loving hard to be funny. Hopefully the subforums can stay okay, though I don't really post in more than a few threads now. On topic "90-day report": I stopped doing PNR shifter romance around the middle of June, and my first sci-fi romance came out at around that time (I'm being intentionally vague so you don't doxx my pen). I'll post my earnings report for the last 90 days, which is essentially how long I've been doing sci-fi at this point (it's actually slightly longer than the graph). The graph also includes earnings from the two PNR romance series I have, but the earnings from those are pretty negligible toward the total earnings--most of the income came from the sci-fi romance.   I'm pretty happy with this, as I quit my day job a few months ago. I've made just about what used to be a year's salary from the job I quit in 90 days. When you factor in expenses and the $750/month I now pay out of pocket for health insurance, it's actually lower than that, but the point stands that I am making more money doing something that's actually fun and doesn't devour my soul. I didn't want to post anything about sci-fi romance when I started doing it because I didn't want to inspire any competition at all. I'm probably going to move on from sci-fi romance though and figured I'd post about it. I have a series that is between 5-7 books (again being vague to avoid doxx), and you can see that the income spiked a lot toward the beginning but is on a steady downward trend. I think part of the reason is that I just got deeper and deeper into a series, and even though it's not a serial, people become more reluctant to jump into a series when they see "book 5". If I started a fresh series, I may see more spikes like I did from the beginning, but I ultimately started feeling that sci-fi romance has a fairly low ceiling vs. other genres that I could be doing, and I'm reminding myself that I'm in this for the money. Sci-fi romance allowed me to basically publish "space opera light" with romance elements in there, and the voracious romance readers would actually buy and enjoy it. However, the highest rank I hit was around rank 200. The book that hit that rank held for quite a while and just churned out money, but my later books have felt a lot more uphill. They might peak around 400-500, and they sink quickly. One cool thing about doing sci-fi romance was that my overall earnings largely were from the series as a whole. I made book one and whichever book was newest in the series $0.99, and I jacked the prices of the older books to $2.99. On a day where a new release was peaking, I'd often see most all of the $2.99-priced books selling 30+ copies, which gave me a decent safety net in some sense. Even if I released a new book in the series that kind of bombed by my standards, the overall series boost would float my daily income above $300/day. I'm kind of late on my newest book and I've finally sunk below $300/day again since the book before this did not hold rank for long at all. I have the impression that if I just continued churning this genre, I'd see it becoming harder and harder to make the same amount of money from it. If I fail at the genre I'm going to switch to I may go back into sci-fi romance and start another series, but the audience for it feels a bit too small. If you're reading this and thinking of doing sci-fi romance, I can warn you that after my initial spikes of success, I saw my brother and a few other people I know well take a stab at the genre and have not much success at all in it. It's saturated by a huge volume of scammy ghostwritten books and really low quality crap, and it can be relatively difficult to stand out from those, as they usually have good covers. I had one of these people try to newsletter swap with me, and I noticed she had ESL english over Facebook. Her book's English was not that bad, so it was clearly ghostwritten, but the story seemed lovely still. I looked at the reviews and they were all very very vaguely worded and all used the same type of weirdly specific phrases to say why the book was good. These 100% looked like paid reviews. You're competing with books like this which occupy the 800-1200 ranks like floating piles of garbage. I don't remember seeing this nearly so bad in shifter romance, and I don't believe it happens in badboy either. I think since the genre is relatively sparsely populated by "real authors," the scammy people see it as a juicy target to fill with lovely books that look good at a glance. I even saw random hyperlinks in this one book from the lady I mentioned (like "Asimov's Laws" was mentioned and hyperlinked) and the hyperlink dumped you to the back of the book. I don't know if that scam still works but they were sure as hell trying for it.
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Sep 22, 2016 05:34
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Re: GBS https://www.twitter.com/lowtax/status/778624883584487424
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Sep 22, 2016 05:34
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I guess I'm one of those unfunny people trying to be funny who infected this subforum. Also I've made a half million so far this year and I'm pissed because it's a pay cut. At least I've made like six thousand on predictit.
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Sep 22, 2016 05:45
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People actually hire ghostwriters for romance? I'm familiar with the idea of say, celebrities "writing" memoirs, but how could these people possibly afford to pay someone else to ghostwrite lovely fiction for them? You have to pay a living a wage, right? Is it just people with ESL English hiring other people with slightly better ESL English from India or what? And jesus christ, half a million. Makes me wish I'd written more than one book since 2013. Though "pay cut" makes me think now is too late to get started.
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Sep 22, 2016 05:52
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They don't pay a living wage obviously. Often they end up getting plagiarized work because you get what you pay for.
