Romance / Erotica Shorts Pricing and Length

I've been looking through Smashwords at other erotica writers, as I have a few short pieces I'd like to put up, but I'm having a bit of trouble determining the appropriate length and price that is 'standard'.

I see some books that are 3000 words and 2.99, and others that are 20,000 words and .99.

What price point would something around 3500 words go for? How about something that is a bit more involved, story wise, and 40,000 words? Still erotica, just more plot around it. What about 10,000 words?

I can't really find the balance or the typical prices, and of course it's a lot harder to find out how much success people had with various price points.

I tried looking around, but I've seen a lot of things that say romance and erotica is different in how it's treated by consumers and how much they're willing to pay for a short, but I haven't been able to find out how much to charge.

By niche would you mean BDSM style or would it be anything that isn't the traditional boy meets girl, boy and girl have soft, consensual, vanilla love?

It's such a shame. I've spent so much time writing this stuff, and reading it, but I have no idea what people's boundaries are. I spent a lot of time on a fantasy erotica stuff where I was told that a very extreme story I wrote didn't need an extreme tag because their level of extreme was faar different from my own.

I'm totally fumbling in the dark here. Thanks so much for your input

veinglory said:

I mean stuff that is a really under-served niche, like smoking fetish, transformation or extreme femdom. In areas like that some people will pay whatever they have to.

Just my approach, but I self-published my shorts in a themed collection. It felt like a better unit for setting a good price point.

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Haha, alright, those are far from my field of expertise and interest.

JanDarby said:

FWIW, I've self-published several short story erotica (in the 3k-word range) at 99 cents. They're basically re-releases, things that were published at a now-defunct website, and it seemed like a reasonable price. One is a collection of three stories, for a slightly longer total word count, but they're shorter than the ones released alone, and the collection is also at 99 cents. If I released a group of the other stories as a collection, I would increase the price, to something a bit less than the number of stories times 99 cents.

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Thanks so much!