I Made $1000 a Month Writing Erotica: Here Are 20 Important Lessons Learned

After 6 months of full-time writing, I had one major problem: I wasn’t making any money.

Armed with a Masters in Creative Writing, some savings, and a lot of seriously unfounded optimism, I’d quit my teaching job at a local college and told everyone that I was now, officially, a writer.

It felt so good to finally take the leap. But now, I was panicking.

I Googled, for the hundredth time: “How to make money as a writer?”, and, this time, my eyes fell on an article about publishing erotica short-stories on Amazon. The article’s author was making over $1000 a month.

My eyes lit up. That would almost pay my rent.

Could I? Should I?

It seemed seedy, and of course, it was beneath my yet-to-flower-but-surely-awesome talent.

But I needed money.

I told myself it was like a young actor doing nude scenes or a stripper paying their way through dance school. I had rent to pay, and well, it was writing after all.

Plus, I could write under a pen name. What did I have to lose?

What I Learned From Writing Erotica

Hunched over my desk in broad daylight, I wrote with as much fervor as I could muster until I had to stop to pick my kid up from school.

I spent days with the blinds drawn, writing in a fever-dream of moving arms and legs, and other body parts. I needed diagrams and a map.

I tied myself up in knots trying to stay the right side of a (self-imposed) ethical line-in-the-sand.

It was fun and angst-ridden, hilarious and desperate.

And it seriously helped my writing.

Here’s what I learned:

1. Hit publish and put your work out there. Every Week. Twice a week. More if you can. Get data points. Get feedback.

2. Quantity leads to quality. Eventually.

3. Perfectionism is the devil’s work.

4. Get a daily writing habit. Get this through necessity.

5. Let your schedule take the strain. Don’t feel like writing? So what? The schedule says write. Not feeling like editing? So what. The schedule says edit.

6. Fail in public. When a story sunk without trace, I had to analyze why, but I mainly had to focus on the next one.

7. People will actually like your writing if you practice enough: and it’s the best feeling ever.

8. It is possible to make money writing online.

9. If you can make $5 a month from your writing, you can make $500. If the possibility is there, you can expand on it. In fact, at one point, I earned $1000 a month.

10. Outline first to help you when you sit down to draft (you don’t have to stick to it).

11. Write down your ideas.

12. Realize when you’re writing two stories simultaneously, and separate them.

13. Use writing tools to help you (Grammarly, Vellum, Scrivener, Reedsy, etc.)

14. Set up a mailing list. Now. You’ll learn a lot and be ready to collect addresses. I can’t use my erotica mailing list for anything else (“Hey, I wrote your smut, so here’s an article I wrote on self-improvement”), but now I know how to do it.

15. Persistence and consistency are gold for online writers. Patience, too. Progress is slow until it isn’t.

16. Be a better writer. Through consistent practice, my stories eventually became stories — with believable characters with genuine motivation and agency.

17. The reality of being a writer is a little different than the dream. A little less full of butterflies and rainbows. And that’s OK. That’s real.

18. If we don’t take time for self-care as writers, we burn out.

19. People are into some weird shit.

20. And last but not least — expect great things from writing online. $1 a month from writing had seemed impossible to me only one year previously!

and a bonus point…

21. It doesn’t have to be erotica, but you do have to start.

Whatever you choose to do, just start. It’s the only way to see if it’s what you really want to do, and it’s the only way to get better at writing.

There are so many opportunities to make money from your writing: start writing short stories (or articles like this one) on Medium. Start to grow a Twitter audience. Start writing on Vocal, or for online publications, or start a newsletter on Substack or Revue.

Write. Publish.

Start.

“There are no dead ends, not really.” Julia Cameron.

Writing erotica got me to hit publish. It earned me my first buck online. And 999 others, too.

Eventually, I needed to learn how to finish a story without someone taking their clothes off. I’d outgrown erotica. I was burned out.

But I had started.

“I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain, I would be all right.” Neil Gaiman

The whole erotica journey lasted no longer than two years, all told — an interlude, a brief peep-show, a flash, if you will, in the story of my life. But who knows? If I need to buy groceries, it’s still an option. And it got me closer to the mountain.

You will find a way. Getting there is not always a linear process. It’s by trial and error that we learn. Sometimes the universe asks us, “How much do you actually want this?”. It tests us.

Get your words out there and show it how much you want this. Show yourself how much.

Strike out and find your path.

You don’t have to write erotica, but you have to write. And more than that, you have to hit publish.

If you do, you’ll learn way more than 20 things.