We’re two days into 2024 and I’m already baffled.
In truth, I’ve been baffled for the last couple of weeks. 2023 was weird, 2024 promises to be weirder still. But what has really set my head spinning is my book sales.
I haven’t been running a lot of promotions this past year (something I hope to remedy shortly). Mostly I’ve been letting my bibliography sit around on Amazon, waiting for readers to discover my work on their own. Despite this, there’s been a steady trickle of sales and page reads through the Kindle Unlimited program.
Necropolis, Epitaph, and Longshot Comics remain evergreen. Also in the mix, deep down the list, are a few standalone short stories I published as a dry run for bigger books. Carrion Luggage, Choke the Chicken, and Hot Pennies are convenient giveaways that serve as advertising each quarter. I set them for free, in accordance with Amazon’s exclusivity rules, and let random people grab copies in the hopes they might want to read more and buy a full-length novel or collection.
I’ve considered unpublishing them in the past, just to clean up my digital bookshelf, but they serve a purpose, so I’ve left them alone thus far. It costs me nothing to let them persist, and the occasional sale or read-through can put a few more bucks in my pocket once in a while.
But there’s one more short story sitting in my Amazon-author management page I’ve never told anyone about. Unlike the others, I didn’t design a physical paperback, and I’ve never promoted it beyond making it a freebie for a few days back in 2016/17 in order to see how that system worked.
It was, unofficially, the very first book I published on Amazon.
And it is smut.
Don’t go looking for it on my author page, or even asking me what the book is called. I put in out under a pen name I never used again, and it was meant to be practice for formatting an ebook and making a cover image. I disavow it, and will never admit to being its author.
So why did I write it at all?
The explanation goes back over thirty years, to my earliest days as a professional writer. Frustrated with the submission process for magazines and anthologies, I got it in my head that I might make some quick money writing pornographic fiction for girlie magazines. It seemed like low-hanging fruit back in the pre-internet of magazine shops and stroke rags.
So I wrote one. Just one.
Okay, technically two. I had also written a parody of a Penthouse Forum letter for Angry Comics that was meant to be hilariously grotesque rather than titillating.
But this other one… Well, it was meant to get the job done.
Satisfied (not that way), I started sending it out to the various dirty magazines that existed in those days and filled their non-pictorial pages with sexy stories.
Naively, I thought it would be easy to place my attempt at erotica, if only because the caliber of writing was elevated from what they usually printed.
Needless to say, when I heard back (if I heard back at all) it was rejection letters across the board. That’s when I had my epiphany. Why would I waste my time writing this garbage when I could be writing proper literature that will be just as readily rejected?
So I never attempted another of its ilk and went back to being ignored by reputable publishing houses.
Decades later, this embarrassing little manuscript was still taking up a few bits and bytes of hard-drive space. With my venture into Amazon publishing about to begin, I dusted it off, gave it a quick proof read, and threw it online, waiting to see if its fictional author would get any traffic. Or money.
The answer was nope. Which was fine by me, because I didn’t really want my failed erotica to generate any money that might tempt me to write more.
The story has sat untouched since, with no one reading so much as a single page since September of 2017. It was a dead book, like so many on Amazon, never to be discovered by even the deepest of wank-material spelunkers.
In fact, I had it on my to-do list to finally unpublish it with the arrival of 2024, officially erasing it from existence.
And then that baffling thing started happening.
Six years dead as a doornail, thirty years after it first spilled out of the tips of my fingers, my silly bit of smut started to get read. A full copy sold. And then page reads happened. This wasn’t some random Kindle Unlimited masturbator stumbling across it by chance. Multiple readers had to be behind this much movement. It was getting pages read every day, to the point it was my fourth best-seller in December. As of the first couple of days of this year, it’s the only one of my books that’s had any traffic so far.
Thousands of spaces down the Amazon erotica list, with not a single review to its name, people are finding it.
I was able to hold my head up after writing sexually frank stories like Sex Tape and some of the rather extreme ones that appear in Petty Crimes and Vindictive Criminals and Raw and Other Stories. But I guess now I’m officially a pornographer, even if it amounts to far less than one percent of my total output. I am suitably ashamed of myself, but I have to let it run to see how long it takes to die out again, and how many bucks it’s going to passively earn me so long after the fact.
Eyestrain Productions 