Publishing options for 3D stories?
Blind Owl
Posts: 504
I know this is 'way premature given my present skills ('thumbfingered newbie' is probably a generous description), but I'm aware that several forum regulars have published stories on Amazon and elsewhere. I'd be surprised if they're making much money at it, but if nothing else I can see the appeal of being able to write off some of the expense involved in feeding what—in my case at least—has quickly become a borderline obsession.
I may lack skills but I'm gradually working up to something like speed, and I certainly don't lack for ideas.
To be frank, my main interest is erotic though not, I hope & trust, pornographic. I only mention this because I'm sure some digital publishers won't even touch explicit sex, or sexual themes. For a while I subscribed to several online comic sites (come on, some of you must know which ones I mean
), but much of the stuff on offer struck me as tasteless or worse. Sex? Hell, yes, I'm all for that. Violence, gore, humiliation and brutatlity? Include me out. So when I saw that Daz Studio was free, I thought "Well, shoot, I can make my own smut comics to my own semi-perverted tastes and save a ton of money!" So I cancelled all three subscriptions, and since then I've spent...well, I'd hate to say how much. But I am having a lot more fun...
So, although it's still very early days for me, I'd be curious to know which digital publishers (other than the usual suspects; details on request) handle the sort of thing I have in mind, and what sorts of terms and contracts are usual in the industry.
Thanks!
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The chance of making money at it is near zero, but I've had luck with https://comicfury.com/
Free publish your own webcomic/story. Not sure it fits what you want, so.
'Near zero' is about what I figured, but that's OK. If I could show any income at all, or what Revenue Canada (our version of the IRS) allows is a 'reasonable expectation' of same, I could at least begin to justify my expensive addiction to my longsuffering wife and sweetheart. Thanks, William, I'll investigate further.
Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but you can check out literotica(dot com). They have plenty of categories, from vanilla to more extreme(if you know what I mean) or none erotic. I actually enjoy the sci-fi and non-human categories.
Thanks, ThatGuy, I'll be checking out that one as well.
No need for expensive clothes when doing erotica. Huh, I should have thought of that when choosing my genre. :)))))
It's amazing how some of the more expensive clothing also approaches nude...
-- Walt Sterdan
Amazon won't publish graphic depictions of sex, though they do publish written erotica. If you're writing erotica and want to illustrate it, the pictures need to be non-explicit. (Some exceptions do occur, such as coloring books of male and female naughty bits.)
There's a web site -- won't mention the name directly, but combine the words render and erotica and you'll find it -- that publishes the better 3D erotic content users send in. None of it is to my taste, but I'm square. You might find a genre that interests you, and has a following.
Patreon allows for erotic art. Get a following first before you beg for money. Depending on your subject matter Deviantart may accept it, or you can publish on Tumblr or your own Web site. Be prepared to work at this for 2-3 years before anyone notices you.
Producing a quality hardcore erotic graphic novel is extremely time consuming, and likely won't earn you a dime. You may actually do much better making it R-rated. Humor still sells, and is a good alternative to the alien and other fetish conent. Depending on how you present it, you can prepare a trailer for your work on YouTube.
If I were to do it, I'd probably create a Web comic about an overbuilt sultry private eye who has some very special abilities (or something). Studies after studies show that sex actually does not sell, but sexy does.
I made $5 or $6 for a 16 page picture book in the 3 years since I published it. You can't charge cheaper than 0.99 cents. I created it to test to see how it looks and formats with the Kindle Reader on my tablet (in a word: awful!). Looks decent though printed.
Just be careful what you post to dA or tumblr; something totally innocent can sometimes be interpreted as risque and deleted without warning. Some folks get hit multiple times with such deletions and others with far worse rule violations can be ignored.
Thanks, I've actually posted some images on DA and collected a fair number of faves, though I have yet to receive any of the feedback I was hoping for. Once I've worked up my 3D chops (to borrow a phrase from music slang), I may have to go Core so I can request critiques.
The Emperor's New Clothes...
That depends on the route: paper or online.
For paper, your images will be in color. That requires a heavier grade of paper. That means more expensive. Amazon may not be your best outlet even if you did keep the images to R rated. Their paper is thinner. I know a pen and ink artist on DA who publishes erotic illustrated short stories (nudity and bondage intensive) via Amazon, and they look great. But that's B&W. They do have a comics division, though. Worth looking at. Also, check with Blurb. I don't know if they have restrictions on content, but they were started as a self-publisher for artists and photographers, and we all know how erotic they can get. Blurb only sells through their own store, so you'd have to really hustle your marketing. I publish some books through Lulu, and one of them is graphics intense. It's black and white, though. Lulu is great for B&W. Expensive for color! Those are just the three online self-publishers I know, and probably the best and most visible.
For online, I'd recommend Wordpress Dot Org. Dot Org is free, and has several flexible comics templates and themes. You will need a host for it, however. The host needs to be set up to host Wordpress dot Org. Not all are. Aabaco (old Yahoo) is pretty cheap and hosts WdotOrg, but there are probably better out there. Avoid Bluehost and GoDaddy. Bluehost charges by the year, and GoDaddy is known for holding your site hostage. Get the right host, and you can publish as explicit as you want.
