Upcoming Changes to What I Do

Hi folks,

I’ve been struggling with this decision for a while and I think I’ve come to the point where I need to stop trying to balance too many things and focus my time and energy where it’s most useful and gets the most return.

This sounds ominous but it’s really not.

If you’ve followed my blog or you follow me on other social media, you likely know that I branched out into gay young adult fiction a couple years ago. The plain and simple truth is that, for me, young adult fiction sells far better than my erotic fiction.

My bestselling erotic story is Seduced by my Best Friend’s Dad, with a lot of my other good-selling stories coming in close behind. Sales still climb, but very slowly.

My bestselling young adult story is Gay Love and Other Fairy Tales. This book has sold almost five times as many copies as Best Friend’s Dad. And it still sometimes has three-figure sales months.

My next bestselling young adult story is Thunder, which after being on sale for a little under a year, has almost matched the sales of Best Friend’s Dad — and Best Friend’s Dad has been out for four years. It will surge far ahead by the end of the year.

After that, my next bestselling young adult story is Gay Love and Other Christmas Magic, which astounds me in its sales numbers because it sells every month since release. In other words, a Christmas novella is selling in the middle of the summer. The sales of this story are climbing far slower than the others, but it’s still at a faster rate than any of my erotic stuff.

It’s a little too soon to comment on the sales of Frankenstein Builds a Boyfriend, but if the month or so it’s been on sale has been any indication, it will perform similarly to Thunder.

So what does all this mean?

It makes complete and total sense that I should put more of my energy into young adult fiction and less of it into erotic fiction.

I will not give up erotic fiction entirely. There are simply too many stories to write, including New York Ice, the sequel to New York Heat; the frequently-requested sequel to Seduced by my Best Friend’s Dad; a novel based on my free short story Dominated in the Hot Tub; as well as volume two of Sexy Shorts. I have a dozen other things on my to-write list too.

But, while I’m not giving up on erotic fiction, I will be writing it much slower (not that I was being speedy with it to begin with).

I will still be very much involved in erotic fiction and you’ll see and hear a lot about it on this blog. After all, I co-run Deep Desires Press and I still run Indie Erotica Collective. There’s still lots of smut to be had — just less from me personally.

What’s on the horizon for young adult fiction?

I did say I want to put more energy here, right?

On the docket are:

Drag Queens, Emo Teens & Big Dreams, a novel about a young man who’s a “straight” football player and son to a strict military man, while secretly leading a double life as a drag queen and madly in love with his boyfriend. This book comes out in August or September. I’ll be getting edits back from my editor soon, but she’s already told me she absolutely loves it.Gay Love And… Book Three — I’m working on this one right now and the title is still TBD. It picks up with Jordan and Benjamin a year after they officially got together as they start to encounter the first real bumps in their relationship. After all, every fairy tale has a dark side.Fangville High Book Two — this is the sequel to Frankenstein Builds a Boyfriend. In this one we follow Serge, the “villain” in the first book, and learn a lot about him. While Frankenstein was loosely based structurally on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I’m looking at mapping this new book on the structure of The Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker. Jewel is where we get the undead mummies from. Yup, Bram Stoker brought us Dracula and mummies. (If you’ve read the first book, you’ll know Serge is an incubus — the mummy aspect will come in via his love interest.)Drag Queens, Ripped Jeans & Movie Scenes, the sequel to this summer/fall’s Drag Queens book, will follow Andrew, one of the secondary characters in the first book.Fangville High Book Three will follow Bram, the vampire from the first book. This will be loosely mapped on the structure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

All of this is subject to change. If a book tanks I might not do a sequel. I may also be super inspired to jump to a book out of order. I might also be taken by a new idea and feel I have to write it right away — which is common with writers. If I can think of a fourth Gay Love And book, I’d probably jump into it. I’d also love to revisit the boys from Thunder, but I need a good western storyline to make it worth the reader’s time.

Still with me?

I hope you like where this is going. If you were here just for the smut, I understand entirely and hope you’ll still stick around. After all, there will be plenty of smut from other authors and I will eventually get some smut done.

If you’ve been hesitant about trying my YA out, why don’t you head on over to deepheartsya.com/sale/? My first three books are all half off on Smashwords until July 31, 2020. If you’ve never read one before, I’d suggest starting with Gay Love and Other Fairy Tales since it’s the most popular.

Thanks for hanging out with me — I’ll be back soon with more exciting books!