Sex Sells

“Sex sells.” It’s an old advertising adage. It might be shocking that at one point, I had considered advertising as a career. The answer to the question, why is because I wanted to do something creative. In Michigan, and I’m guessing throughout most of the mid-west, we are told that there is no money in writing. Sure, there are journalists, but with the newspaper industry dying a slow death, parents worry about their kids having a decent career. Being the rebel I am, the decision to write came after I lost my job eight years ago. I have been a writer, a paid writer for almost a decade!

When I started out, I was a novice. I took any job offered to me on Odesk. Yes, I have been around long enough that Upwork used to be called something else. Most of the jobs I got on there were for ghostwriting erotic novels. Whenever someone asked me what I did, I would just say that I was a writer and had a celebrity gossip blog. I was embarrassed by what I did but not enough to save the money that I made from it. Erotica wasn’t mainstream yet, and there was no way the stuff I was writing would win over a mass audience.

Then came my big turning point. A publisher asked me to write a trilogy for them. They gave me an actual publication contract and the promise of royalties, which I still get to this day! The first book was written in less than a day, erotica consists of almost no research, and sent in. Before I knew it, I was told that it was going to be published. The day of publication, I was in NYC on vacation with my best friend. I strutted around Stonewall like I was a celebrity because in my mind I was. I’ve never finished the trilogy as the publisher decided to move away from the erotic stories that had sold so well for them, but I know where the story is going and when the rights revert back to me, I will finish the story.

After that success, I decided to move into something more mainstream. My blog even fell by the wayside too. My work made me start to think about more traditional nonfiction and social media. So I wrote Hashtag Your Way To Success, which is being shipped to publishers as we speak. My fiction consisted mostly of short and flash fiction, but money was being made for writing! Because writing Hashtag was so fun, I wrote a guide to becoming a freelancer, a weight loss guide and a cookbook for the weight loss guide. All of them are in various stages of the publication process. The one day, I realized that I missed writing fiction.

There is something about creating fictional worlds that is so great. Shape of Love my first pure romance novel poured out of me, but I had no interest in being just a romance writer. So I turned my sights onto satire and started writing One Death to Live. As fun, as it was my interest, was turning again.

This time I found myself intrigued by true crime. The Forgotten McScam, which you can read right here in the Criminal section, got a lot of pageviews really fast. Maybe I should write a book? I thought. Then a guy I was talking to challenged me, after reading one of my erotic stories, write about Sex and see what happens.

With that challenge in mind, I wrote Does Size Matter and was amazed at the results. The pageviews grew by the minute! It had to be a fluke, so I started to alternate and eventually combine sex and true crime. The result was an increase in revenue for me and more pageviews to get my name out there. My sex stories all have done very well. Surprisingly so!

That lead me to create some more erotic stories, novels. Will I become rich writing about sex? Maybe. There are authors out there bringing in 6 figures every year by writing smut. There is hope for me to be one of them. I know my niche, LGBT, and I know how to write to them. And yes I know that straight women consume more of the gay erotica and he’s they will be well served. It’s the beginning of a new, old career for me.

While parents may have good intentions, they shouldn’t discourage their kids from a creative career. Lucky for me, I was laid off and given a chance to explore what I love and have transformed my career more times than Madonna. But lucky for me, I rediscovered that sex really does sell.