Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 116362 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 582(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116362 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 582(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
April marks the start of tourist season in the city. The flowers are in full-bloom and foreigners descend on the clean streets, looking to spend their money on tiny bottles of expensive maple syrup, T-shirts with moose and beavers on them, and slabs of smoked salmon. They also find their way to the bookstore, looking for a vacation read or just to admire the ambience, so when I get there we’re already slammed.
We work non-stop, which is great for business, and even my father seems to be in a boisterous mood. He still hasn’t mentioned the divorce to me, and I don’t dare bring it up, but at least he’s smiling more. The summer seasons have saved us in the past, but I’m not sure if this season will be enough to do it.
I end up staying late, putting all the books back in their proper places and tidying up the store while my dad jets off to an appointment that he seems awfully cagey about (I’m assuming it’s with a lawyer). With the lights in the store off and darkness settling outside, I hop on the stool behind the counter and pull up the Amazon Kindle site on the work computer.
Amazon’s Top 100 list is the best indicator of how books are selling, and the moment I peek at the Top 20, I’m a little mind-blown. Professor Dumbass is not such a dumbass after all.
About half the books in the Top 20 are cheaply priced erotica, ranging from $ 0.99 to $2.99. They all seem to feature the same guy, in various stages of undress. A few have Jesus beards and tattoos, more are cut off at neck level because I’m guessing their faces are hideous, and all are baring their steroid-pumped chests. Shit, I don’t want to think about how small their balls must be to look so jacked up. If they’re getting any pussy from being a cover model, I’m going to assume the girls will be sorely disappointed once they take off their pants.
The books also have similar titles, like Bad Boy Being Badder and Sluts R Us, and all seem to be written by Sassy LaRue and Lacey Lippes and I. Swallows.
And they’re all selling well.
All of them.
Now I’m determined to find out just how well.
I do some Googling which leads me to the website of a best-selling author I’ve never heard of who blatantly states how much she makes from each ebook, how much she needs to sell in order to get to a certain place in the rankings, and how much she makes over the course of a year with a release nearly every month. It’s tacky and probably unprofessional to boast about your earnings like that, but I’m finding it extremely informative, especially since her sales are in excess of three hundred thousand dollars.
I bring out a notepad with the store logo on it and do some math. A lot of math. My degree is coming in handy.
Basically, from what I figure so far, if I make up a pen name, find a stock image of a shirtless roid monkey, and write a twenty to thirty thousand word novella about some kind of romantic or sexual endeavour, and put it up on Amazon for ninety-nine cents, I could stand to rake in some dough. If I released every month, I’d get even more dough. If I put some money into advertising and marketing, according to various other articles and websites, I could increase my sales even more.
Sales equals money equals saving the store. It means getting enough money to hire a manager who knows what they’re doing, preventing my dad from going into bankruptcy, and giving me the freedom to do—and write—what I really want to.
It’s win, win, win and all I have to do is write some smut.
But it can’t be just smut. It has to be the clit-throbbing, panty-soaking, thigh-squeezing smut that gets women off again and again. Something plotless and easy to follow since masturbating all day has been known to delete a few brain cells. It has to be romantic too, just enough that while the dude is nailing the heroine, he’s considerate (or whipped) enough not to go around nailing everyone else.
I only have a Kindle via app on my iPhone but it’s a good enough start. In the name of research, I start downloading every bestselling erotic romance book I can find until my phone is full of them, and then I start reading. I also make a mental note to not let anyone look through my phone until I’ve read and deleted every one of these suckers.
It’s nearly midnight when my eyes start to cross and my brain feels like rubbish. I’ve made my way through both Big Balls, a sports romance involving a well-hung tennis player named Rock Hardon, and Begging for Seconds, about Chevy Silverado, a billionaire chef who teaches his new cook how a turkey baster should really be used. Surprisingly, it worked a lot better in the book than it did in Gigli.