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“Coming Soon” is no longer coming: it’s here!

Today is the release day for Coming Soon, which includes my femdom menage story, “Exceptional Service.”

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This piece was cooked up after dinner with my partner at a rather nice establishment with a waitress who was attentive enough…but mostly to him. And she did that thing many waitstaff do, giving my credit card back…to him. Presumably because he was “the man”(even though as my bigender girlfriend and I liked to point out to each other, they were just giving the card to a woman either way). But on the drive home I suggested, to keep from getting too irritated, that maybe she was just very into his gorgeous self. A motive I completely understood. Theriac agreed and proposed a way to tip a very attentive waitress who is very into your sub. 

Helen, the heroine in “Exceptional Service,” is actually into both members of the couple and attentive enough to return the credit card to the woman whose name is on it. Maybe that’s why, along with her tip, she receives a phone number at the end of their meal, an offer she decides to take them up on…

Coming Soon is available most places books are sold, including

Amazon

Bookshop.org

Barnes & Noble

Better World Books

IndieBound

Love’s Sweet Arrow

Powell’s

Indigo

Books-a-Million

Some exciting Erato updates

Also:

I’ll let my Twitter speak for itself as this has been a wild week (mostly vaccinated family members from across the country got to finally meet in person, minor car accident, sporadic internet access, unexpected deadlines). 😀

One year

So yeah, it’s one year to the day.

This morning while my coffee brewed I lit some candles, re-arranged my girlfriend’s urn and picture and pennies on my bookshelf.

Last night I had a dream we were texting each other and he was okay, he’d just withdrawn for a while.

I’m not great about big days. I can’t even be relied upon to celebrate my birthday with any regularity much less death days.

I’ve texted his family. Just a string of hearts.

The last thing I ever said to him that I know he heard (well, read–texting) was that I was “astounded and gratified” to have him in my life. Still true.

***

I don’t have a lot to say right now (though I am doing well overall–settling in to my new home, working, reading, slowly getting out into the world again now that I’ve vaccinated). But I do want to be deliberate about grieving in public. About being “out” as a bereaved person. I choose that word deliberately. Just like some people in my social circle don’t realize how many LGBT+ people they know until I tell them I’m bisexual (and I don’t trust everyone with this information–another parallel), I think many of us do not realize how many we know are carrying grief. I think realizing this can help us be more compassionate, more open to the strangeness and vulnerability of this life. I hope being “out” can help other grievers–and that’s all of you, sooner or later–realize that they’re not alone, not weird, and not doomed. I wouldn’t say grief lessens so much as it changes. Like any part of life. It hurts like hell and it’s a gift, because love is a gift. Thank you for reading.

Proud Editor Moment – the Good Sex Awards

I texted my sister last night, “Just had a panel of like 25 sexperts agree with my editorial decisions twice. (Two stories from Erato are Good Sex Award finalists.) Feels great!”

And it does.

I’m actually not sure of the number of sexperts involved–the Good Sex Awards has an awe-inspiring list of judges, some of whom I have giddy “Omg did they read and like the story?” feelings for, some of whom I hadn’t known of before. I don’t know if they all read for every category, but I get the impression they each had a lot of reading, because my circle was buzzing with authors excited to submit their stories to the Award.

Full disclosure: I submitted two pieces myself, previously published in anthologies and magazines outside of NSP, neither of which were finalists. But that’s okay. The competition was steep and high-quality!

Enough about me. After all, I can’t take a lot of credit–just enough to feel proud that two stories I (and my co-editors–I can’t take all the credit even for this part!) read and was like “Wow, this is great, I want to publish it and share it with other readers” also produced that “Wow, this is great!” feeling in some other readers.

Frankly, I’m probably just lucky these two authors decided to submit their stories to Erato before some other lucky editor snapped them up.

But putting together Erato had its rough moments, with a staggering personal loss right in the middle of the project that sometimes had me wondering if we’d make it through. Part of what kept me going was the quality and significance of the stories we had to publish. So this moment feels…vindicating? Hopeful? It’s the part of the biofilm where they can stop rolling and freeze on my smiling bright-eyed face cuz we’re on the right high note.

Anyway–

Big congratulations to Jem Zero and D. Fostalove, whose stories “A Study in Circuits and Charcoal” and “Touch” from Erato are finalists for the Good Sex Awards!

“A Study in Circuits and Charcoal” is a finalist for Best Feminist Sex. You can read it here and read Jem Zero’s interview about zir story here on our blog

“Touch” is a finalist for Best Sexy Talk. You can read it here and read D. Fostalove’s interview about his story here on our blog.

Finalist stories are candidates for the Good Sex Award’s Readers’ Choice Award. Voting runs until June 20. You–yes, you, dear reader–can check out all the sexiest stories on The Good Bits website and fill out your ballot here

A new kinky story is free to read on Lascivity

At Lascivity, with its delicious tagline “literate kink,” I have a new story up. It’s one that does a few things…different from my usual. A fun experiment.

She’s taken a week of paid time off for this. To stay at home. With him. Doing practically nothing.

Wearing nothing.

It’s the third day, early afternoon. Sunlight through the screen door patterns her legs and stomach. As she studies it, dark blond hair falls in her face. She shoves it back. The strands tickle over her shoulders. It feels good; her head feels so light, relieved from the tug of her professional chignon or even the ponytail she wears when running errands.

She finds herself more powerful naked — not a worker, not a woman, but a human animal. No mincing steps in high heels. No tight waistbands. No ruddy bra imprints on her back and underneath her breasts. Those faded in the first 24 hours. He’d helped to pet them out of her skin.

Read the full piece at Lascivity.com

Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, so I’m going to pretend that’s the reason I’ve lately been reading and posting a lot of poetry on my Tumblr. Actually it’s a happy coincidence. I’ve rediscovered poetry, as I do every few years, and this spring I’m making more of an effort to share about the books I read. Thus, quotes on my Tumblr.

Poetry can share big ideas in a concentrated space, making it especially quotable. Quick & intense suit my mood right now.

I found poets through a mix of sources, one big one being a search for queer erotic work in my library system–leading to the discovery of writers like Natalie Diaz and Danez Smith. Sharon Olds has been on my to-read pile for years and I was finally inspired to get into the copy of The Gold Cell that I picked up at a library book sale back in 2017 or so. It was worth the wait.

Overall, the pieces that stick out most to me–and thus the ones that get most quoted–are on sex, spirituality, and sadness. Plus the occasional parody; one of the most recent posts in my “poetry” Tumblr tag is on Beowulf retold by Bertie Wooster, for reasons that really do make sense in context.

Partying with [not] Playboy, writing with BARE magazine

For reasons that require (I hope) no explanation, I’ve been reading a lot about sex lately. All kinds of things–poetry, feminist criticism, Medium articles of sex tips, and articles about consent and building a consent culture.

Lately I discovered this older but perennial “Top Ten Party Commandments” from…well, not actually from Playboy. The site is a parody. But as “the ultimate guide to a consensual good time,” this list isn’t just a joke.

And when I say perennial, I mean it–rules #2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 could just as easily be guidelines for Cunning Linguists. I mean, actually, they’re in the guidelines. It’s not often I get to be on the same page as (parody) Playboy!

Anyway, by looking up the source of Commandment #7, “Love All Bodies,” I discovered Skidmore College’s student-run erotic lit magazine, BARE.

I’m not sure if the magazine is still running (its Twitter account hasn’t been updated since 2014, its Facebook page since 2019, and its WordPress has ‘Fall 2015’ as a header). But like the ‘Playboy’ Party Commandments, its message is perennial–at least as long as people continue having and/or writing about sex, which I don’t see coming to an end anytime soon.

For instance, there’s so much good stuff on their prompts page–which I also feel might be a sister to the Cunning Linguists guidelines. Just check out these ideas from them:

  • Write about any sexual feeling you have had – lust, desire, etc… and where in your body you feel like it stems from – avoid clichés – when you feel pleasure of course it radiates from your pelvis, but do you feel an uplifting in your sternum? Does the top of your head tingle?
  • Have you ever felt angered by someone’s reaction to your sexuality? VENT! Write down your reasoning! This is your chance to make them aware, and help them understand!
  • Have you ever felt confined by your sexuality? Why? How? Imagine the moment that you break free and what it would be like?
  • What’s the best sexual experience you ever had? What’s the worst? Develop the context of the situation – characters, emotional background, setting – draw people into the story
  • Make lists
  • Write short sentences or very long, allow your sentences to communicate how you’re feeling in the moment you’re writing about.
  • Write in diary entries
  • Write a letter to someone else
  • Make metaphors – writing about sex or sexuality does not have to be described in literal sexual terms – does sex make you think of something else? Use that action or moment to describe sex or your sexuality Ex: a tennis match, a flower blooming (very cliché example)
  • Write instructions for someone else on how to do something sexual, or how live a certain lifestyle that you have experience with – Ex: ‘How to be a Lesbian at Skidmore, How to have a threesome with your two best friends’
  • Write “a day in the life of” Ex: “A Day In the Life of a Trans Man
  • Write a conversation – via text, email, AIM or real dialogue that conveys something important – let the words speak for themselves
  • Don’t be afraid to be funny, sex is funny, people respond well to funny
  • Don’t be afraid of poetry – it doesn’t have to rhyme or be cliché – play with word choice, punctuation, alignment, and spacing. Make sure the words you use count because you will use less of them than you do in prose.

Do you ever see an idea you’ve been acting on for years suddenly put into words and feel ridiculous for not spotting it before? That’s my feeling when I read “VENT!” Yes! So much fruitful writing can stem from venting–from digging into your emotions, exposing them, telling the world, in the words of Kazuo Ishiguro, “This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?

Or maybe from the opposite of venting–if writing about the best sex you ever had is the opposite of venting? But there can be anger in pleasure, a sense of justice, and there can be joy in a good vent session. (In any event, I’m sticking a pin in a potential anthology call titled The Best Sex of Their Lives).

This isn’t just what I want to write but what I want to read, too. When I feel an energy, and urgency behind the writer’s voice, I lean in toward their story to listen more closely. When a story asks me how it feels, when it tells me something I thought only I had felt, it wins its way into my memory and heart forever.

Avoid clichés. Vent. What’s the best sexual experience you’ve ever had?

This is the way it feels to me. Does it feel this way to you?

I think this post is turning into a sort of found-poetry ars poetica.

What about you? Which of these would you like to write, or read? Do you have your own suggestion for a prompt or guideline? A rule? A party tip?

Maybe leave it in the comments. Or, although I’m not sure if BARE is taking submissions on these topics anymore, the New Smut Project certainly is. Or share it on your own blog, or in a story you submit somewhere else, self-publish. But share it.

The world needs more honest, thoughtful sex talk, and I’m always up for reading it.

A Sexy Sixth Anniversary

It’s almost hard to believe, but the first two NSP anthologies came out six years ago today, on 23 March 2015.

Here’s how they looked back then–although the spines and back covers recently got an update to match the color of the front and to include more information.

If you haven’t had the chance to read them yet, you’re in luck–we’re celebrating with a special coupon code offering. For the next two weeks (from 23 March 2021 to 6 April 2021), you can use the code sexysixth on Heart, Body, Soul and Between the Shores in our Gumroad store for 20% off paperbacks and 45% off ebooks. 

Also, our Gumroad store can now ship internationally, making our books available to anyone on planet Earth*. 

Curious about what’s inside? Excerpts and author interviews for Between the Shores and Heart, Body, Soul are on the NSP blog. I bet they’ll whet your appetite–here’s a few that still resonate with me after six years:

He turns his head so that his ear is pressed against the door. The mattress shifts, and a drawer is pulled open and shut. What’s she doing? He can hear her inhale sharply, and the mattress squeaks. Is she? Oh. She most definitely is. The drawer on his side of the room sticks, which means she’s gone to the other one. She’s removed something from their extensive collection of toys.

-From “Close Pairs” by Andrew Metallo in Heart, Body, Soul

Val felt safe in the arms of her lover, calmed by the clean scent of Iz’s skin. She knew Iz would never push her, and that if she didn’t want to talk about rope again, she didn’t have to.

Still, those old pictures made her miss the easy, kinky joy that used to send her soaring. Rope had made her feel so sexy. Cass used to comment that even the smell of hemp got Val wet. A part of her had been locked away along with the rope. As much as Val cared for Iz, as much as she adored her body, there was a sweaty, needy state that Cass used to produce simply by whispering “hog tie”—and with an uncomfortable lurch in her chest, Val realized she’d never been there with Iz.

If Val could find a way back to her old self, if she could recapture the thrill of rope, she could be that sexy woman again, ready and able to come over and over again. She missed abandoning herself to feelings rather than protecting herself with thoughts. And as that person, she could be the inspiration for Iz’s lust. The heat she’d seen in Iz in response to that video could be directed at her.

-From “Return to Rope” by Annabeth Leong in Between the Shores

At first, it had been a pain in the ass to dance with Tucker. His style was big and emphatic, and their respective training made them clumsy when they had to match their pacing. But with practice, they had found ways to navigate each other’s bodies, and for all of his over-wide shoulders and mile-long limbs, Tucker no longer provided an obstacle at every corner nor a tripping hazard with every step. Brent could maneuver around him, and Tucker himself found his way between Brent’s knees and ankles with a solid, fluid footing. They transferred weight between them with the ease of waves pulling at the shore–with time and practice and, now, trust. After these weeks, finally, the movements came easily.

From “The Dressing Room” by Guinevere Chase in Heart, Body, Soul

“You remember your safewords? What’s your color, Katherina?” he asked, knowing—hoping—she wouldn’t say red or yellow. Hoping that she was—as she’d said—ready for this. He cupped her jaw, letting his thumb rest on her racing pulse. He stared into her dark, fear-dilated eyes. He knew that she was scared, that the people playing and watching around them worried her. He frowned as her eyes, wide and bright as gibbous moons, scanned the room warily.

He needed to focus her attention away from her anxiety and onto something else, like the scene they were about to share. He drifted his thumb against her jaw, forcing her chin up to look at him. “Kat, color. Now.”

She focused on him, meeting his gaze. “Green. I’m ready.”

-From “Donovan’s Door” by Sonni de Soto in Between the Shores

“I was inspired to write “The Best Entanglements” after reading a single line in the call for submissions to this volume requesting stories featuring a character saying “no” to a sex act. Though I’ve written fan fiction in which that happened, I haven’t read any published erotica that examined that “no” and went on from there. In other words, it sounded like an interesting sort of story to write.”

Emma Grant, author of “The Best Entanglements” in Between the Shores

“I wanted to disprove the notion that you can’t laugh and come at the same time. Please tell me if I succeeded!”

Nancy Weber, author of “Little Dan” in Between the Shores

“Cora thinks of herself as the ultimate Nice Girl: she’s academically successful, pretty, loves floral print and has never had sex outside of a relationship. But that doesn’t exactly mesh with the fact that she desperately wants to sleep with the campus “player” after her dependable but obnoxious boyfriend dumps her. She judges everyone in her life because she has internalized both the virgin/whore dichotomy and the less damaging but similar nice guy/player binary. Cora sees the people in her life, including herself, as these classic archetypes, and she unlearns them as she gets to know Devon. Wanting to have casual sex doesn’t mean she isn’t a good person—it just means she’s human…”

Ella Dawson, author of “Very Impulsive/Very Angry” in Heart, Body, Soul

Virginia Dare and Madimia Dee were both real people, but I gave them very different fates.

Evadare Volney, author of “Tempestuous” in Heart, Body, Soul

*Along with aliens, dimension-jumpers, and astronauts who can provide an earthbound address to ship to. I don’t want to leave anybody out.

And submissions are now open for NSP’s fourth anthology, Cunning Linguists: Language, Literature, and Lechery. If that sounds like your thing, please do consider sending something in! Or if it’s your thing to read but not to write so much, you can join the NSP newsletter to be emailed when the anthology becomes available. No need to worry about spam–we’ll never share or sell your information, and updates are only sent out a few times a year.

New anthology call for language, literature, and lechery

Cunning Linguists will collect 20 to 30 pieces of diverse, feminist, body-positive erotica exploring the seductive potential of:

Literature—

  • Reading a sexy story to yourself, or to a lover. Writing a sexy story for yourself, or for a lover, or for a friend. Reading a story that wasn’t intended to be sexy but, well, it turns out you’ve got a new kink.
  • The narratives we construct about our sex and love lives, or have constructed for us, or deconstruct. The patterns we and our cultures make and break.
  • Sexy thoughts we have about other people’s stories and characters—yes, send us your fanfiction! For legal reasons, please stick to works in the public domain.
  • Literary structures: write an epistolary story collecting the steamy letters a 19th century abolitionist sent to his boyfriend. Take it into the 21st century with sexts. Or the 23rd century with a hologram.
  • Write a story entirely in dialogue. Write a sex scene that also works as slam poetry. Write a story that travels back in time with each scene—paraphrasing Sam Goldwyn (well, allegedly), open with an orgasm and then work us up to a climax.

Language—

  • Make love to and with your favorite words. Or take a new look at your less favorite. Which is sexier—dirty talk or sonnets? Quote Shakespeare in sexts. Make pillow talk about all the dirty words in Shakespeare. Convince us moist is actually a turn-on. Is it a dick or a cock? Is her sex better than her pussy or vice versa? And is cunt an insult or a term of worship?
  • Write with and about the words that send a shiver down the spine, that make a heart skip beats or knees go weak.
  • Write about the feeling of finally finding the right word to describe your sexuality.
  • What about wordplay? What’s the sexist literary device—parallelism? Zeugma? Alliteration? Even a good pun gets us laughing, and laughter can be sexy. Or dare we say, puns can make us moan as well as groan.
  • What about wordlessness—pleasure that sends lovers beyond words? The use of nonverbal communication?
  • And what about the unspeakable? Reveal what someone has never been able to talk about. What’s more naked than the truth?–Maybe the right lie?

Keep in mind that, alongside this anthology’s focus on words, the most erotic stories are sensual—texture, taste, and scent play a role in addition to sights and sounds. We don’t have as many words for smell as we do for vision, but what can we do with the words we have? Perhaps you can coin new words. Plus there’s synesthesia, and a sixth sense, or seventh sense… For many, isn’t reading itself a form of synesthesia, transforming sight into sound? And how do telepaths talk dirty?

Length and Payment:

$30 for flash fiction up to 1,000 words

$100 for short stories from 2,500—6,000 words

(Wordcount requirements aren’t firm if you’re within rounding distance. Or query first.)

Contributors will also receive a free ebook copy of the anthology and a discount on paperback copies.

Submission deadline: September 1, 2021. Final decisions will be made by November 2021.

Release planned for Spring 2022.

Genre, pairing:

Just about any, and any. Contemporary, historical, speculative fiction, romance, mystery, literary character study, prose poem—really, the only genre we don’t accept is erotic horror because it’s led to too many submissions that don’t fit the rest of our guidelines or our mission. Paranormal takes on creatures like ghosts and vampires, as well as stories with a bittersweet tinge (we do want the “sweet” along with the bitter—we love stories that show a sense of compassion) will be considered!

No limits on the gender or number of participants, so long as they are 18+ and express their affirmative consent.

See full guidelines, including submission instructions, here.

