re comparing erotic romance publishers

I'm not sure what I might do to help, but I'd be happy to do it. I find raw HTML confusing (And this comes from someone who could program IBM mainframes in assembly language[at least the IBM 360, 370,4400 series)

I'd be happy to help assemble reports and stats and all that stuff.

Scott

I'm not sure what I can do to help, either (I'm computer stupid), but at the very least I'm a member of Passionate Ink (the erotic romance chapter of RWA) and can plug the site and try to urge people to contribute--we have lots of epubbed members.

You might want to link to Brenda Hiatt (Brendahiatt.com) and her "Show Me the Money" page. She's been collecting voluntary and anonymous (she gets the info with the author's name, obviously, but the name doesn't go into anything public, and she even erases it from her own records once she's added in the data) information on advances, royalties and payouts of romance publishers, including epubs.

She's the first to admit it's not scientific, and it depends largely on the author participation, and in cases where very few provide info, the figures are skewed in all sorts of directions, but she provides the number of responses it's based on for each publisher so you can adjust accordingly, and it's more information on realistic financial expectations than you'll find just about anywhere else.

She doesn't have info on Liquid Silver, but she's got two entries for Ellora's Cave, one for single-title books and one for anthologies, based on reasonable numbers of authors providing information. A few other epubs are listed, although the number of people reporting is so low as to make the figures statistically insignificant, but still interesting if you view it, not so much as an average or what you can expect, but what a few authors earned.

It might be interesting to create a similar sort of poll/database (unless, of course, it's been done already, and I haven't checked into it), perhaps at this proposed site comparing the epubs, with a very few basic questions like turn-around time, editing experience and cover quality, somehow limiting it to the authors pubbed with the particular epubs.

JD

I'm good at nagging people.

As to other stuff, let me think a bit about my schedule and get back to you.

JD

I'm not good w/ matters dealing with a) numbers or b) technical stuff.

With blogging and other random grunt work, I can help.

If you need any coding help, please let me know. I can do perl, php, html... whatever. Although it sounds like you have most of the back-end in place already.

So I'm not sure if this would be useful (ignore me if it isn't, I'm posting despite my usual "no posting on nyquil" rule), but have you heard of the Vanilla forum? It's an extremely 'light' version of a regular forum, with hefty search features, that would lend itself to an encyclopedia-type site very easily.

Assuming you don't have a more custom thing or a CMS already picked out, that is. Okay, gonna stop rambling now.

I was brainstorming a bit on the general topic of how to choose an epub and how it's really different for each writer, depending on what he/she wants to get out of the experience.

Which led to me to wondering -- would it be useful to have a sample business plan for erotic romance writers with some of the issues highlighted, with some options in each section, that would correspond to the parameters in any comparison chart or poll of whatever of the epublishers? It might be a good organizational tool to tie the assorted issues together.

In other words, one part of a biz plan is to define one's niche, which correlates with the publisher's niche that one would target. In other words, if the writer knows she tends toward m/m stories for f readers, or bondage stories or whatever, that becomes her niche. Or it could be more general than that, but there's probably some common thread (and that's another related topic of discussion, figuring out that common thread, which would help determine which epub is best for a given author or a given story). And then, she'd want to look up other information on the site about which publishers are best at handling that type of story and cross-reference it with other goals she might have in her business plan.

So, the sample business plan could have a section that read something like:

I intend to write:
m/m stories
menage stories
paranormal stories
[etc.]
for an audience that consists of:
women
men
vampires
[I don't know, perhaps more along the lines of "women who read so-and-so's books" or "women who are more adventurous in their reading than average" or "women who are less adventurous in their reading" or some such thing. I haven't thought out all the options, obviously.]

Then, there's usually a section in a biz plan on one's goals (e.g., make a basic living, hit the NY Times list, attain name recognition on a small level to build upon later, get editorial and reader feedback, etc.) and another on how one is going to achieve one's goals, which could lead to a discussion of what the epub does for its authors (e.g., distribution, name recognition, feedback, reviews, etc.)

Does that make sense? Does anyone think it would be interesting or useful?

JD, whose legal training and contract-writing background is showing.

New here.

I checked the site out and will say I really like the layout. Simple, easy to navigate, so that's a plus right up front. Pages are short so load time is also. Many forget that some people still use dial-up. I don't, but others do.

Preditors and Editors - i instead of a in Preditors. Used to say on the site that they did that on purpose, don't know if it still does or not.

Also, a link to anything and everything is always nice, even if it's there somewhere, each time you put the name of a site in the text area it should be linked. People are lazy, er, I am anyway and many don't have the time to keep looking around. Just my observation there.

As I said, I like the look you've got going. It was quite refreshing actually!

Melanie A.

Melanie: welcome! Hope to see you around here more often.

Jan: that sounds interesting. I think it would be helpful to some newbies.

Personally I'm still looking for my niche.

I'm semi-new to the epublishing world, so I'm not sure who would be an "important" publisher.