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Sep 22, 2016 05:58
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Also re: wishing you had written more than one book. If I can impart one piece of knowledge, it's that the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. You'll never be rich if you end up giving up now. There has still never been a better time in history to be a writer.
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Sep 22, 2016 06:06
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fruit loop posted:People actually hire ghostwriters for romance? I'm familiar with the idea of say, celebrities "writing" memoirs, but how could these people possibly afford to pay someone else to ghostwrite lovely fiction for them? You have to pay a living a wage, right? Is it just people with ESL English hiring other people with slightly better ESL English from India or what? It can be profitable. There are actually a lot of decent writers out there who are willing to sell their services for next to nothing (definitely not a living wage once you factor in how long it takes them). You can feel bad about it, but they are dumb for agreeing to the prices. I think a big obstacle ends up being though that a good ghost writer likely won't keep ghost writing for long since they will realize it sucks, and you have to keep risking new ghost writers. You also have to know how to publish stuff well and market it, and then you're spending your time and money publishing and marketing something that might not really be very good. When you add in all the time/money/effort you spent microing your ghost writer, you may realize the profit margins aren't so great. I'm kind of interested in trying it at some point. There was a guy I met on the off-site who gave me a good window into the mind of someone who would write a 50k novel for less than $500. We had both started doing erotica at the same time, and I had followed Sundae's advice to the letter and was making over $100/day after a month. I was totally over the moon, and at that point I was really interested in sharing my knowledge with others and helping people learn to succeed. As a side note, I'm not really interested in the helping/teaching part at all anymore (lol). I was on the IRC for the off-site, and I was gushing about how big a deal the mailing list had been, specifically offering a free story to people who joined my mailing list. This guy PMs me suddenly saying something like, "You know it's not actually encouraging to gloat about your success, right?" Instead of just saying "lol dick gently caress off" or something, I actually politely communicated with him for a while. I told him I was legit just trying to help, and that the mailing list thing had been the single biggest factor in my making decent money in such a short period of time. He gave me this sob story about how he was having to break his back and ghostwrite for hours per day just to put food on the table and feed his family. I told him to try the newsletter thing and publish his own thing and he wouldn't have to ghostwrite for fractions of a penny per word (his rate was really low, don't remember the number). He said it was impossible, as you couldn't do a NL without a PO box, and a PO box was wildly expensive for someone like him who could barely make end's meet, so it was therefore impossible for him to publish his own stuff. I argued with him for a while, saying I just used my real address and didn't give a poo poo, and he said that wasn't possible for him bla bla. Basically anything I suggested to try to help him was impossible and I was just priveleged or lucky and I was just bragging to brag and I was a dick etc. Ever since that conversation I've seen these "types" of people lurking on various self-pub forums. It's always this wall of excuses, and they are always dumb enough to write a full loving novel for less than $500. Ask yourself...if you can actually write a novel that someone will pay you $300 for, how much do you think they are making off of it? The biggest hurdle to self-pub is often just "can you actually finish a novel?" Everything else is a lot of little things that are important but definitely not insurmountable. I feel like these types of people for whatever reason are afraid to fail or take any risk at all, and they don't value their time for some reason. I think the maximum output I could sling lovely words out would be 3 novels in a month, and I'd be exhausted from that. For that to be AT ALL worth it to me, I'd have to charge something like $1500 per novel (and it still would feel awful and I'd barely survive on it after taxes and health insurance). That's also a very low price for whoever is buying it, but no one would pay that because there are dumbasses racing to the bottom who would do it for $300. My brother learned how to make romance covers in Photoshop in less than a month (with no real previous skills) and was charging $150 for covers he made to authors after a month. There are like, dozens and dozens of other things you can do online to make more money than writing a full novel for a few hundred dollars. A full novel probably takes 20-40 sitting-in-the-chair-writing hours, while a cover probably takes 1-5 hours. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Sep 22, 2016 |
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Sep 22, 2016 06:08
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A full novel definitely takes me way over a hundred hours of butt in chair but that's irrelevant. Just do it.
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Sep 22, 2016 06:24
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I'm tempted to try my hand at this, but I'm getting bogged down building up the logistics as some great hurdle. I'd appreciate any help you guys might be able to give to get it down to size. 1) Going from general chat here, it seems like the only place worth publishing at the minute is KDP - is that true? And am I right in thinking that KDP has exclusivity requirements? 2) I already have an LLC that I could put any earnings through (hopefully there will be some!) - but I'm not in the US. I know there's at least one author in here who lives in Asia, like me. Are there any problems getting money from Amazon in a currency that isn't USD/GBP/EUR, like terrible conversion rates/fees from Amazon, or Amazon only paying in USD and your bank hitting you hard? 3) How do pen names work? Let's say I wanted to write some Tom-Clancy-esque stuff but also some Bridget-Jones'-Diary-type stuff under two different names. Can they be effectively separated but linked to the same Amazon account, or do I need to sign up with 2 different email addresses? I have more questions about marketing and stuff, but those should wait until I've actually written something and can make use of the answers.