Answers to frequently asked questions are posted in the q&a tag on the New Smut Project’s blog. For updates and more info, you can sign up for our newsletter through MailChimp, follow us on Tumblr, or follow editor T.C. Mill on Twitter or Facebook.

In which I talk about ebook pricing

eBooks! You can buy them online! eBooks! I’m compose catchier lyrics but I’m out of ti-ime!

Opening announcement related to the subject of this post: Smashwords’s annual Read an Ebook sale runs March 7-March 13, 2021. You can check out all the books included in the sale here. And you can check out which of my books are available here–including several that are free this week.

You’ll note that no New Smut Project books are included. There’s two reasons for that–the meat of this post:

First, especially if you’re interested in the first two anthologies from NSP, keep your eye on them, because something fun will happen for their sixth birthday around March 23, and I didn’t want to confuse things by running multiple promos in a single month. 

Second, while I do include NSP anthologies in some Smashwords sales, I never discount them below 50% (with the exception of Smashwords’s Authors Give Back sale last spring, which was…like so much of 2020…an unprecedented response to unprecedented times). Sales are good for promotion, getting the books in front of new eyes. They also give people who don’t have a lot of disposable income for book-buying the chance to pick up a title they’ve had on their wishlist. I want NSP’s books to be accessible. At the same time, I’ve picked a base price for them that I know is worth the value they offer.

After all, $8 (and under $20 in paperback) for 400 pages of smut and erotic romance is a good value. Erato, for $7 (or $16 in paperback), offers 50+ erotic scenes–less than 15 cents each. And then I’m humbled and excited–humblcited?–when reviews of the anthologies name a particular story or handful of stories as “Worth the price of admission on their own” (human taste being what it is, they don’t often name the same stories). That’s exactly the kind of value we want our books to provide!

In A People’s Guide to Publishing, Joe Biel remarks on the complexities of book pricing, and especially discounting, on a much larger scale than NSP has yet reached: 

In 2012, I was on a panel at a festival in Pendleton, Oregon, about the future of books. The opposing view of my own was presented by a woman who had sold 100,000 copies of her fantasy novel eBook. At that time I had sold a little over 1.3 million books, with about 100,000 copies of my bestseller. Naturally, the juice was in the details. The other panelist revealed that the first 30,000 copies of her book had been ‘sold’ for free. She had then raised the price to 99 cents for the next 30,000 and the remaining 40,000 copies had sold for $2.99, making her net profit less than $15,000. Still, she was the envy of the room… But after expenses and paying the author, our company had netted over $400,000 on 100,000 copies of one title alone.

Now, Biel’s Microcosm Publishing uses offset printing, which means more money is earned per hard copy sold. And frankly, I wouldn’t say a strident No to the chance to sell 100,000 copies of any book I’ve worked on for ~$15,000 net earnings. That would be a significant chunk of change for my purposes and better yet, many readers.

After all, I’m giving away some books for free or for 99 cents this very week in hopes of getting more readers. Readers are fantastic :D, plus several of my stories have themes–like To Have and To Hold, which breaks down herpes stigma–that I want to reach as many people as possible. (It’s not like I’m wearing a sandwich board on the street corner, either–if I say so myself, the honeymoon pegging sex in THaTH is damn hot.) However, it’s a lot simpler to give my own short stories away for free than to give away longer work, much less someone else’s work.

Contributors to the first two New Smut Project anthologies are paid entirely by royalties–if sales of those books earn nothing, neither do the writers. And if Erato was given away for free, NSP would have no source of income to pay authors for future anthologies. In the future, as we have more books for sale, perhaps one could be made a “loss leader” or even “permafree”–but Biel’s whole point is that successful publishers don’t need to do that, and there are other reasons offering a book at a step discount can backfire.

For instance, the matter of perceived value. These are good books. A lot of time and effort went into making them. The presentation–from cover art to price–should reflect that.

