The Trouble With Publishing Erotic Literature

Lesson learned from publishing my first erotica book

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

I became quite successful with my raw erotica stories on Medium. In a matter of weeks, I started to earn over $200 per month on the platform where about 40% of writers earn nothing and only about 5% earn more than $100.

Almost instantly, I became a top writer in three categories (short story, fiction, and this happened to me) and got the first paying subscribers on Substack. My stories received positive response and praise from the readers, such as: “Your articles are like a sumptuous buffet overflowing with exotic delicacies.”

Things looked so good that I decided to self-publish a collection of my stories hoping the book would do as well as my posts on Medium. Boy was I wrong. It turned out that Medium and book publishing are worlds apart and have two very different sets of rules as well as readers.

I soon learned that, unlike on Medium, one has to invest in paid promotion in order to sell at least some copies of a book. I also paid to get the book listed on NetGalley in the hope of getting some reviews. Little did I know that the readers using such platforms will punish you with bad reviews simply if the books don’t cater to their personal taste.

Instead of the positive comments I’ve received on Medium, I almost instantly received 1 and 2-star ratings from female reviewers who didn’t say much more than, quote: “These weren’t for me.” One of these reviewers even added that the stories seemed to be targeted at the male audience as if that was a bad thing that in itself deserves the poor rating.

Lauren H, Librarian

A  collection of erotic short stories. These weren’t for me! They felt far more targeted at a male audience.

I complained to NetGalley about this, since their rules state that the reviewer is supposed to write a review, meaning they need to write more than “this isn’t for me” and shouldn’t give a book low rating because it’s targeted at a specific audience. NetGalley agreed and removed the two reviews but, guess what, Lauren the Librarian republished the removed “review” word by word!

Another reviewer on NetGalley stated that the book was porn. Well, even if that was true (I happen to disagree), there is no porn genre in literature, at least not on platforms such as Amazon and NetGalley. There is erotica, though, which is the genre under which my book was listed:

erotica

(ɪrɒtɪkə )

UNCOUNTABLE NOUN

Eroticameans works of art that show or describe sexual activity, and which are intended to arouse sexual feelings.

Well, at least the readers liked the cover! But following these reviews, I asked NetGalley to remove my book from the platform since what was as happening was a crusade against erotica ran by some of the readers. Tellingly enough, I noticed that several other books in the genre shared the same fate as mine.

The book also appeared on Goodreads where it, so far, has one 5-star rating (that one, not surprisingly, came from a male reader). It has no ratings on Amazon yet and a few sales. So far, 125 copies have been sold and there were a bit over 1,800 Kindle Unlimited reads.

That’s far from enough to cover the cost of publishing and get the book in the top 50 or even 100 in this highly competitive category on Amazon. Publishing books thus turned out to be much harder, more expensive, and far less rewarding than publishing blog posts and short stories on Medium.

Even though that’s not what I expected and the results were disappointing, I’ll likely still self-publish collections of my stories just for the fun of it. But I‘ll definitely not count on it as a source of income, let alone give up my day job. At least not just yet.