Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
The preferred term these days is erotic or adult romance. Or as my dear old dad referred to it, porn for ladies.  |
BTW, vis-a-vis our discussion about recidivists:
It's my experience that our clientele tends to be three groups, largely.
- Memoirs--man, lots and lots of memoirs, from people who presumably, are writing them for their family members. sure, they publish them, but they're pretty regular, everyday folks, who haven't done anything remarkable, so I presume that their sales are pretty meager. Obviously, not many folks write more than one memoir.
- People who've heard that you can make BIG money publishing books; who've never met a writing course that they liked, don't need no stinkin' writing group or critique group, and they're not gonna spend any advertising money or money on covers until their first book makes them rich. Suffice to say, we usually see them once and only once.
- Determined writers. These are our recidivists (repeat customers). We have many for whom we've done 6+ books, over the past 9-10 years. They're determined to write. Yes, they write for their own enjoyment, but they are also determined to be "working writers." We get quite a bit of biz from those folks, typically one book/year.
Also, in terms of my numbers--while I can tell, pretty accurately, how many books we've made, it's far more difficult for me to tell how many unique clients we actually have had. My accounting/billing system tracks "customers" in terms of who has received a quote, and how many invoices we've sent out, but it's a major undertaking (I have to request the report from the software company) to determine unique invididuals who've received an invoice. (We have another 2K invoices for customers that have had rework done on their books, editing invoices, etc.) So, my figures of number of customers are guesstimates, based on how we organize our clent folders (last name, first name, with their individual books in sub-folders). So, hell, I could be off by 500 bodies. But I think the numbers are about right, as of the end of 2018--something over 4K books for 3K-ish clients. {shrug}. Also, that's from the "new" accounting system that we started in 3rd quarter 2011, so all the customers from '09 to that point aren't counted, either. For that matter, neither are their books.
Honestly...the numbers are to reassure prospective buyers that we're not some fly-by-night (even though most of them found us through Amazon). They were probably more important in 2010--the numbers, I mean, but then again, the demographic of the clientele has changed dramatically. The customers now are more skittish, far far less technically-oriented (a huge number of our clients use yahoo, AOL and Hotmail email addresses, for example), and more afraid of the process than the early adopters in 2010, for example. We do significantly more print than we ever did, so our overall production of "books" per year is lower now, as each book that has the print component as well as the eBook components takes longer to do. Fewer books, fewer customers. {shrug}. If it matters.
FWIW.
Also--I find that the vast bulk of "erotica" authors don't use formatters. Their business model doesn't support it, which is numerous books, each of which sells quickly and not abundantly. As I understand it, erotica authors will turn out a dozen "books" per year, uploading them as Word files with branded titles or what-have-you. No joke, we've had exceedingly few requests for quotes on erotica.
Hitch