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Sep 22, 2016 07:41
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simplefish posted:
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Sep 22, 2016 07:49
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EngineerSean posted:I guess I'm one of those unfunny people trying to be funny who infected this subforum. obligatory lol nice meltdown Hope to see you back one day though, realtalk.
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Sep 22, 2016 08:02
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Sooo here's a question. I started a new pen name (primarily for shorts) about a year and a half ago. It did pretty okay! Not great, but not awful. Put together a mailing list, which picked up about 100-150 folks. For a while, I was putting out a few stories a week. Then life got in the way, and I wasn't able to produce anywhere near as much—then, finally, nothing. I haven't written anything on that pen name—or sent anything to that mailing list—in more than a year. My question is: Do you think it would be at all feasible to start writing novels under this name and reach out to that same mailing list, with a "HEY ____ IS BACK, EXPECT A NOVEL LATER THIS MONTH, LOOKING FOR FOLKS WHO WANT A REVIEW COPY" kind of message? Or do you think that might be a lost cause?
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Sep 22, 2016 14:13
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angel opportunity posted:It can be profitable. There are actually a lot of decent writers out there who are willing to sell their services for next to nothing (definitely not a living wage once you factor in how long it takes them). You can feel bad about it, but they are dumb for agreeing to the prices. I think a big obstacle ends up being though that a good ghost writer likely won't keep ghost writing for long since they will realize it sucks, and you have to keep risking new ghost writers. You also have to know how to publish stuff well and market it, and then you're spending your time and money publishing and marketing something that might not really be very good. When you add in all the time/money/effort you spent microing your ghost writer, you may realize the profit margins aren't so great. I'm kind of interested in trying it at some point. This is exactly why I didn't go for the "write me a 60k romance novel for 400 dollars!" thing that's very common on Upwork. My friend did it since she's super broke, but as even as a poor student I can see it's a ripoff. The security of getting the money up front is nice, but it's just so little for the effort you put in.
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Sep 22, 2016 15:07
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Toaster Beef posted:Sooo here's a question. One of the biggest romance writers I know did just that. He said it went well. If you've already got the mailing list, go for it!
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Sep 22, 2016 19:07
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EngineerSean posted:I'm not sure who still posts here that has worked through the erotica renaissance but hopefully this thread doesn't die (or this entire subforum deleted for the lulz). I'm still around and would probably be more productive in writing if I wasn't just so gosh darned tootin' happy these days.  Seriously though, my wife is gone for two months and I live 3,000+ miles from my friends now. If I don't get like a billion words written by Thanksgiving, there is something seriously wrong with me, great outdoor weather and wine or not.
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Sep 22, 2016 23:44
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How do I get more reviews for my book? No one's bought a copy in a while, and I wouldn't even mind if people only left some kind of feedback.
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Sep 23, 2016 00:41
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change my name posted:How do I get more reviews for my book? No one's bought a copy in a while, and I wouldn't even mind if people only left some kind of feedback. Fewer than 1% of buyers will leave a review, even if prompted to do so. Your best bet at getting reviews is to get a mailing list or facebook page going where your fans have opted in to learn more about you/your new releases, etc etc. Then, offer free copies to them in exchange for honest reviews. It's something you should do up front before each new release, and something that gets more effective the more people you have on your list (aka the more books you write).
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Sep 23, 2016 00:50
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How do you guys find proofreaders/editors for your books? I've been following this thread for a while but I think I'm a much better editor than writer so I'm more interested in that side of things. I have experience doing it, but it's all involved website copy and I'm not sure how to connect with fiction writers.
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Sep 23, 2016 01:22
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I just tried to sign up for Upwork (why not, guaranteed money for working off other people's outlines sounds fun) and my profile got rejected. Despite the fact that I'm a top 100 author in Erotica and there are tons of people asking for Erotica shorts. Hire me to write your 25k gently caress books is what I'm saying, I'll gladly do it for $300 because I'm a whore for money and want all you goons to be successful
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Sep 23, 2016 03:14
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same
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Sep 23, 2016 07:46
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Sundae posted:I'm still around and would probably be more productive in writing if I wasn't just so gosh darned tootin' happy these days.
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Sep 23, 2016 08:06
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Aaronicon posted:same I blame Obama, personally. (I blame him personally, personally, for personally inflicting that post upon my person.)
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Sep 23, 2016 16:44
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