With In My Dreams in the can, as they say in the movie business, I’ve decided to go through my published erotica and offer more of my titles in print form. I’ve decided to start with the House Party series of four books and currently re-editing the story to ferret out any lapses in judgment when I was trying to type with one hand and abusing myself with the other.
As much as I hate to say this, House Party was damn good. I’d forgotten a lot of the detail in the story as it’s several years old. It’s like I’m reading it for the first time, and I’m impressed. I’d pat myself on the back but would probably injure my shoulder doing it.
I must be a glutton for punishment as I wasn’t happy with the initial output created automatically by Amazon’s conversion routines. I know that I could have generated the PDF straight from Word, but since this is a print book, I wanted it to have the bells and whistles of the average book you buy at Barnes and Noble. So I invested another $450 bucks in updating my QuarkXPress to the latest version to satisfy my anal OCD impulses. While my existing copy worked fine, there is nothing like the new car smell of software right out of the cellophane. I need to sell a bunch of copies of In My Dreams and House Party to get me back in the black. As if that will ever happen.
I’m about a third of the way through House Party as I check for errors or better ways to say things. The story is almost 90,000 words and too long to work through in one pass. Nevertheless, my mind tends to wander after a while, and it’s a good thing Word will return you to the point at which you stopped.
The other three books in the House Party series were created with Scrivener, which is better suited from the author’s standpoint of keeping track of your position. I’ve got to the point that virtually all of my writing is now in Scrivener as I’ve drunk the Koolaide.
In many of my stories, the main characters, Foxy and Larry, reflect us in real life, and now my next worry is Foxy being pissed at me for how I portray her in stories. I’ve always tried to picture the fictional Foxy and Larry reacting in the same fashion as we would do in real life. In the House Party series, she leaves Larry and runs off to Los Angeles to begin a career as a porn star.
Foxy being a porn star is certainly in the realm of possibility but abandoning our marriage is something I’d like to think would not happen. We’ve always enjoyed swinging, and it has enriched our lives because of the people we’ve met and the things we’ve done. While I don’t think everyone should throw their house keys in a bowl, we’ve had a lot of fun doing it.
The Lifestyle is not all fucking and sucking as we are prone to say. Straights probably think that we go from one orgy to another and are always looking for our clothes. That might be how things work, but it’s a lot more complex than that.
We’ve formed lifelong friendships with the people we’ve met and partied with. Divorce is almost unheard of in our circle, which is the opposite of straight couples. Most of the reasons you would bang a coworker and end up in front of Judge Judy don’t exist for us. If I have the hots for someone, I can tell my wife, as she’ll often say, “Can I join you?” The biggest problem with having a threesome with my wife is that I usually have to settle for sloppy seconds.
It’s like one night I came into the bedroom, and my wife demanded that I take a shower as the perfume was making her nauseous. She wasn’t upset that I got some strange stuff, only that she disapproved of the scent the girl was wearing.
I’m Larry Archer, and I write erotic stories for the huddled and yearning masses. Foxy and I are swingers in real life, and I write about the things we do and see. While the Lifestyle is not for everyone, it’s been fun for us. My smut is explicit and hardcore but with a somewhat plot. My porn stories are generally positive and fun as this reflects how enjoyable swinging has been to us. If you’re interested in checking out my stories, I publish at all the typical outlets.
Larry Archer's World (LarryArcher.blog) 
I’m very curious to find out whether your print versions sell, Larry. I’ve been considering putting my longer works in print, too, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.
Good luck!
xxoo,
Lisabet
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Del does pretty good with print books from what I understand. Personally, I’m not convinced that it’s really worth the trouble but it does give you another avenue to pursue sales. Having said that, I haven’t really pushed my first print book Stripper or Nurse and any low sales are likely my fault. The major reason I’m doing it is to get my wife to read and provide input on the smut I write. I thought I had her convinced but she’s retreated and says it’s print or nothing. If she wasn’t so cute I’d be mad at her. The biggest hurdle I see is formatting the output properly. Amazon will convert your doc file but it really needs to be a PDF. A properly formatted print book should follow certain norms and that gets tricky with a word processor.
I used to do magazine layouts and learned a lot about using Quark to set up the page templates. On the first go-around with In My Dreams, I let Amazon do the work and while it was okay, the result didn’t knock it out of the park. But Foxy wanted to read something and I knew deep down that I’d end up with Quark, I ordered her a copy to read.
I want to try print books and would love to see Foxy read my smut as I know that she’d have good feedback. The bottom line is that I’d encourage you to try it, if you have the ability to generate a PDF, I’d try converting one of your existing stories to PDF before starting the process on Amazon. It’s pretty cool to be able to hold your story in your hand and the journey is somewhat like nipple clamps. They feel good when they are off!
If you publish a print book, Foxy said she’d love to Jill Off to one of your stories!
XOXO F&L
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After posting my response to your comment, I started reading Mark Coker’s predictions for 2022 and one paragraph was right on topic to our thread.
“More authors embrace print on demand – With print on demand (POD), your book is printed after the customer orders it. POD offers myriad advantages to authors, publishers and readers. For authors and publishers, single-copy prints and small print runs are economical. POD eliminates the need to pay for and carry unsold inventory, and your book never goes out of print. By offering your book in print as well as digital, you increase the accessibility and desirability of your book to readers who prefer print, or who want to purchase both. Indie authors have historically made print publishing a secondary priority to ebooks. POD’s setup expenses, which for most indies involves additional investment in graphic design and interior book design, do make the current state of the art in POD more costly than the low-cost and simplicity of ebook publishing, but this is changing as the technology improves. With more book buying shifting online, POD makes more sense for indies than ever, especially considering that 75% of book sales by dollar volume go to print.”
He makes sense to me.
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