Insecure Wednesday: Creating a New Author Was Harder Than I Thought

 I mentioned a while back I was in a Discord group with some other similar authors for a few weeks.  In that time, one harped on me for my covers and having a male pseudonym and said that feminization stories sold better than the gender swap stories I usually wrote.

And since Eric Filler sales had been pretty flat (or down) for some time, I decided to try creating a new name.  This name would be more unisex and focus on feminization instead of full gender swaps and be transgender romance instead of erotica.  They would also have better covers, A+ content, and other stuff I didn't do when I started with the Eric Filler books back in 2014.  This new name would have all the benefits of what I had learned in 8 years.  So it should be better than ever, right?

Nope.  It was pretty much a failure.  I started writing stories near the end of November and published the first one called Spokesmodel on December 11th.  Annnnnd...nothing.  Pretty much no sales, no pages read or anything.

Well, fine, maybe I just needed to do another one to get more notice.  The second one I did was called Misstek Syrens.  The misspellings were intentional because it's the name of a band who turn out to be Sirens like in The Odyssey.  Anyway, I published that one probably close to the end of the year and...nothing.

I wrote a third story called My Tutor and by then I decided since no one had read Misstek Syrens and it was pretty short, I'd unpublish it on Amazon and make it my reader magnet on Prolific Works.  I also used "Tiny Letter," which is a stripped-down newsletter thing from Mailchimp I've seen other authors use, to create a newsletter.

So when I published My Tutor I had the newsletter ad in that book and Spokesmodel.  I also had an author page on Amazon's Author Central.  I had to email them to get that set up because even though you can have like 10 pen names in Author Central, the system wouldn't let ME do it myself for...reasons.  Anyway, so now we've got a couple of books and a newsletter and a reader magnet.  Things should be ramping up, right?  Nope.  Still nothing.  I did a newsletter but it only went to my email because no one had signed up!

I did a fourth book called Body Builder and didn't even bother with a newsletter because still no one had signed up.  I had already tested it once so there was no need to do another test.

As I started the next book, Secret Identity, I decided to do something more desperate and put Eric Filler as a co-author.  The idea being that maybe then I could promote it to Eric Filler readers and some of them might sign up for the newsletter and buy other books and maybe I could start get something going.

Annnnd...not really.  I got like 2 sales and some pages read, but only 1 newsletter signup.  So still no traction on this thing.

Then I decided to write one more story called Ransom Wear.  That way I'd have 5 stories so then I could do a bundle.  And if none of that got any traction for Kelly Counts, I'd just pull the plug.  Still nothing happened, so I was ready to close it out with the bundle.

A couple of weeks later I released the bundle.  And got a couple of sales, but still not really anything great.  So I won't be doing any more of those.  Since the bundle was long enough I tried to do a paperback.  But the problem was it kept bouncing it back with some dumb boilerplate blathering about DVDs and CDs and ISBN numbers previously used.  Which it's not a set of DVDs or CDs and Amazon assigned the ISBN to me.  After the third time I emailed them and some helpful chap in India told me that you can't use the word "Bundle" in paperbacks.  (Kindle it's OK but not paperbacks for...reasons.)  So I had to change it from "Feminization Bundle" to "Feminization Collection."  And then I changed the Kindle title and A+ content and everything to match.  Ugh.

I'm not really going to miss doing those stories.  It might seem weird, but I don't like feminization stories.  They're just boring to me.  I mean, a guy puts on girl clothes and maybe a wig...big whoop.  It just seems to limit things, especially in bed because if he's pretending he's a girl he can't use his thing, right?  So that kind of limits you to two orifices.  It's just not that interesting to me.  And the emotional stakes seem a lot lower.  I mean, he can literally just take this shit off whenever he wants--unless maybe he's being threatened by someone.  With a gender swap the person is usually stuck as a woman, maybe until they learn a lesson or get an antidote or whatever time period is up like the 24 Hour Gender Swap series; they can't just take off a wig and put on guy clothes and be the way they were.  So it wasn't all that fun for me.  Not that I think the stories are bad; I just don't think they're as much fun as the gender swap stories.

Anyway, back in 2014 it was enough just to put books out there.  I didn't create a newsletter or reader magnet for about a full year.  But in 2023, apparently it's not enough to just put books out there.  I would say it's probably that there are a lot more authors and maybe fewer readers.  Or readers who are just too swamped.

This all goes back to what I've said before about discoverability.  People talk about covers and keywords and categories and all that, but it doesn't really matter.  At least not at first.  Because the problem is Amazon's search engine, like all search engines, isn't going to put Kelly Counts's books at the top of the results if you search for transgender romance or feminization.  With literally thousands of other stories out there, it's just going to get lost in the shuffle.  (An unfortunate thing I realized about this name when I Googled it is most of the first page of results is about R. Kelly being convicted of however many counts of whatever.  Oops.)

Still one of the best ways to get people to read a book without spending a ton of money is to make the book free.  I got a bunch of downloads and a handful of ratings (none with words of course) when I made Spokesmodel free.  I was hoping people might buy more Kelly Counts books or at least sign up for the newsletter, but nope.  Probably because the kind of people who gulp down free books aren't the type to actually buy anything.  They're the type who go into a store and eat up the free samples and then leave without paying for anything.

Early in May, since I was working on a private commission and hadn't any new material for a few weeks, I decided to rebrand all of the Kelly Counts books.  So now they say, "Eric Filler Writing As Kelly Counts" like those Nora Roberts/JD Robb books.  I put an announcement on my blog and in the newsletter and updated the Planet 99 Publishing site to add those books.  And?

I got a few sales of the 5-in-one "collection" but not of the individual books.  So overall it was pretty much a big waste of time and effort.  Too bad because I mostly liked the stories even though they weren't really my thing.