Publishing erotica on Amazon: an awesome side hustle or a dirty hobby? My experience of 12 months’ efforts.
How did I even get into publishing erotica?!
Funny story…
A group of friends from university meet up every year (COVID excepting for “fake Christmas”, which is code for getting irresponsibly inebriated and eating a big roast dinner.
Anyway, there we were in a holiday cottage in rural Derbyshire, over a dozen of us naughtily drunk. We were talking about a friend of ours who worked in publishing. She’d jokingly told us one year that she’d had to give a presentation to other publishers about that high-brow read Boffing Bigfoot by the illustrious author Ann L. Probe. [That’s not an affiliate link, by the way, but it does go to Amazon.]
Somehow or other, that came up in conversation about the weird things that had happened to us in 2019. Boy, was 2020 going to turn out to be a shocker!
It turned out that this wasn’t the only dirty book that the gang had heard about! Someone else mentioned other comedy titles, such as Chuck Tingle’s Space Raptor Butt Invasion. [Again, not an affiliate link.]
That’s… where someone mentioned that we should try writing an erotic story, using the age-old game of “you write one sentence, pass it on, cover up the other sentences”. Needless to say, it was god awful.
However, it got me thinking: could this be an actual side hustle? I knew I’d never find out if I didn’t try it! That’s where my adventure began.
Is there an audience for publishing erotica in 2021?
Here’s the thing: if you can think of it, someone’s into it. Rule 34 is still as true today as it always was!
The best bit is that people who are into certain genres of erotic fiction will always want something new. How often do you read a book twice? This means that you won’t really be able to saturate the market: you won’t steal someone else’s audience, you’ll only share the same readership. It also means that other authors will want to help you out.
The biggest audience is from Amazon’s Kindle store. While printed books still make up 80% of the publishing market share, the stock go-to favourite for erotica fans is Amazon. There’s also Smash Words, but I use Amazon for all my publications.
How do you even do this?
If you want advice on getting into writing erotica from a significantly more experienced audience, check out the subreddit r/eroticauthors. Do the community a favour: read their FAQ before you ask questions. From here on, this section is about how I’ve approached it.
I write stories of around 6,000-10,000 words for Kindle. I have released them again as bundles of 5 stories, then again as an annual 12-story full bundle.
This is effectively selling the same thing three times. However, you learn that the audience for single stories isn’t the same as the audience for longer books/ collections. There seems to be no disadvantages to releasing both singles and bundles.
Typically, a short story has made anywhere from £10-30 in its first month, then dwindles down to obscurity with the odd pop-up sale or read.
I use Kindle Direct Publishing because a) it’s easy to publish on; b) there’s no fee, minimum sales volume or whatever, just a cut of anything you make; and c) it’s the biggest market for eBooks.
I buy stock photos to build my covers and that’s about it for complexity. Kindle direct publishing’s service is remarkably simple to use.
Marketing… What marketing?!
One of the great things about publishing erotica on Amazon is that you can’t really do any advertising. Why is this so great? It means that your barriers to entry are lower than for regular books! After a while, if your passive marketing works and you’re hitting the right beats for your audience, you’ll start competing on a level playing field with the more experienced competition.
Ah yes, I should probably explain “passive marketing”. My bad.
Passive marketing for publishing
“Don’t judge a book by its cover”
An English idiom that has no place in publishing erotica!
The general consensus amongst the erotic authors community is that eBooks on erotica are sold by cover, title, and the blurb. It’s true for pretty much every book, which is why that phrase above exists, but in erotica it’s vital. If you can’t advertise, you can at least learn to get the covers, titles and the blurb to fit the style that your audience expects.
I can’t give too much away, because all erotica genres have their own audiences and their own standards. However, I can at least tell you that I usually use depositphotos.com to buy stock photos to make the covers of the eBooks. It’s one of the few stock photo sites that gives you permission to use their photos (as long as they’re tagged as “erotic” or “sexy”) in adult books.
I once read a blog post from someone that suggested using shutterstock for cover imagery. Unless you’re going off the beaten path, there’s no licence on shutterstock for their photos to be used for adult works. If you use a photo of a woman from shutterstock and she complains, Amazon will remove your book from sale without hesitation. Sorry dude, sad but true.
