Marketing is not one of my strong suits. I have all of the makings of a bad marketer: My social media presence is small and very inconsistent (hell, my own writing is inconsistent), I would prefer my audience has as much full access as possible instead of paywalling my content (a point of pride normally but not for a marketer) and I’m not very good at hyping myself up. I think even when I’m proud of something I create and mention it, through my own fault I come across more as an egoist than a hype-beast or something.

Marketing is a weird game to play. As far as I can see, marketing is all about two things: One, getting people to become aware of the thing you’re selling, and two, to convince otherwise unconvinced people to give you money and continued attention for your products. The former is harmless, but the latter unnerves me. I don’t like the idea of people buying my stuff not because they wanted to of their own volition, but rather because I tricked them, and to a small extent, that what marketing is.

To this end, I never know where the line is on my own marketing endeavors. I don’t know how and when to plug my Patreon, I’m not good at getting data on what causes more attention, and social media and I get along like oil and water. I’m trying to get back into being consistent with my Discord server and I have a few things I want to implement here and there – there’s a link below if you either earnestly want to join or want to see me the dumpster fire that is my attempts at retaining an audience. Either way I hope it’ll be entertaining, and would love to have anyone interested join.

Recently, a friend with benefits of mine, having passed my trust test, became aware of my writing and got to read a few of my works. She’s majoring in marketing in college, so her opinion was valuable to me. To my joy, she told me that the website itself was intuitive and easy to navigate, which was a win. She also told me that I should be plugging my monetizeable assets, in this case my Patreon, every chance I got. I asked her if that wouldn’t, past a certain point, numb the average reader and annoy them, and she told me that annoying people wasn’t the point and that even if consistent readers would get annoyed, enough new viewers would feel pressured to join that it would make up the difference. And yes, the word used was “pressured.” This anecdote was included in this blog with her permission.

Sometimes I wish I was better at marketing, but I think that’s only because I have this naïve idea that I can be just as user-friendly while making my revenue go up. I don’t really think that’s possible. Honestly, if I truly want to make more with this format, I just have to write more, plain and simple. I could implement her suggestions but at that point, who’s to say that’s any more user friendly than locking content behind a paywall?

Thanks to money troubles among other reasons, my writing at this time is truly inconsistent and unpredictable. In a weird way, I need to fix that externally primarily, and not think that my erotica can save me. It did that once, when a story of mine blew up on a public website. I should post to more public sites for a lot of reasons, but at the end of the day, I need to remember I write primarily for enjoyment. The question of “How do you market erotica?” can be answered with “I don’t know; I don’t want to,” and I don’t think that’s an invalid answer.

Don’t get me wrong; my kind donors, including a very kind viewer that signed up just last week, help enormously. But I think I had this idea years ago that I’ve naively clung to, that I could write erotica full-time and also not have to sell my soul or overwork myself. I no longer think that’s in the cards, and selling my soul and overworking myself both sound terrible. I think I’ll choose to be happy with what I have.

If you enjoy my works or are even curious what the community of a site like this could look like, I again invite you to check out the site’s Discord server, linked below. I can only imagine the creepiness of most erotica site Discord servers, but I’ve been amazed at the supportive, inquisitive, honest, and non-creepy qualities of the people in it… and I wouldn’t say that if it weren’t true. Some of them are even writers themselves; some having started after they join the server, with their works being linked in some channels. If like me you’re not here for the hustle and bustle and you’re content with the occasional story and a small but kind community, I have a feeling you’d enjoy it. I’ll talk to you all next week.

Click this image to be taken to Bashful Scribe’s Discord server.