To take your erotica sales from a side hustle to another level ($1,000+ a month), you’ll need some tools to get you there.
I have personally used dozens of tools to increase my writing efficiency and output. Here are 5 tools all best selling erotica authors should use”
1. PicMonkey book design
Book covers are absolutely key to making four figures ($1,000+) a month selling erotica and other short stories online on Amazon.
If you’re not going to hire someone to design it you should at least learn the basics of some kind of photo imaging software. You don’t need to be a seasoned pro…just the basics will suffice.
The best photo editing software on the market is PicMonkey hands down.
PicMonkey is VERY intuitive and easy to use.
Here’s what the interface looks like:
Once you have your stock photo uploaded, it’s time to put in the book title, author name, and perhaps even a little illustration…
Here’s a really fast and easy tutorial to get started on PicMonkey:
Here are a few things you want to learn:
- Shadowing
- Picking the right font and colors
- Changing the lighting and background
- Adding illustrations
All four of these things are easy to accomplish with PicMonkey.
PicMonkey has hundreds of different overlays, textures, and effects that can make your book cover look VERY professional.
But my personal favorite is the level of fonts they have. PicMonkey has 50+ wonderful fonts that will pair well with any stock photo.
Click here to get PicMonkey and start making professional book covers!
2. Scrivener to make more money
Check out my Scrivener review here. It is seriously the best word document platform I have ever used. It has no doubt saved me hundreds of hours by formatting my documents correctly.
As you can imagine, writing is a very intensive process. That’s why I don’t want to have to worry about stupid formatting issues once I finish a book.
Microsoft Word is a bare bones processor compared to Scrivener. There are always weird formatting issues when you submit an unformatted word document to Kindle for publishing.
This is what an unformatted word document looks like when you preview it in Kindle:
In comparison, this is what the exact same text looks like with Scrivener:
When you spend 4+ hours writing a hot smut piece do you really want to spend 1+ hours fixing stupid formatting issues like the size of the font or ugly paragraph indents?
The difference between word and Scrivener is night and day!
Scrivener pays for itself because of the time it will save you on silly formatting issues.
Other great benefits of Scrivener include:
- Increases productivity (I increased my word count per hour by 25%)–I can now write 2,000 words an hour!
- The auto save feature prevents you from losing important work if your computer crashes!
Click here to get Scrivener on Mac!
Click here to get Scrivener for PC/Windows!
3. Bookreport for analysis
The one issue I have with the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) interface is the lack of analysis. If you download an excel document, you get an ugly excel sheet with the list of books that have sold.
Nothing is formatted and the information isn’t exactly useful.
Plus even if you did want to manipulate the date into some graphs or charts, it would take hours!
That’s why I save money by using Bookreport. Bookreport will show you how much revenue you are generating from each book through a simple pie chart. In addition, they will estimate your daily royalty income.
They will also list out your best selling books over time. You can even see how much each different pen name is making!
This is a really powerful analysis tool to figure out what books are doing well and which aren’t.
For instance, you can see which of your books have been selling the most over the past say 30 days. Check out their covers, their niche, the title, and the blurb and figure out why they did so well.
Now you can implement those findings and make even more money writing short stories!
Bookreport is actually FREE for users who are making less than $1,000 a month on Amazon. For people making more than $1,000 a month it will cost $10/month (which is a small price to pay for such a powerful analytical tool).
Click here to get BookReport and start increasing your book sales!
4. DepositPhotos for covers
Book covers are one of the most important things you need to successfully publish and sell erotica.
You know how they say don’t judge a book by its cover? Well, throw that old saying out the window and forget it ever existed.
If you only learn one thing from me it is this: book covers matter a lot!
The cover is one of the first things potential customers look at when they’re scrolling through a sea of other books. Make sure your book cover looks decent before you actually publish.
To get great covers, I highly recommend buying a stock photo from DepositPhotos. They have one of the biggest libraries of pictures out there.
Best of all, they have an amazing selection of erotica. You can get scantily dressed ladies on the beach to jacked guys with their six pack bursting out for all to see.
Here are some of the great photos I got from their site:
Keep your eyes peeled for App Sumo deals on Deposit Photos. About once or twice a year, they actually sell 100 stock photos for just $39! That’s less than $0.39 (39 cents) per photo!
You can’t beat that price anywhere! Last time that deal came around I actually bought three of them.
Deposit Photos also runs their own promotions. Over the past year or so they’ve been offering 100 photos for $100 (or $1 per photo). That’s actually still a really good deal that I would recommend readers take.
Click here to signup for DepositPhotos and create professional book covers that will sell!
Final Thoughts
The key to publishing short stories online for money is having great tools. These tools will make it easier to write, sell, and market your erotica eBooks.
Use these 4 powerful tools and don’t miss out on important sales!