Day Nine as an Erotica Writer — I Have to Find a Niche
The first four volumes of my first series of erotic short stories are online. Two more volumes and the series is complete. I have gained first experiences, and now I know what to look out for in the future.
How vital a specific niche is, I’m learning the hard way.
The idea for my first series was that an ordinary single woman encounters a man who pushes her beyond her previous sexual boundaries.
In the course of the series, she experiences the most different sexual adventures with him. In the course of this journey, her self-confidence grows, and she feels more and more comfortable in her skin. She understands better and better who she really is.
The problem with this setting is that the woman in each book tries out a different sexual practice. But the erotica market is very specialized. Readers who like to read about sex between two women do not want stories in which a woman is brought to a swingers club by a man.
This is a very simplified description, but it gets to the heart of my problem.
Readers do not yet know what preferences I reliably serve. I use particular keywords for each book, but the blurb is always vague (among other things because I’m afraid that otherwise, the books will end up in the adult dungeon again). Also, the cover is the same for every book. This is to ensure that readers can immediately see that all books belong to the same series.
But the cover and the blurb are the most important signals to lure readers who like certain things.
So my cover and blurb are far too general to appeal to a specialized readership. Within the series, it’s hard to show which book deals with which Kink.
I did have rankings in the German Kindle Store in the 250 to 700 range in the erotica charts. Still, first of all, those rankings were almost only achieved by borrowing rather than selling, and secondly, things are not going so well in the American store by far.
Well, I designed the first series as a test balloon anyway. I wanted to get a feel for this particular market and gain experience. So I will write volumes five and six to complete the series. Finally, I will publish all six books as an additional anthology to gain first experiences with them as well.
But after that, I will start to look for a profitable niche, which I like and which is not completely overflowing. Of course, I will have to experiment with three or four niches under different pen names until I find something that really brings good results.
To read up on this topic, I am currently reading $500 A Day Writing Kindle Erotica For Amazon: A Step-By-Step Strategy Guide by Darby Jones.
The title sounds pretty lurid, but the author obviously knows what he is talking about. The topic of niche analysis takes up a particularly large part of the book. It’s about finding out which topics have a broad audience but little competition.
I’ll follow the advice in this book to determine which area of the Kindle Store erotica market I want to focus on.
My results today
As announced yesterday, today I translated volume four from German into English and uploaded the English version to Amazon.
It took me about four hours.
Besides, my books can now be found in more categories in the US-Store. Yesterday evening I wrote to the support and asked for it.
Unfortunately, the support could not solve another problem yet. One of the books is listed as Scottish / Gaelic, although I indicated in the dashboard that it is in English. The answer of the support staff member makes me doubt whether he has read my mail at all. I have received divided instructions on how to make sure that my book is listed as Scottish / Gaelic. But this is exactly the problem — it should NOT be listed in this language.
As long as this problem is not solved, I will not bother the support with my next request. At the moment, my books are not yet listed as a series. I want to change that so that readers can find the other books more quickly if they have read one of the series.
For the rest of the day, I will continue working on my next thriller before I go swimming with my wife.
Tomorrow I start working on volume five of my erotic short story series.
I hope that I could give you some exciting insights again, and I am looking forward to seeing you again tomorrow to read the next part of my field report.
René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.
Receive weekly updates, and don’t miss any of my articles.
subscribe here http://bit.ly/ReneJunge
Read Also: