Lucy Wild's Blog, page 3

How to make the transition to longer romance

After the success of The Little which was 30,000 words of submissive Victorian age play, I decided to try something even longer. It took some planning and a fair while to write but Little Faith was 45,000 words when finished and written from two alternating perspectives, that of the hero and the heroine. It's been on sale for 3 days now and is in the top ten in the USA and the UK Victorian erotica chart. Not only that but it's had 5 5 star reviews so far since release.

I'm pretty proud of this as I've never written anything this long before. I started out with 3,500 word short stories back in 2012 and have gradually built up to longer stories over time. The success of this one does encourage me to keep going with longer rather than shorter stories as they seem pretty popular. My advice to anyone making the switch from short to long fiction can be summed up like this:

Start out short, get to understand the basics of storytelling with short stories, cover design and blurb too if you're doing them yourself rather than hiring someone.

Gradually go longer as leaping from 5,000 to 50,000 is a big step to take in one go like going from a five minute walk to a marathon without any training in between.

Planning makes life so much easier. Get a synopsis and chapter by chapter plan together before you start and you won't end up with huge plotholes that require substantial rewrites later on.

I aimed for around 2,000 words per chapter spread over 20-25 chapters. In the end some of my later chapters were too short so were combined together to make the same length chapters ending with a 21 chapter book.

Pricing at 99c/99p as an introductory offer as new readers (in my opinion) are more likely to take a chance on an author they don't know if the price is low.

So far it's proved a worthwhile experiment and the success of Little Faith makes me think I should have been braver and made the transition a while ago but there's always the fear that a longer work might flop and write off the time you spent writing it.

Little Faith on Amazon

Need to get rid of a nipple?

I had the book cover to my upcoming age play romance sorted when I noticed a tiny little flaw. See if you can spot it.


The title of this blog post might have given it away a bit. I only noticed once it was finished but there's a hint of nipple visible. Now this may not be the end of the world for most of us but in the world of Amazon, nipples on book covers are a huge risk as your book may be adult filtered (not findable immediately in search results) or even blocked.
So having spotted the problem, what to do about it? Well my solution was to open up GIMP (my preference for image editing, the equivalent of Photoshop) and make use of the airbrush tool to whiten the area and avoid the risk of trouble when the book is released. Here's the results of my work, see if you can spot the difference.

And there we have a finished and adult filter safe front cover. All in a day's work for a glamorous romance author!

Need a Victorian name?

There are many ways to create names for your characters but if you're writing Victorian romance like me or steampunk erotica, you could do a lot worse than visit:


It'll give you male or female Victorian names, first and surnames, and even steampunk or vampire style ones. Very useful for getting a handle on names from that era.
Once you have a name you can start to think of the characteristics that might fit that person, a nice getaround for if you're struggling to create characters. Or if you have some characters but no names, just click through until you find one that suits your purposes.

How to self publish on Amazon - A Complete Guide

Feel free to share this guide far and wide, just don’t claim credit for it please

Don’t own a Kindle?You can download the Kindle app for PC, Mac, tablet or smartphone.Go to this Amazon page for more details.








The Little
Excepting in the case of brief quotations in articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or distributed without the express permission of the author.
All characters portrayed are consenting adults over the age of 18. This book is intended for mature audiences and contains explicit language and scenes. All characters portrayed are consenting adults over the age of 18 and are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Lucy Wild’s author page(page break)Fancy a free erotic romance? Sign up to my spam free and completely private mailing list at the link below and in return you’ll receive a full length erotic story that’s exclusively for subscribers
Lucy Wild’s Mailing List(page break)Chapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3etc etc etcAlso by the Same AuthorHave a look hereto see how it looks when you read the sample section on the Amazon website. Here's how it looks with the page breaks in place:


The Little
Lucy Wild



All Rights Reserved.Copyright 2016 Lucy Wild
Excepting in the case of brief quotations in articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or distributed without the express permission of the author.
All characters portrayed are consenting adults over the age of 18. This book is intended for mature audiences and contains explicit language and scenes. All characters portrayed are consenting adults over the age of 18 and are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Lucy Wild’s author page

Fancy a free erotic romance? Sign up to my spam free and completely private mailing list at the link below and in return you’ll receive a full length erotic story that’s exclusively for subscribers
Lucy Wild’s Mailing List



Contents
Chapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Etc etc etc 

The Little






Also by the same authorThe Little
Highlight the book title. Right click the highlighted text and click “Hyperlink”. In the address box paste in your website address then click “Go.”Now it will look like this. “The Little.” It will still lead to the exact same page on Amazon but looks so much more professional.

