I just had to explain what I was cackling at to my roommate. It automatically passes the Laugh Rule.
She found her reluctant fiance, Erstad, brooding out on the rainy moors.
“Is that a baby rabbit?” she asked, observing his huddled form.
“IT’S SIX BABY RABBITS AND YOU CAN’T TOUCH THEM,” replied Ernstad, contriving to look twice his usual size and at least three times his usual fierceness.
write about 5000 words of porn or more – 3000 or more also acceptable, but you don’t really want to go under that. don’t tab to indent, i swear to god, it fucks with amazon’s formatting so bad. don’t write any porn that’d send you to jail IRL, amazon naturally (and thank god) doesn’t accept that shit.
on the ‘bookshelf’ tab, you click ‘add new title’, fill out everything, upload a cover – you can get one free image a month (or maybe a week now, i dunno) from bigstock.com if you need some stock images of people’s abs and stuff but can’t put cash down for anything just yet – and amazon has a cover making application built right into the process too to make things easier or if you don’t know shit about photoshop or whatever.
then you upload the document itself. click save and continue. choose how much you want your title to cost – 2.99 is generally what most people price theirs at, because that’s where amazon’s 70 percent royalties starts at. enroll in kindle select if you want that 70 percent royalties to apply to the whole world, so you’re getting the same royalties no matter where you sell.
then you hit publish and wait and wait and wait and wait for amazon to actually publish the fucking thing.
then you wait 60 days after the end of the month to get your royalties! don’t know why, but that’s how amazon rolls.
and you just keep making more and more titles in the meanwhile to build up that income cuz you’re not likely to make a lot from just one title.
there’s no real ‘gatekeepers’ in kindle erotica – you just start writing and publishing and you keep doing it and building up a library. some genres/kinks/niches sell better than others, and trends come and go, but it’s really all up to you – to do the writing, the publishing, the marketing, and then more writing and publishing. you just keep at it, bit by bit. this is a market where it’s really all about quantity… the bigger your library is, the more sales you’ll start to rack up, building like a snowball. even better if you release titles on like a regular schedule. ideally you want to put up like 2 titles a week, but 1 a week is a good initial goal to shoot for.
you can also go to amazon’s author central to set up an author page to get all your titles in one place and help build a reader base/link readers and buyers in general to.
godspeed anon!
hm.
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
adding in my own hmmmmms
… I am seriously considering this. And also considering getting a proper pen name
Okay literally I’m reblogging this for the erotica how-to but also this is how Amazon self-pub works no matter what you write, like subject-wise, this is it for everything. OFC it doesn’t cover stuff like editing, cover art, marketing or pre-orders (Amazon used to have a pretty brutal pre-order deadline system, but they seem to be relaxing it after the last update? I can’t tell for absolute sure?), but in a bare-bones nutshell, yes, this is universal, and good information.
(I haven’t done Amazon Select because I like to get my stuff in with other sellers like Barnes and Noble/iBooks/Kobo – bc some people don’t buy from Amazon, and Select means you can’t sell anywhere but Amazon, in exchange for some extra promotional tools. If you want to do this, I suggest looking into the distributor ‘Draft2Digital,’ it’s a very easy all-in-one free service. Smashwords is also an indie standard, but more difficult to work with; I feel Ways about Smashwords.)
But yes, if you just want to do Amazon self-pub, this is a very good basic start.
So just a heads up for anyone who may not be familiar with taxes!
Amazon pays you as an independent contractor/self-employed, which means a couple of things. First, it means that the income you receive from Amazon will not be taxed! You’ll receive the full amount of whatever you earn from your sales, instead of the chopped up paycheck most employees are used to seeing.
This does not mean you don’t owe taxes! Sometime in January following the year you earn money from them, Amazon will send you a 1099-misc form listing the total amount of income you received in the previous year. If you use TurboTax/etc, it will walk you through how to input that, so don’t worry about that!
Here’s the stuff to note: If you makes less than $600 during the year, Amazon is not required to send you a 1099, but you are still supposed to report the income. The chance of you being audited for owing the IRS less than $100 is probably slim (it is barely worth what it costs to audit someone), but please take note and report the income as needed!
And the biggest thing!!!! Because your income is not being taxed upfront, it means you will OWE taxes come the following year!!! Self-employment tax is 15.3% (which you will notice is MUCH LOWER than what gets taken out of your employee/W2-based paycheck), so you will owe AT LEAST that the following year (more if you make TONS of money). Now if you are working as an employee, there’s a good chance that any money you owe will be cancelled out by whatever extra money the government took from your employee paycheck during the year.
BUT. If you earn a significant amount of self-employment income, or self-employment is your ONLY form of income, you will owe the government money in April!
The smartest thing to do when you earn any sort of self-employment income is to put 20% of that paycheck into a separate savings accounts. Just put it there and leave it there. If you can get a savings account with good interest, even better, but not necessary! That way when your taxes come due in April of the following year, you aren’t scrambling for money to pay them; the money will be sitting right there in your savings account!
Also, being self-employed allows you to report deductions for stuff, so you might want to look into that too, because it’ll save you money. After you pay your taxes, any money left in the account is yours to do whatever you want with!
source: I’ve been filing a 1099 as my sole source of income for about 4 years now (about to be 5)
Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:
A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning).
Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage.
I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both.
Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????).
The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.
There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned.
Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles.
reblogging for “operatically sordid”
Ditto.
i also work as a barista and here are some anecdotes for you
– A woman was banned from the store for peeing on one of our chairs. She sneaked back into the store to pee on another chair in retaliation
– On my second day a car burst into flames in the parking lot. nobody ever claimed the car
– I wasn’t at work when this happened thankfully but at one point an unidentified woman became violently ill in our bathroom, vomiting up what the janitor described to me as “blood and chunks of flesh” before passing out on the floor
– An old man followed me around the store while I was on break and attempted to convince me to run away to Las Vegas with him
– Things we have discovered in our restroom: a large purple double dildo, porn magazines that had been viciously ripped apart, a pair of white boxer-briefs smeared with blood and feces, about 50 business cards for someone’s “freelance sorcerer” career
– One time a chipmunk got into the store, and we barricaded it into a closet and sent someone to get a live trap. The head manager at the time, who was a soulless asshole and also very stupid, then spent upwards of half an hour attempting to kill the chipmunk by smashing it with a mallet, ignoring the increasingly desperate objections of the cafe staff. Luckily the chipmunk was too fast for him and we eventually caught it in the live trap to be freed at a local nature park
– On Craigslist Missed Connections i discovered an anonymous man posting incessantly about another customer’s pantyhose. The contents of his posts made it clear that he was a regular, and also that he was jerking off in the cafe somewhere. We never caught him.
❝I can’t stand that holier-than-thou bullshit, and yet, I’m completely infatuated.❞
❝It’s okay. You can laugh. I promise not to tell anyone.❞
❝Okay, let’s try it again only this time I’m gonna stick my tongue in your mouth, and when I do that I want you to massage my tongue with yours. And that’s what first base is.❞
❝They took down my pants and started writing the alphabet with their tongue.❞
❝I’ve been very well-informed of your reputation.❞
❝You promise people the world in order to get them into bed with you.❞
❝Relationships seem too distracting. I’d rather concentrate on my studies.❞
❝Get your ass on the bed and prepare for the fuck of your life!❞
Requires Fantasy Novel Things (feel free to add more)
– Title contains the words “Wolf/Rose/Sword/Dark/Crown/Throne”
– Unexplained white haired girl
– Evil Queen that is definitely a red head
– The one black haired guy that dresses in all black but his eyes are blue and beautiful
– Special Eyes™
– Someone turns into an animal and exactly one (1) person might question it
– The Blacksmith
– The mysterious hooded woman in the woods (bonus points if she has a fancy stick)
– Barn sex
– The fastest horse in the land that gets shot by an arrow on page 215
– The one soft spoken healer that gives life changing advice and then is never mentioned again
– A truly excessive amount of dead parents
– Everyone is British except for one inexplicable Irish guy
-traveling unreasonable distances by magic and still not having time travel to save aforementioned dead parents
-that one person who calls magic stupid and believes surgery is the next step for man
-dragons in general
-at least one character or place with a Y in the name -The Village Festival is the biggest event of the year -the word “lithe” -the nice innkeeper with their mean spouse -a character unused to hygiene who freaks out about having to wash
– long and arduous road trip to the Place of the Specific Adjective and/or Noun – the Castle Ball where the heroine wears The Dress which is described in great detail – medieval weaponry 101 – the three drinks of fantasy: ale, wine, and fairy wine – there’s always someone with a Napoleon complex – the Moon cycle and the Solstices
– Orphans raised by orphans until the orphans raising the orphans die tragically leaving orphaned orphans.
– Dark Lord of the Evil Darkness. Wears black, hell bent on destroying the world but is really just misunderstood. Often is either strikingly beautiful or has pronounced physical feature such as missing nose, body burnt by lava, pink eye.
– Gambler/Drunkard character with foul mouth but loveable sense of humour. Kind of like that one weird uncle every one has but usually less creepy.
– Hard to acquire mystical artifact, MC must go through trial similar to battling for 50 inch flat screen on Black Friday.
– The orphans grow to adulthood, fall in love, have children of their own. Their children become orphans.
– Ancient prophecy. Must be vague enough to be misinterpreted.
– Cryptic signalling of end times. Fish dying, wolves grow bolder, moon turns blood red, comet in the sky, tv shows that should not be cancelled, are.
– Quiet, brooding guy, has hidden endearing talent such as: knows how to repair vintage horse carriages or plays the lute.
– Sean Bean dies.
-the Powerful Immortal Race will help exactly one (1) time
-the roar of some great beast (may or may not be an actual beast)
-the [blanking] of the [blank] of the [blank]
-the hero of a famous battle that everyone knows about in spite of the lack of news media or efficient means of travel
-magic can’t be used to help the common people because of Reasons™
-The Common People
-bedding down for the night
-The Rest Stop, the only time our heroes get some sleep, someone Wise states the obvious and they receive Unique Items
You guys I just realized that what I’ve always wanted out of werewolf fiction is a story where lycanthropy isn’t a purely human condition
Like this dude wakes up from his wolfbender and his room is full of all these fucking chickens from local farms that he initiated into his pack. They all start clucking and crowing at the moon and when it’s full they all transform into these tiny little weird bipedal wolves with wings.
I don’t remember making this post but it’s going around again and I’m losing my shit
sparksoffandommagic 