Peter’s books have always sold in a slow, irregular trickle. Part of the reason is that Amazon doesn’t let erotica authors advertise on their platform. There are other ways to advertise; however, until recently, we hadn’t tried anything other than this blog and the occasional tweet.
A week ago, we asked a casual question of a fellow erotica author that led to a big change in our approach. Successful gay erotica author Jean Valjean recommended animated gifs and a jukebox tool that allows us to create a few dozen salacious tweets that trickle out in random order four times a day. We’re up to 150 backlogged tweets and will likely stop at 500.
Creating 150 unique tweets from Peter’s books (mostly) was eye-opening. We never stopped to check our editing jobs on the books. WOW. It’s hard to market a bunch of books that still need a polish or two. Being forced to say something arousing in 280 characters or less makes for extremely concise edits. Adverbs and adjectives are the first to go. Names get replaced with “he”. Entire descriptive sentences vanish, leaving the raw act of sex exposed.
With this new mindset, PS publishing vows to edit every book again. Right now, the books are in a genre that we probably invented called “Anatomical Smut.” If you’ve read Peter’s works, you know that he spends an inordinate amount of time describing how massive size impacts the innards of the bottom and the life of the top. When a male character gets pregnant, the book is essentially written from inside the colon. We’re going to keep looking through his hoard of manuscripts to see if some were rewritten as gay romance, which didn’t even exist as a genre until the 1970’s.
So look for some revisions to Peter’s novels in the weeks and months to come.
If you’re interested in the steamy Twitter ad campaign, which is much more polished than the books, check out Peter’s Twitter
UPDATE: There are over 1,500 tweets stacked up in the jukebox now, and dozens more added each week. Be sure to check out the Twitter feed. It’s a smorgasbord of big fat dicks.
Peter Schutes 