Self-Publishing Steps
What I’ve Learned from Selling AMWF Romantic Erotica Short Stories and Books on Amazon in the United States (You’ll notice that I’m repeating keywords. Do that.):
1. Pay a friend or agent to set up an anonymous LLC (in NM, WY, DE, or NV), and get an EIN from the IRS.gov, but also consider if you really need to be that anonymous.
2. Get a business bank account. Wells Fargo has good deals for banking. Are you trying to sell anything beyond erotica? Most website payment processors ban that. I hear authorize.net works, but there’s always a risk with processors that you’ll get banned and they’ll confiscate your payments. I prefer PayPal for payment processing, since they don’t reveal too much on invoices. Still, there is a possibility that PayPal could ban, if a book crosses the line. That’s more likely to occur if the art has nudity, or the writing has overt taboos.
3. Make a plan to foil thieves. (I’ll post more about this later, but essentially, put your name in your stories, and in your art, and hopefully thievery will mostly be free advertising then.)
4. Get a real copyright certificate from the copyright.gov office. Consider trademarks too, if you can afford it. You’ll need a copyright registration to prove ownership if it’s ever contested. (Amazon might request it.) For a book, or a collection of short stories like I have, the regular registration is the way to go. I can’t use the “group of unpublished works” registration because my word count is too high, and each story is counted separately, so if my book has 15 stories in it, that’s 5 more than is allowed in one group, and I’d be paying even more to do it that way.
5. If you use Canva to edit your images, or compose your covers, you need to thoroughly remove their metadata tags, or Amazon will ban you. You can do this by uploading and saving your images in Fotor. It won’t work to use the Microsoft Windows way of removing metadata, because it will look to you like Microsoft Windows removes the metadata, but it really doesn’t. (Canva even puts in a metatag that has your name, so be sure to save your Canva work through Fotor to remove it.)
6. Buy a domain name/website space (wix.com or dreamhost.com) to make a subscriber based mailing list. You’ll need an email from your webhost, and a couple others (Google and Live, for example). I recommend making a WordPress site using Dreamhost so that you can download and transfer your entire site to another host if you ever need to. You won’t be able to do that with proprietary site builders like Wix, but Wix will be a lot easier for a novice to cope with.
7. If you make a WordPress site, install these widgets: AgeGate to block youth, MailPoet to create a subscriber list, and Block AI Crawlers to at least attempt to prevent AI crawlers and bots from searching your site. You should also password protect any page that has a story on it, since crawlers usually don’t go past passwords (though they sometimes can).
8. Build up your social media and deep dive into marketing. Pay close attention to what will get you banned from social media (self promotion, for example). In most cases, it’s best to only post original posts in your own page, and restrict yourself to bland comments in other people’s posts.
9. Follow tutorials to self publish on Amazon after learning about what will get you banned from Amazon (using clip art from Canva, or explicit images, or taboo material, for example). Also, make sure you are following you local laws. At first, publish only in ebook format until you are used to the whole thing. It’s easy to delete and back out of ebooks if you discover later that you’ve made a huge error.
10. Consider multiple streams of income/exposure to widen your net. Make instructional videos on YouTube, for example, or read your books aloud (audio books), or act out some scenes. You might need to learn multiple skills, such as photo editing and some coding. I recommend using Natural Readers.com for making audio books – especially using the Voice Changer feature.
I’ll be making tutorial videos to show others how to do all this, but it’s a project that I’ll have to set aside time for.