I have personal experience w/ Forbidden Publications and Freya's Bower.

Publishers not mentioned on your list:
Silk's Vault Publishing
Samhain
New Concepts
Triskelion publishing

Right. You need people to keep coming back.

:utting thinking cap on, battered and holey as it is::

First, here at the water cooler I did a Lot of copy/paste to find links to ER sites. Granted, there's probably somewhere they're linked, but this is a huge place and I haven't been able to see everything. So, having them all in one place and easy to find is a good thing.

There are members here that are published at some ER places, yes? Would they be willing to help by allowing their books to be put up and with a possible chapter, or partial chapter? It would be free advertisement for them. And, that's something that could be updated when they have something new, or a new author gets their foot in the door.

Would any of the ER editors be willing to be interviewed? Get what they want and are looking for straight from the horses mouth, so to speak. Maybe some do's and don't's from them in more detail than what they have listed.

I wouldn't mind seeing a page devoted to all the slang that is used. See, I'm new to this side of writing and believe me, it can get confusing. Everything seems to get shortened all the time. Yeah, showing my ignorance here.

See, you're going to get new writers coming in too, and they want to know what's what.

Something for others to link to. Nothing flashy, but pretty and nice looking they can put on their websites.

Interviews with authors around here could be added.

Interviews with struggling writers who are trying to break in.

Have both talk about their writing process. Trust me, others are interested in how others write. It can help boost confidence that others are not alone.

Know anyone who would be willing to write weekly or monthly columns about do's, don't's, why's and wherefore's of writing erotica romance? Some guidelines to help those struggling to get on the right track. Maybe even with some examples.

What's hot this month, what isn't.

Who got picked up by some big NY publishing house after writing for one of the electronic publishers? Didn't I just read something about that here, or somewhere?

Okay, can't think of anything else right now. And not sure if what I came up with is even what you were looking for.

...knowing what sort of publisher you want, then finding it! Any chance you could start even an introductory statement along those lines for the main page?

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Sure. Just give me a few days. Until Monday, say. I've got a bunch of other things on my agenda that will take priority, but I should be able to get something together for you to look at.

How about setting a go-live date, when we can have it together and start telling people about it? (See, I told you I was good at nagging.) Something to work toward getting stuff together by? September 1 maybe? I've always felt September was a natural "new year," a good time for starting stuff. Or perhaps the Monday after Labor Day, b/c it's still peak vacation time and prepping for back-to-school until then.

I've already got a blogger account (should be "JanDarby" although I'm a novice at this blogging stuff), and can blog on the sort of business-decision issues I mentioned in my biz-plan post. I can't commit to daily blogs, not even sure about weekly, but I can certainly do once-monthly and perhaps every two weeks.

Haven't checked the site out yet, but will later this evening. Assuming the intermittent thunderstorms don't knock out the power.

Oh, and as an aside, are we limiting this to e-pubs or should we mention the traditional pubs of erotic romance? There were some free print copies of erotic romance (Virgin Books, Red Sage and Kensington's Aphrodisia) in the goodie bag at the RWA conference, and I've been looking them over, trying to get a handle on the differences among them.

JD

Very attractive! I love how sleek it is; very classy and elegant. And the color scheme is luscious.

I'm embarrassed to admit I couldn't figure out the publisher section at first, until I realized that there's different data for each publisher on each page.

Maybe name each section, like "Requirements", "Sales", "Contract Details" or something? Or put them all on one page... or I could just be very, very slow (a definite possibility) and nobody else has this problem.

I would also suggest a "home" link on the menu bar, and maybe off-setting the different categories (meta, publishers, big name publishers) in the menu bar or separating them with section titles.

Hmm. I think I'd also divide the reviews into 'summary' (basically the tables) and 'detailed' (write-up similar to the one for Ellora's Cave), with the detailed ones linked from the company name on the table page. With the goal of having a detailed write-up for each e-publisher but at minimum a table entry.

Man, can you tell I'm between projects at the moment?

veinglory said:

One way to do it would be to start a blog and give everyone posting rights. then popular posts would go to the website? Please let me know if you would like to be involved. I would prefer to use blogger as I can host it under the main page.

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I said this on RD so it's really just a reiteration here. I think your best bet would be to use a CMS for your main said like WordPress. It will make keeping your site updated simple. WP is very easy to install and well worth it in my opinion, there are also some very nifty plugins that would make it look more like a website than a blog.

Wordpress is pretty spiffy; if you do decide to go the CMS route, I'd suggest Drupal instead, though, since it's got more community oriented features.

I'm not big on CMS's, though. They're usually nicely put together, and great for organizing a big site, but tend to have a lot of 'feature bloat'. There *is* something to be said for picking a system early, though -- then you don't have to worry about migrating everything into a new system later when you outgrow your existing system.

But then, of course, a custom, tailored script will do exactly what you want from the gate, and CSV files are pretty portable.

Let me know what kind of article you need and I'll come up with something for you. I'm crappy at concepts but can usually crank out the execution.