Thinking of writing erotica?

If you've ever thought about giving erotica writing a try, you could do a lot worse than to peruse the vast quantity of advice over on:

https://www.reddit.com/r/eroticauthors

and especially this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/eroticauthors/comments/33gqqd/faq_thread_how_do_i_get_started_writing_erotica/

It's absolutely stuffed with every detail you might need from writing to publishing. And if you're thinking romance might be more your thing, they have that covered too.
How much money can you make from erotica? Well it depends on how good you are and how much you write. Think roughly $10 per story per month but you might get more or less depending on many factors including your covers, blurb and niche. As with any skill, you get better the more you practise, so get started early and keep working. Aim for 500 words a day as a beginner and stories no shorter than 5000 words. Full length novels are anything from 50,000 words up but of course will take longer to write. With practice you should be able to do 10,000 words a day without too much trouble which will either be one longer story or two short ones. Do that and then do it more!

How far would you go for your art?

In a piece of performance art called Rhythm O in 1974, the artist gave her audience complete freedom for six hours to use any object on her from 72 that she had first laid out on a table. The objects included a scalpel and a loaded gun. I don't know how far I would go for my art but I know I wouldn't go this far.
Rhythm O - Wikipedia page

Completely free guide to self publishing and formatting

Because I'm such a nice person (and I wince every time I read a badly formatted kindle book) I've put together this quick guide to self publishing on Amazon and formatting your books for publication. Feel free to share far and wide and you can get it as a PDF, mobi or EPUB file. It's hosted on Instafreebie, ready to download.

Get it here...

Let me know how you get on with it!

Connecting your blog to your amazon KDP author account

So having just set this blog up, the next step was to try to connect it to my amazon author page so blog posts show up on on my author page when readers hunt out my books. Not as easy as it sounds but simple once you know what to do.
Have a look at my author page to see it in action:
amazon.com/author/lucywild
It took an hour to get that set up but these instructions should make things quicker for you.

First of all you need your blog's 'rss feed.'

Have a look at this:
https://turbofuture.com/internet/How-to-find-A-Blogs-RSS-Feed-URL


To find my blog's rss feed required going to the blogger home page for my blog and then choosing "Layout"
In there you want to scroll down to gadgets to add a gadget.
Then find "Subscription links" and add that to your blog.
Load the blog and find the subscription links. Click the posts button.
See the word Atom? Right click on that and choose properties. That address you see, that's your blog's rss feed. Copy that.
Now open your amazon kdp author page. See the bit that let's you add a blog? Click on that and when it asks for your rss feed, paste from the address you copied and that's it. From now on each blog post will pop up on your author page on amazon. Cool huh?

How to set up a mailing list

If like me you want this kind of connection with your readers, I recommend getting a mailing list and newsletter on the go. I set mine up by following the steps in this post on reddit. If you already have a mailing list please let me know as I'd love to sign up to a few. Good luck and message me if you need a hand setting one up.



https://www.reddit.com/r/eroticauthors/comments/4jclh1/faq_newsletters_subscribers_free_stories/

A busy day and it's all thanks to reddit and getting a book finished

So I read this article on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/eroticauthors/comments/4p68mv/dataporn_60_days_of_romance_novels/

which kickstarted me to creating a mailing list
http://eepurl.com/b6QNCD

a facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/lucy.wild.756

and now a website blog. Took quite some doing but got there in the end and even made a few facebook friends through it. Next thing on the to do list is to find some Advance Review Copy Reviewers. I know they're out there somewhere.
All this because The Little went live today and I wanted a little break from writing for the rest of the day so popped onto the erotic author forum.

If you're interested, here's the book I've been working on for a while. It's a Victorian age play romance.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HFGN9W2