Welcome
Hi, there. I am dedicated to building a career for myself as an erotica author, but I’ll admit the Skye Warren brand was a bit of an experiment. My other manuscripts are following a more traditional bent of erotica or erotic romance. Even there, it turns out I scribble outside the lines enough where it’s an issue. But I had these other ideas, these fantasies about nonconsent and dirty, graphic sex that I knew would be way out of the bounds of traditional publishing. The hypothesis is that someone out there is interested in reading such things.
I put up my first novellas around the middle of November. Then I ended up taking them down and back up as I worked out some kinks in the formatting and other details. At the time, I did no promotion. No twitter, no posting on blogs, no ads. I didn’t submit anything to sites for review. I didn’t even have this website. Zilch. This means that anyone who found my books early on did it through searching or tags. To be totally honest, I was shocked anyone bought it at all.
But they did. I’m not doing a site-by-site break down of the sales numbers (aforementioned contract issues), but my total sales for the month of November, which was less than a half a month’s time, ended up being $68 and some change. Rounded, it was $69, which I thought was cute, considering I write erotica. I considered it auspicious, a successful trial run. Nothing major, no charts were hit and no bills were paid, but there it was. Proof that people were looking for what I was putting out.
A few details about what I put out: there’s Keep Me Safe which is my nonconsent offering. That has been my big seller by FAR. We’re probably talking 80% of sales. At the same time I put up Below the Belt, which is a more traditional erotic romance. Standard genre wisdom suggests that erotic romance would fare better than a nonconsent erotica, but that hasn’t been my experience. Now, these are pretty small data points, so I don’t mean to suggest that it is true as a whole. As I said, these were sold based on discovery alone. That means that more people were probably searching for the terms about Keep Me Safe than about Below the Belt. Also, Below the Belt has more competition in the very broad, very populated erotic romance genre than Keep Me Safe does. Another factor is that Keep Me Safe is darker and has a suspense edge to it, whereas Below the Belt is more of a contemporary romance with a slightly humorous bent. All of this could factor in to the differences in sales.
I also put out Beauty Touched the Beast and, more recently, Sweetest Mistress, as free reads. This is the closest thing I’ve done to promotion, with the idea being that people will seek out free reads, like my work and then go on to purchase my paid products. I have no way of knowing how much they factored in to my sales so far, though they have a fair number of downloads on Smashwords, where I initially released them. I am only just now working out how to get them onto other sites, like Amazon.
I have several things I’m planning, including working with an editor and a sequel to Keep Me Safe, so I will keep you guys posted. Hope to see you around.
– Skye