Another reason is that the customers who buy something just because it’s cheap or discounted might not be the ones who vibe with the product itself: in Worth Every Penny, Sarah Petty and Erin Verbeck share results of research into Groupon follow-ups: “We find a surge in [Yelp] reviews subsequent to the offer. But we also find that reviewers mentioning ‘Groupons’ and ‘coupons’ provide strikingly lower rating scores than those that do not.”

For ebooks specifically, Catherine Ryan Howard observes in Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing that readers who buy ebooks simply because they’re inexpensive are often not the authors’ target audience. When an ebook is priced at $4.99 or $6.99 rather than $2.99 or $0.99, it’s not a complete impulse purchase: the reader looks at the description, checks out reviews, and reads the sample pages before deciding to buy. This avoids 1-star reviews from church ladies who bought a 99 cent erotica book (or suspense, science fiction, historical fiction…basically any genre) and were shocked to see it contains the f-word.

Howard also recommends increasing an ebook’s price over time if it continues to sell, but I’m not sure that’s fair to readers. And if I wouldn’t feel good about it, I can’t use it as a pricing strategy. But maybe it’s “fairer” than an alternative of setting a high initial price and discounting afterward? Yet the marketing tip I’d learned is that big fans and ‘leader’ types will be fine with paying a little more if they get the item they want right away. Readers who wait for discounts pay with their patience rather than money. (And either way, they’re committed to the book because they want the story it tells, not because it’s cheap.)

Overall, I try to keep prices stable, with occasional well-advertised discounts for promotion and accessibility. To reflect the value of the book and have room for offering discounts, I need to price above rock bottom.

And discounts offer one more benefit: a way to circumvent Jeff Bezos. Smashwords’s sales attract readers to buy directly from Smashwords rather than Amazon (not only does this fight the monopoly, but authors surely appreciate receiving Smashwords’s 85% royalty rate rather than Amazon’s 70%–and while 85% of a discounted price may be less, it’s not like readers only buy on Smashwords during Read an Ebook Week. The sale just helps encourage more people to set up accounts and make purchases there). On the New Smut Project’s Gumroad store, where we receive ~90% of each sale, we’re able to offer discount codes to each newsmutprojectfan—get it? That’s the discount code. We don’t keep it secret because we want people to use it. You save a dollar, we earn more, and Jeff Bezos gets none–except at most the print cost of a paperback, which, yes, we’re currently printing on demand through Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s the most inexpensive POD option, thereby helping us price our books more accessibly and earn more to pay authors. Is it ungrateful of me to acknowledge the benefits Amazon offers us while also trying not to earn them as much money? I figure Amazon does get paid for the books it prints (see discussion here) and all the books sold through its storefront, which it is plenty good at attracting people to use. But that doesn’t make me their feudal vassal obligated to ensure they get 30%+ of all purchases of the books I publish.

Selling off of Amazon does knock a book’s Amazon sales rank and theoretically harms its visibility in the store, but frankly, I don’t expect most people to discover my books on a random walk through Amazon. Heck, I searched for “consensual erotica” (one of Between the Shores’s keywords) the other day and my results included The Story of O. “Discoverability” on Amazon doesn’t seem like all it’s cracked up to be, or nearly as achievable. Plus, given the rise of Bookshop.org last year, I like to think there’s a larger trend of online book buyers looking at shopfronts other than Amazon. (NSP books are available through Bookshop.org! We only receive the “expanded distribution” KDP royalty rate for them, but 10% of your purchase price goes to support local bookshops—and another 10% is paid as an affiliate fee when you buy through my storefront—so consider yourself encouraged to shop there, if my encouragement matters.)

I’ll put it this way: 50% of Erato’s earnings during its first month of sales–October 23-November 23, 2020–came through our Gumroad store.

So there’s my outlook on ebook pricing (and a little bit on paperbacks). If you’ve discovered that this is the most interesting topic in the world to you, first off, I’m delighted and want you to be my new best friend. Second, you might love Jamie McGarry’s series on small press publishing on Medium, which goes even deeper into these topics. Here, for instance, he talks about discounting and distribution. 

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