Oh, right. There’s one more trap in publishing erotica…
The Adult Dungeon
Despite the subject of this post: this is not a kinky dungeon.
The “adult dungeon” is what happens when Amazon classifies your content as “adult”. Bizarrely, erotica generally is OK to sell on the public face of Amazon until the cover gets too erotic. When that happens, Amazon still sells it, but only if the people searching for it have specifically turned the adult search option on within their Amazon settings.
Didn’t know that Amazon had an adult search filter? Neither did I before I tried this side hustle, which means most of the potential audience/ market doesn’t know that either. Safest bet is to avoid the adult flag like the plague.
Generally, items get adult flagged for being too nude. As a general rule, I’ve found that lingerie and/or topless men are totally fine, but as soon as a woman is topless or there is a glimpse of hand on bare butt cheek, you’re going to the forbidden zone. There’s also a loose rule against certain words, which means that fans of certain genres will get used to their own slang. For example, “FFM” represents a physical encounter between two Females and one Male.
OK, this is getting weird. How does this become a side hustle?
Publishing erotica pays. Not remarkably well, but it does pay.
I’ve made a little over £1200 from twelve short stories, after bundling them up and also selling the bundles. It’s not the most impressive, I know, but it also keeps generating in the background. Conceivably, it’s also quite scalable, as every story I release keeps boosting the number of links to my older eBooks on Amazon.
You write the books, you use Kindle Direct Publishing to put them on Amazon store, and if you’ve gotten the right combo of passive marketing then you get paid for sales. There’s the option to “enrol in Kindle Select”, which is where you swear fealty to Amazon/ make your eBook an Amazon exclusive. This means that you get about half a penny per page read. Short term, not great; but if you end up with twenty books, each at 25 pages, each getting a reader or two a day… you see the advantage in scalability, right?
Now the big question: is publishing erotica an awesome side hustle, or just a regular side hustle?
Rating “publishing erotica” as a side hustle
Factor 1: Enjoyment
I’ll confess: I really do enjoy this side hustle. I mean, writing erotica in itself is OK, but watching the sales stats is quite addicting.
I’m going to rate this a 4 out of 5.
Factor 2: Variety
Unfortunately, this is the weak link for me, as I spend quite a lot of time on computers in my day job. I don’t write about this kind of thing in my day job, but it’s still more screen time.
I’m going to give this a 2 out of 5. You might grade it higher…
Factor 3: Scalability
Publishing erotica is nothing if not scalable!
The stories you publish remain on Amazon for pretty much eternity, it’s purely that if you don’t have something linking to them, they get lost. That something can be “another eBook”.
This means that if you keep producing works, your author profile keeps being boosted on Amazon, and your income scales up.
As a result, I’m grading this 5 out of 5.
Factor 4: New skills
I technically already knew how to write. However, this side hustle taught me how to write to an audience, which was pretty cool. I also learned about passive marketing and maintaining a brand.
I reckon a 3 out of 5 for new skills is about right.
Factor 5: Energy drain
Sadly, publishing erotica is quite time consuming. That said, it’s not especially laborious once you get into the flow of it. It’s also something that can be done in little chunks – when I was commuting at the start of the year, that train ride into the city was prime writing time that I couldn’t have used for anything else.
On balance, I’m going to grade this a 4 out of 5.
So, is publishing erotica an awesome side hustle?
Let’s check out the final scores!
| Factor | Score |
|---|---|
| 1. Enjoyment | 4 |
| 2. Variety | 2 |
| 3. Scalability | 5 |
| 4. New skills | 3 |
| 5. Energy drain | 4 |
| Overall rating (mean) | 3.6 |
In conclusion
I’m glad that I gave this side hustle a go, and I’ll probably top this up with more sinful smut in the future. It’s not the most lucrative side hustle, but I have reasonable confidence that it will scale up. Plus, there’s something naughty about publishing erotica, even though 50 Shades of Grey has made it a more mainstream thing to write.
