Is there actually a market?

Liebe Spanking library-Community.

I'm a very quiet but enthusiastic reader from Germany. I love the Library of Spanking Fiction. In fact I would like to try and write something myself (writing is part of my day job).
And this brings my question, which is rather delicate or private in nature, but I hope it's okay with you:

Is there a market for this stuff? And if so, how does it actually work?

I found so many great pieces here, and so many great people with an impressive artistic output-volume, that I concluded, that many of you are actually working in the arts or in academia?
Reading some of the works, I was sure: That has to be a writing pro.
And seeing the size of some bodies of work, I thought: That must be actually someone, who does mostly this.

So what do you think: How many of the authors here, do writing for a living?
Are there even some, who work predominantly as spanko-novelists?

And if there's a buck to make... what's the typical scope of revenues...
I mean is it rather like: "Hey darling, I got the annual kink-o-paycheck, we can eat out tonight. I wrote a whole novel, now I can treat you to pizza. I love my life."
or is it rather like: "This is to little for all the work, but it's still nice to have at least the utilities payed with this."
or is it rather like: "well it's self publishing, but a few can make it."
or is it rather like: "My agents won't stop calling me even here on Ibiza, shouldn't have sold the rights for the whole series!"

Thank you very much and excuse my bumpy English please.

All the best

Nikita

I never took money for my work. It's probably best for my ego that I never asked for any.

The same for me, and I have a very strong impression that this grandiose gesture never cost me much. Still, with the number of books on the market, there must be some money in it unless everybody is just hoping to be the next shade of grey.

I have also been impressed by the literary skills of many of the authors here. I know that some have experience from more technical writing, but I doubt that there are many published novelists among us. Those guys are usually busy writing real books...

This interesting blog post should answer some of your questions:

https://strictjuliespanks.blogspot.com/2020/10/so-you-want-to-be-author.html

So yes, there seem to be a market, but it is apparently very, very hard to make a living out of it.

The most prolific spanking author is Flogmaster I believe (lot of his stories are available for free here on the library as well as on his website, but he also has a lot of them that can only be purchased) and I really doubt it has ever been more than a side job for him and he has written a couple millions of words at this point.

Somewhere - can't find it now - I described my royalties as "keeping me in red wine". Actually, that was an exaggeration, though, to be fair, I do drink quite a lot of red wine.

Most mainstream authors make very little money: https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book/

For niche erotica I would assume the numbers are even lower.

I would treat it as a hobby that occasionally pays for an extra nice dinner if you're lucky.

As a spank author who considers his own work to be 'niche within a niche within a niche', the math determining who my paying audience would be does not lead me to believe this would be a lucrative venture. A while back, Februs told me how much revenue my e-books here have generated for this site and it was depressing.

So, while I agree with wildebeet about being lucky to succeed, I would also venture to say that there would probably be a few things that not every author could do that seem to bring a little extra success and not a single one requires that you hone your actual writing skills. (Remember 50 Shades.):

1: be female (especially if you're writing F/M.......but you should probably not do that either) If you are unfortunately male, don't despair yet, but absolutely do not write Femdom.
2: if female, be a relatively young and attractive female and show revealing pictures of yourself now and then as an adjunct to one's literary ventures.
3: write M/F
4: promote your work everywhere
5: be successful in something else kinky or literary first, and then use that to promote your work. Maybe vampire stories? They seem to have an unusual success rate. (Ann Rice & E. L. James)
6: Play the lottery when it's a huge pot, win, and then self-publish. And then even if nothing sells you will still be wealthy.

An old adage in business is to never buy until you know who you will sell to. The easy part is writing the ebook. The more difficult part is selling, exactly the same as with many commercial enterprises. By writing short stories and offering them for free, you can work out what appeals and what doesn't. That should guide you when writing for sale, always accepting that you're not going to make any kind of a living unless you are very lucky.

Many use Amazon to publish their work, but Amazon have become more and more restrictive, especially on the type of front cover illustration they will allow, and it's that illustration that attracts buyers. A poor front cover will be very limiting. Your own website offering downloadable ebooks is probably best, although it will mean an initial investment, and then you can have that girl lying across someone's lap getting their bottom spanked or whatever.

Years ago when the a.s.s newsgroup was our main way of communicating, Janet Hardy, aka Lady Green, of Greenery Press, offered to publish my book of verses, "Bottom Lines" under the name of H. Andrew Swinburne. She did, and you can still find it on line at used book sites. But it was much too niche to sell, and eventually she sent me back the many unsold copies. I never planned to make any money from the book. but I learned about self-publishing and later wrote a book on a "normal" topic, which sold just enough to break even.
There is now a plethora of purchasable spanking material for sale on line, even on Kindle. I doubt that most authors make much money, no matter what they write about. Like authors here, they write because they have to write. Writing is like spanking: it's something you have to do. Spankos seem to write a lot.
And instead of money, I have some pride in producing what I think is the best (because it is the only) book of spanking verse ever written.

Hi ppl

I am the first to admit I don't write nearly as much as I did - I was trapped in a very unhappy marriage (I have since escaped from - Yay!) and I suspect when I wrote it was escapism for me and channelling an inner need too. I started writing purely because I couldn't find any stories that I enjoyed reading, nothing very niche.

I did have an E-book published on Bethany's Woodshed website but I never saw a penny from it as they denied my novella sold. (At the time I was writing on Spanko.net and regularly had thousands of views within a day, I cross publicised - at the end of everything I wrote I included a link to my novella and had my own website that got thousands of hits, I didn't know how to go about E-publishing my novella at the time. This was 25 years ago now when there was a real market for E-books of the kinky persuasion, and lots of people were prepared to cough up real money for them.

Afterwards I felt ripped off and disillusioned, so I published my novella for free on any spanking website I could find, including here, so they couldn't continue to make money out of my work.

At the very start of my writing 'career' I was quite prolific and created a lot of work that I posted on Spanking Memories - that became Spanko.net - the first hiatus I recall was that the owner of the site wanted to make it pay per view - bearing in mind that all the stories on the site were posted on there for free and a large number of authors said to the owner 'if you go ahead with this I will delete all of my stories from your site'. The owner carried on and suddenly a lot of the stories on his site disappeared overnight. Needless to say he quickly reversed the decision and almost all the authors re-posted their stories. This was around the time Khefren and Wren got together. because Wren was one of those who deleted her stories.

I have been offered in the past the opportunity to have my work published by a couple of editors but due to my ongoing health problems and raising my kids, mounting my first exhibition - i am an artist as well as a writer. I haven't followed up on the offers.

If I am honest I would have liked to have earnt the price of a coffee, notebook, pens and a sandwich from my work just so I could say I am an published author.

But no matter Himself is proud of me and that means the world to me.

pim