It has been a hot minute but we’re back with the remix.

When I first started making (decent) money online back in 2014, I was writing ebooks. More specifically, short-form erotica because that’s what makes money. And it made really good money for where I was in life: fresh out of the military and in my first year of college.

Unfortunately I was under the impression that I had “made it” and stopped. Per the previously posted graph, you can see how quickly that fell off.

But that makes sense, because what I was writing had no real longevity. Sure, a few books get a few sales every month, but most of them are lost in the void. Or I de-listed them because they were complete dog shit.

And I’ve written ebooks on and off for years. Sometimes it’s a fiction book I think would be cool to write. Sometimes it’s a non-fiction book that’s literally a compilation of articles formatted and organized to be read in a certain order. Both sell.

When I started my last big website in 2020, it was a repeat of the first website I made and sold in 2016. The difference was a few years of experience and going hard in the paint. So how my primitive brain works is thinking go further back and doing something similar to what I was doing in 2014. Just not erotica.

Mostly not erotica.

The Big Plan

So I’ve always liked, I don’t know the name, fringe media? B-movie cult classics, indie music, alternative art. Stuff that’s incredibly niche and not mainstream, because I’m a loser hipster millennials.

Troma movies and grindhouse-style films. Pulp fiction, and not the movie (well, the movie is cool), but the style of writing and publication. I’m looking at a stack of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazines right now. Pen & Pixel style album covers are so bad they’re good.

So what’s the overall big plan?

Pulp-style novellas with over-the-top action and sex with ridiculous collage-style covers that stand out.

Pen name

I’m rocking with a pen name that’s so close to my real name that I’m barely trying to hide it. Because I’m not trying to hide it. I just want to reserve my name for the off-chance I ever want to write books with my name.

Covers

Let’s talk about so bad they’re good. Like, how ridiculous is this shit 👇🏾

That’s me just farting around in one of those art programs. A little bit of background removal and just slappin’ some shit together. That’s an example of visual representation of the stories to a literal level. If that was a book cover, which it will never be, you know exactly what that story is about.

The definition of judging a book by its cover, which is what I want people to do. If I put a stripper with an AR-15 on the cover, I want people who want to read about strippers ripping up AR-15s.

Stories

Oh yeah, these stories are fast-paced, over-the-top, and laced with tropes. These are not literary stories, they’re being written to market. I’m not trying to win awards, I’m trying to get paid in the worst way possible: writing fiction.

• Genre: Action, adventure, thriller, romance. Honestly, the more I think about it, a shitty way to describe it would be romance for men, which is funny because the romance is a subplot. But you gotta shoot a couple bad guys to get the girl, or something.
• Length: Novella-ish. 12-30k words, depending on how enjoyable it is writing. After online writing for a decade, I know that if I try working on a story for something like 6 months to a year, I’m going to get bored and start something else. Can’t have that, gotta finish.

Marketing

I’m coasting right now. The first book is written and published, and exactly one person has read it from cover to cover (not me, I promise).

But I haven’t done anything with it.

I’m starting off in KDP Select because I haven’t done anything except write the story. I don’t have a website for the pen name, I don’t have an email list created, nada. Once the second story is written and published, I’ll set my first book up for free for five days to promote the second book.

And as of right now, that’s the plan.

• Book 1 released
• Book 2 released, set a 5-day free promo for book 1
• Book 3 released, set a 5-day free promo for book 2

Boomshakalaka, we’ll see how that works.