You are reading this article on Substack, and you might publish a Substack of your own. Many erotica writers on Substack, myself including, also publish novellas on Amazon. Some publish series on Substack for paid subscribers. I also maintain a Patreon page with regular updates and exclusive stories.
It is difficult for a writer to manage the many platforms for publishing, promoting, and sales.
The goal is to share your passions, light fires in readers, and entertain your fans--while making enough money to take care of yourself and maintain your ability to publish. As I wrote in my first post, artists and writers deserve to earn a living.
So I’m trying out different publishing strategies, strategizing, tinkering, and learning from what works.
Lately, I have found that caption stories seem to attract paid subscribers on Patreon. A caption image or caption story is an image of a sexy scene, especially a fetish scene, with an accompanying story or dialogue. For a couple of examples, see the following, which I offered on Patreon for free:
And, for paid subscribers, “Let Us Use the Laundry Machine!,” which is Part I of a femdom series Laundry Room Domination.
As you can see, a caption story can either be a one-off image with a story attached or a longer story told in a series of images. Lately, I’ve had success with long-form stories.
My first long-form story was Married the Rich Princess / The Husband Training Course. I did part one, and I liked where it was going, so I kept expanding the story.
Patreon features two ways to make money from your content. You sell monthly subscriptions, and you can choose to sell certain posts as one-time purchases. I find that giving people choices of how they wish to consume your content increases revenue. Selling an article, video, or image that you already produced doesn’t take away from subscription sales. Just make sure the price of the one-time purchase is set high enough so that it makes at least as much or more sense for customers to subscribe for the long-term.
Over the past three months, 74.8% of my revenue has come from subscriptions. Or, to put it another way, I would have earned 25.2% less than I did if I did not offer one-time sales. That split is approximately equal to the breakdown of my Amazon Kindle royalties--75% for book sales and 25% from Kindle Unlimited page reads.
Here’s where Amazon comes in. When the full story was finished, I offered it to paid subscribers on Substack and published it on Kindle.
You compile all the stories and images together. By then you’ve got a short story of a couple of thousand words accompanied with pictures. Great. It could be sold by itself as a story, but the images make it stand out from the competition. There are relatively few eroticas featuring images being sold in the Kindle Marketplace.
Keep in mind that the images include no nudity. They’re fetish related, so they might include bondage or trampling, but a lot are images of cute women wearing boots and high socks and such clothing--the erotic play comes out in the text.
Since its publication, The Husband Training Course has become my No. 3 best-selling book on Amazon for the month and made more sales in the Kindle Store than it has as one-time sales on Patreon. Amazon is a good place to compile multiple stories or parts of a series released on Patreon and reach a new audience that might not use Patreon.
Remember that you cannot put the stories you already published on Patreon in Kindle Select and offer them for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. But there’s an advantage to that, too: while you won’t earn from KENP reads, it does force any body who wants to read it to have to make an order. So it could end up increasing total royalty take.
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How can I get my book or article featured here? To be a friend or partner of
(and get the resulting benefits), add a recommendation for one of my substacks—either or —and then email me at arichaseramos at Proton dot me and tell me about your latest book or Substack article (must have been published in the last 30 days from the time you email me), and I will feature it in an upcoming email!