Cover Reveals for new series: Michelle's Massage

Hello everyone!  I'm super excited because I have a new project set to come out soon.  It's going to be a series of short erotica pieces.  The series will follow a woman named Michelle through a series of encounters with a very sexy Latino massage therapist.  I just got back the first two covers from the designer and I think they're looking great.

What do you think?

The first story, "The Encounter," will both serve as an intro to the series and as a stand-alone story in its own right.  I'm planning on having it up on Smashwords, Amazon, and AllRomanceEbooks within the next day or two.

Cover Reveal for Sasha's Soldier

I have a new story that I'm working on.  It's completely written, and I have a cover.  Now all I need is to find the time to finish editing it and get it up.  This one is a uniform story.  I've heard those sometimes do well, and it was honestly quite a lot of fun to write.  The main characters are a sexy African American nurse named Sasha and a wounded marine named Kevin.  I enjoyed getting to know these two characters as I wrote about them and to see how they need each other.  And of course the sex was fun too :)

Here's the cover for the story.  I got it back from the designer not long ago, and I'm really very pleased with how it turned out.  Hopefully I should have this out and available for sale soon.

Cover Design

Boy, it has been quite a day today!  I work a . . . not-so riveting day job and it's been nothing but stress, spreadsheets, and grumpy people all day long.

There have been a few saving graces.  First, I just got a copy of Bill Willingham's Fables Volume 4 at the library, and I love Fables.  Second, on my lunch break I got to give my husband a hug and get some exercise.  And third, I'm eating tortellini with broccoli and chicken in a cream sauce.

Most pertinent to this blog, though, is the fact that things are moving forward with "In a Stranger's Arms," my first erotica.  I started editing it last night and also began corresponding with my cover designer.  She asked me a number of questions in order to determine what sorts of images to use on the cover.

She asked what color hair the protagonist's hair is and whether she and her love interest should be dressed or undressed.  She asked whether they should be embracing or kissing.  She asked what sort of background I wanted?  Cityscape?  Apartment?

Some of these I'd already thought about, and some of them provided food for thought.  For example, when writing the piece it actually never came up what my protagonist's hair is.  I was writing from her perspective, and most people don't spend a ton of time thinking about their own hair color.  There was a lot more detail about her love interest, of course.  In the end, I told the designer that the protagonist was brunette mostly just because I was going for a bit of a an everywoman character, and brown hair is fairly common.

My designer also asked for a summary of the work to aid her in creating the cover.  Here's what I sent her:

Sara Graves has always made the responsible choices in life. She dated the nice boys, went to a good college, flossed. But after her "nice boy" husband cheats on her, Sara ends up in a bar looking to make the first big mistake of her life. She finds that mistake in Terrell, a tall, muscular black man playing pool in the bar. When Sara comes on to him, she finds him more than willing. But Terrell isn't just a powerful lover, he is a tender one as well, and as he makes love to Sarah in the restroom of the bar, his car, and finally his hotel, Sarah realizes that she may have just made the best mistake of her life.

In the end, I realized that I have two goals with my cover.  First is to accurately represent the feel of what is in my story so that readers will know what they're getting into when they start reading.  Second is to create something eye-catching and sexy.  As long as I get those two things, I'll be happy.

Beginnings

Hello, I'm Vivian Gwynn, and this is my first blog post!  I am just jumping into the world of self-publishing erotic fiction.  I love writing, and I love sex, so this seems like a match made in heaven.  I'm planning on selling my fiction through Smashwords, and I'm curious as to how the process goes.

I've been told that self-publishing is a great venue for erotica and works of a sexual nature (probably because people feel more comfortable reading a sexy e-book than they do carrying around a hardcover collection of erotica).  This makes sense to me, and I hope that I have the chance to share my writing with a lot of new people.

I've written my first piece of erotic fiction, "In a Stranger's Arms," and I'm currently preparing it for publication at Smashwords.  Currently, I'm working on getting a cover for it.  Because I'm working on a pretty tight budget, I'm trying a designer who works with a website called Fiverr.  At Fiverr, every service is $5, although there can be add-ons which add to the price.

On a couple of forums, I've read mixed reviews of cover designers at Fiverr, with some saying that they've had great experiences and others saying that you get what you pay for.  I figured that for $5 I can afford to take a little gamble.  My biggest concern was whether the images used in my cover would be legal and correctly paid for.  So I specifically asked all of the designers I was looking at where they got their images from.  I avoided any who said that they simply found them on Google, so there wasn't any issue.  The designer that I've ended up going with says that she gets her images from bigstockphoto.com and that they offer a license for up to 250,000 downloads.  If I end up getting 250,000 downloads, I'll need to upgrade to an extended license (but if that happens, it's nothing but good news!).

I'm currently waiting to hear back from the designer.  She says that she'll be contacting me soon to show me some options for the cover.  Exciting!