Naughty Books Shows the Ups & Downs of Self-Publishing

One my naughty books

 As someone who writes naughty books, I was of course interested when I saw the documentary Naughty Books on Hulu.  (It is also on Amazon Prime, YouTube TV, and free on Tubi according to Google.)  As I said on Facebook, even if you aren't into writing or reading naughty books, it's still an interesting look at self-publishing because this focuses mostly on three self-published authors.

After 50 Shades of Grey, there was suddenly a lot of interest in erotic literature.  Big Publishing was mostly caught flat-footed so this being the early 2010s, there was an opening for self-publishers to fill the void.  And they did!  And some had a lot of success and even crossed over into the mainstream.

One author who started out in Washington state was the most successful of the three main authors profiled in the documentary.  After making quite a bit publishing an erotica series on her own, she got a contract with Pocket Books (part of Simon & Schuster) and had some mainstream success and even achieved her dream of signing at an event with traditional romance author Nora Roberts.

But there was initially a cost in that her boyfriend or husband or whatever at the time became really jealous of her success.  He started demeaning her in public and so she left him and moved to Montana, which then became the setting of her mainstream series.  Eventually she found someone else to marry and maybe she's still married; this was from 2020 so who knows if they got Covid or burned up in a wildfire or had a meteor fall on them.

Another author in South Dakota, CJ Something, had a few successful books.  The problem then became in coming up with more material.  It didn't help that her husband became a whiny baby sitting around the house or whatever all day.  Eventually she quit writing.  The movie is kind of vague about what happened with her husband.  It says they "still raise their kids together."  Does that mean they're still married or just that they're both involved in raising the kids but living separate?

A third author in Ohio is probably the one I could most relate to.  She had some success early on with erotica under a pseudonym, but then her sales started dwindling.  Tastes were apparently changing and getting darker, but she wasn't really interested in writing that.  She gave it the ol' college try only for Amazon to reject the book--something I know all too well.  So she gave up on erotica and continued writing YA and some mysteries under her own name.  It doesn't say, but I assume she's not making nearly as much money.

What you see is that you can be accidentally successful in self-publishing.  None of these women really set out to make it big; they pretty much just did it for fun.  But they wound up with hit books because they were in the right place at the right time.

And then the biggest problem is maintaining that success.  I don't think any of these women had any formal training or really had done much writing in their earlier years, so when they had to suddenly start pumping out new material, it was pretty difficult.  And unlike me they actually had families and social lives.  For most authors, especially in self-publishing, to maintain your brand you have to keep a flow of material going.  You can't be George RR Martin and put out one book every 20 years and expect to keep making sales.

A problem these authors faced--and I've faced too--is that they got in early with their books, but as they tried writing more, there was increased competition.  I think I was somewhat early into the gender swap market and that helped early sales, but there has been increased competition.  And for books like these, people don't really care about quality; they just want their fix.  They don't really care who gives it to them.  Which is again why you need a steady flow of material.

The movie also shows that traditional publishing can be a blessing, but it's not going to magically solve your problems.  The one who got a contract with Pocket had a book get into the top 100 on Amazon, but she had to do a lot of hustling and promotion to make that happen--and I doubt Pocket was very helpful with any of that.  The movie says something we indie bloggers have said for a while:  traditional publishing is good in that it gets your book into stores, but there are benefits to self-publishing like having control over prices and timing your releases and such.  It's unlikely the author's book would have made the top 100 if she had self-published it, but it probably would have still been more successful than most self-published books because she already had a brand and some social media presence.

I hoped this would have some tips that might help me improve my books.  They have some somewhat known actresses like Aisha Tyler and Allison Tolman read excerpts and...they're not really that good.  The writing isn't really any better than what you see in critique groups most of the time.  It's better than "Peterotica" on Family Guy, but not really anything memorable.  This is something else that people like me have said before:  the actual writing doesn't matter nearly as much as the story itself.  It didn't matter that the writing for these was not great; it mattered that they had the right subject at the right time.  As I've seen even with really poorly-written books of mine like First Contact, the average person doesn't give a shit about all those "rules" for "good" writing that you'll read about in how-to books or get told in critique groups.  They just want an entertaining story.  And if you're successful enough, you might even get Big Publishing knocking on your door despite they would never have accepted your story in a million years otherwise--the same for literary agents.

One thing this told me specifically is why my books can't really cross over into the mainstream.  First, I'm a guy and apparently guys aren't supposed to do this.  I mean other than spouses or siblings, there were no men in this movie.  It makes me think I should have used a female or gender-neutral pseudonym.  Second is the reason these books were successful is what women want is a story where a guy is a total asshole to them, but it's OK because he really loves her.  Or comes to love her.

The power dynamic thing is a problem for my books because in a gender swap story, the man is turned into a woman, reversing that power dynamic.  Even if there is another man, it would still be more of a man-man dynamic than a man-woman dynamic.  And apparently women aren't really into the woman being in charge.  (Which also helps explain why Trump won the white female vote in 2016 and probably 2020 too.)  I don't think I could make that work for the gender swap thing because as I said even if the guy turns into a woman who's treated like crap by a man, it's not a "real" woman and so I don't think it would really appeal as much.

Anyway, I enjoyed watching this documentary because it's one of the first I've seen to really take self-publishing seriously.  Some of the authors even talk about how self-publishing was seen as "vanity publishing" and such until ebooks came along and people started making a lot of money at it.  The funniest line, though, was when one of the authors said she decided she could be a writer because she read Twilight and if Stephanie Meyer could do it, so could she.  I mean, she's not wrong.

If you have any of the streaming services I listed above, check it out and draw your own conclusions.

(BTW, something else funny to me is one of the authors got 5 musical notes tattooed on her arm because she published 5 books.  If I did that, by now my body would pretty much be entirely black with ink.)