My First Series of Erotic Short Stories Is Finished. It Took Me Seventeen Days.
It took me over a year as a thriller writer to write six volumes of a series. In the Erotica genre, it only took seventeen days.
Tenfold your productivity, many self-help gurus write over and over again. They build up a pressure that few can cope with. Who can really increase their productivity tenfold without burning out in a short time?
But I have found a way to do just that. Since I published my first erotic short story seventeen days ago, I have completed a six-volume series. So after less than three weeks, I have as many books on sale in the erotica genre as after more than a year as a thriller writer.
Where is the trick? Well, the trick is how we measure productivity. As authors, we can either take the number of words written as the basis for measurement or our publications per unit of time.
A tenfold increase in the number of words is possible, as long as you have only written 500 words a day. But I was already at a daily output of 5000 words. With the best will in the world, I could not increase that tenfold.
But I could do something about the number of my publications. While a thriller that is popular with the public must be at least 50,000 words long, in the erotica genre, you can easily sell books with only 5000 words.
I have gone this way, and so I was able to complete a six-volume series in seventeen days. I had to write 30,000 words in that time.
You would have calculated and determined that I could have written 85,000 words in seventeen days if I had really written 5000 a day. But first of all, I never write on weekends and secondly I was working on my next thriller on the side and published an article almost every day.
But back to why I see this as a tenfold increase in my productivity. Every publication brings the chance to be discovered by new readers. Every release can also make the old books visible again. At the end of a book, you can advertise and link to the other books.
If you write in the mainstream, i.e., fantasy, romance, or thriller, you will only get a new publication every two months at the most, and only every two months you have the chance to reach new readers and make old books more visible again.
In the erotica genre, you can theoretically publish every day, if you write fast, know what you are doing and do nothing else. But everyone else can publish at least two books a week.
Two books a week means sixteen books in two months. Compared to one book every two months, this is more than a tenfold increase in your productivity.
The current figures
In the first sixteen days, I sold twenty-two books and collected 3761 Pagereads via Kindle Unlimited. That’s at least another 114 downloads.
Reaching 135 readers in seventeen days, although I’m completely new and inexperienced in this genre, I consider it a great success.
What comes next
As I wrote yesterday, I will write in the next series from now on. I will stick to at least two releases a week, but probably be faster.
Today I created a Facebook profile for my erotica pseudonym. It should serve to connect me with other german-speaking erotica authors. So far, I haven’t been able to find such a community, so I’m founding one myself.
That was my short report for today. I now say goodbye for the weekend and hope that you will continue to follow how my path as an erotica author progresses.
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