Sunday, I was unstoppable and finished publishing House Party 2, 3, and 4 in paperback. I’ve still got a couple of issues with QuarkXPress but for the most part have figured out how to get around the kinks in their system. I’m on a first name basis with the head of their development team and I’ve been surprised that he hasn’t blocked my number. Being a software developer in a past life, gives me insight on how to help them zero in on resolving issues.
It was pretty cool to start with the basic document file for the eBook versions and punch that out into a completely different format, was neat. The first book, House Party, took most of a day to convert to print format. Then I did three books in one day!
Just sending an email with “Your product sucks!” or “it doesn’t work” is not very helpful to most programmers. You have to provide them with examples and exactly how to reproduce the problem. It’s time consuming on my part but if I like a product, it only benefits me to help make it better.
I guess not being able to go to house parties has freed me to get mine out the door. I even refreshed Stripper or Nurse? in print and republished it. Slaving over a hot keyboard, that’s me!
This morning, I got notification that HP2, HP3, HP4, and SorN sailed through the approval process and are now live and available for purchase. So everyone grab your credit card and send me some love! Just kidding, as an engineer the process or path to the goal is the most important thing. Besides patting it on the head and letting it go out and play in traffic, that’s not as much fun as getting it out the door.
While I appreciate every dollar my stories earn, I couldn’t keep my Frenchie in Blue Buffalo or Wifey in stripper shoes. I guess we all dream of being the next James Patterson but like basketball players, only a handful make it into the big leagues.
Besides 50 Shades, authors who write porn have to be content to living on the shelf under the counter of the dirty book store until some pervert shows up to buy us. The last we see before being shoved into that paperbag is the burn of the Lysol as the clerk sanitizes everything.
The last ten years of writing erotica, has been interesting to say the least. Being in the Lifestyle, a lot of what you do cannot be talked about around the coffee pot at work. Foxy and I have had some of the best times of our lives meeting fellow swingers. While other people are bragging about their new car, you urge to burst out with, “That’s nothing! You should have seen this blonde I banged!”
My stories always have a fair amount of humor in them as that’s been my experience, this is a lot of fun. A lot of erotica deals with pain and fighting as the husband suddenly figures out that they’ve moved three times and still have the same milkman.
I think as a writer you subconsciously inject pieces of your situation into your stories. I’ve created a fictional copy of ourselves who are in most of my stories. I quickly figured out that it was probably a mistake but early on I wanted to talk about our experiences. This was before I realized that I enjoyed writing erotic stories and could do a reasonably decent job at it.
The fictional copies of us tend to be pretty true to form. Maybe not as far off the edge but generally speaking, we did most of what our make-believe selves have done. If I come up with a storyline that includes activities outside our margins, I’ll typically create real fictional characters to do the dirty stuff.
According to statics, somewhere around 2.5% of the population throw their house keys in a bowl but I tend to think it’s a little higher than that. Of course, when you’re out in public and on the lookout, you tend to see what you want to see.
As usual, my rambling mind has made a detour into the closest ditch and now spinning its wheels. I just wanted to brag about being able to convert 3 stories into print novels in a single day!
Speaking of bragging, I am now approaching four thousand stories sold on SmashWords. I don’t know how that stacks up against other authors of erotica but it seems pretty cool to me?
My House Party series is only available on Kinky Literature or Amazon due to contractual requirements. Check my links below if you’re interested in learning more?
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) 
Congrats on all three: finishing the books, getting them published, and being an unpaid beta tester.
scratch the last, you’re not unpaid, you’re in the hole since you paid for the product.
I totally get your bit about giving software guys what they need to recreate the problem. i do that as part of my job. i’ll either get a call from a customer saying “it doesn’t work” and have to pull the details out of them to figure out just what that means, or i’ll be the test lead on a release candidate and have to check what happens if you do the illogical things our users normally do.
i don’t write code, but got my degree in physics, with a minor in math and philosophy.
so, as i look at it, i was trained to think and deconstruct any question/item/issue into its fundamental parts, separate the wheat from the chaff, and focus on that.
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I agree and have been down that road myself. This morning I spent about an hour on the phone as they called to talk to me about my concerns. While I did pick up a couple of nuggets of information, it was basically a time suck. When I would ask why does it this this which is in opposition to standard practices on Windows and MacOS, I got the same answer, “That’s the way the program works and we can’t change it.” Which I thought was a **** remark as what he was saying is that if it’s broke, it stays broke. I’ve had a number of conversations with a team leader and those went completely differently. The guy who called was obviously a Tier 1 support person whose first method of fixing something is it turned on? He went down my numerous list of trouble tickets and told me that they couldn’t do anything about one of them. Then I told him, well your boss agrees with me and it’s on the list to be fixed, he kind of brushed it off. I think it was a language problem. Anyway time goes on and I think I’ve retrained myself.
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The unstoppable Larry Archer! Seriously, congratulations!
I love the “don’t blame me” graphic!
As far as working with software people is concerned – if you can get hold of a real person, that person is likely to be very grateful to get detailed feedback and information about software issues. I’m a software developer myself, and I know that as much as you’d like to, you can’t test every possible configuration or scenario. Intelligent, observant and organized users are a Godsend.
Last year I had some great interactions with the tech support people at Zoom. I had a problem that apparently showed up only on Linux. Apparently they don’t have that many users for their Linux client, so they seemed very pleased to talk with me. (And the issue did get resolved.)
Hope your print books do as well as your ebooks, Larry!
xxoo,
Lisabet
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Thanks Lisabet. A while back I was on a tear creating Twitter ads and that was one of my favorite. If we can’t laugh at ourselves, what good are we?
Once I had a customer who called me and said, “Did you know that instead of entering a number as requested, you press the “x” key 27 times then your program will crash?” My first response was, “Why would you do that?” It turned to be a buffer overflow problem, which I fixed but what your users do never fails to amaze me.
Only time will tell about sales. I’m trying to figure out if your library size helps sales. I’m working on about five more to put into print. Currently, mostly done with “Crashing the Swinger’s Pajama Party,” which is one of my all time favorites. I loved our work together on that story and all your input. Sales with one or two print novels have been super slow and maybe having a bunch available will help.
The jury is still out on the sales of print erotica in my mind? Del seems to be doing pretty good with them. He focuses on Hotwife stories, which I think appeals to the older crowd, who maybe more comfortable holding a book rather than their phone. At least that’s my current working theory? I’ve never tried to satisfy an audience only myself.
I still have a Linux laptop and desktop somewhere in my office. I’m guessing that Linux is still used in college. I took several C++ courses and bought a $300 laptop that came with Windows but was so slow. The Best Buy sales guy almost pleaded with me to not buy it as it took about 15 minutes to boot. I brought it home and immediately stuck Ubuntu on it. It was fast with Linux. I used it to do my homework because I could email the programs to my professor rather than developing them on my Windows laptop, and fixing them to run under Linux.
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