EDIT: I'm assuming you'd keep your images in color, after spending all that time setting them up and rendering them. If you changed them to grayscale, you would have more, and cheaper, options for paper.
Very helpful advice. Thanks!
My ambition would be to publish online, in color, at the standard 16:9 aspect ratio and 1080p resolution. This is what I've been working in, and yes, I'd be wasting a lot of setup time and render cycles if I reduced the images to grayscale.
As far as comic templates go, I already own what seems like the answer to my prayers: a cheap and very versatile little program called Comic Life 3. Once I've produce content that I think is good enough to offer to the public (in my case the 18+ public), and found the right host for my efforts, I should be able to just upload my finished images and wait for the money to roll in. (
, in case there was any doubt.)
Then I definitely recommend Wordpress dot Org (which is not the same as Wordpress dot Com, although it's the same concept and company). I had an online comic for several months -- until I realized the font wasn't commercial free. My old computer also had a video card that maxed out at 1.5 G VRAM and said "No more Iray!" So, it's on hold. Anyway, I used Wordpress dot Org, hosted on Aabaco, and I used the Comics Lite template, I think. There are several. A WdotOrg template is for setting up the website, not your comics page. I found the comic template to be easy to use. It was the slider system. I could tell it to start the visitor with the earliest page or the most recent. Each page (a jpg or png) uploaded as a new blog post, fell into the right place, and all I had to do was assign a few tags. So simple! That template also offered the ability to create a characters page, and a store if I wanted to sell teeshirts of my main girl. Dot Org is opensource, and many of the addons are free. The ones that aren't are inexpensive, and it's a one time purchase arrangement.
There are probably better systems out there than this. It's just the one I know.
PM me if you want to know the names of some who actually do make money at this (probably not their day jobs, though).
By the way, it's never too early to dream. Use your goals to stretch your skills.
Amazon says they don't accept it, but I've seen porn comics on there from more "famous" companies that have been around a while and started off in print. (I'm trying to remember the names but I can't atm)
DO you have examples of this? I've never seen anything like that on amazon
Serpieri's Druuna is on there, Belore's Lolita
Just to name a couple I've seen others that I recognized from my youth but like I said, I can't remember the others.
You should put your deviant art account in your signature line here, so people can find you who might be interested in your art. Finding someone on Deviant Art without a link is darn near impossible.
I've asked much the same questions as I'm currently working on two illustrated stories using Daz, but of the zombie apocalypse variety. I wound up on a porny message board not because I'm into that stuff - I'm not - but because that was where this type of stuff was being discussed. I was worried that even though there isn't any sex nor nudity in my imagery other than the main characters kissing at the end of Book 3, there will be swimming pools worth of gore and blood as they fight there way out of a zombie inefested city center. Here's what I learned about the Big 3 ebook publishers from that board, and a few others...
Smashwords is probably the most open about these things. As long as the work is properly tagged as adult, proper disclaimers are given, etc., they'll publish most anything. They will draw the line at over the top obscene things like gratuitous torture, so be forewarned, but it doesn't sound like you're writing that stuff so no worries.
Amazon Kindle is the most restrictive. I mean, just don't even take the chance if there's something slightly questionable. The word was that Amazon outsourced it's proofing and approval department to India, where morals are a lot stricter so ebooks were routinely rejected for the smallest violation, or in some cases no violations at all. Long before I got into Daz two years ago, I wrote a professional manual which was originally accepted, but when I went back to change the title and cover to differentiate it from another author's book with a similar title it was rejected and banned. Seriously, it was a non-fiction professional work, but that was enough to raise the ire of someone in the approvals department. I'm in education and the work dealt with youth counseling, and the legalities of contacting parents and the authorities when child abuse is suspected. Apparently, the topic of child abuse was enough to get the work banned. Anyway, nothing else could explain it and Amazon didn't deny it when I questioned them about it. The bottom line is, don't publish anything on Amazon that's even remotely questionable. Amazon is routinely unpredictable and tough to figure out, it's policies constantly changing with little to no warning. If you do go through Amazon Kindle, remember - no nudity, no sexual scenes, and no characters even remotely near the age of 18; make everyone in their mid-30s to cover yourself, I'm serious.
B&N Nook is somewhere in the middle. They will accept a lot more than Amazon, and aren't as anti-porn, anti-violence and anti-gore, but do your research before publishing there as they will sometimes become restrictive depending upon the content. They seem to have understood that works more on the seamy side generate big profits, and being smaller than Amazon they're more willing to accept such titles. If you do decide to publish mainstream, then B&N might be the place to test the waters as Smashwords is decent, but doesn't get nearly the traffic that Amazon and B&N get. Of course, you can often publish the same work on more than one website, pursuant to their terms of contract, so look into this, as well.
I hope this helps, and best of luck!
EDIT: back to Amazon, publishing your works on a weekday means that they are usually accepted. There is supposedly a higher rejection rate of they are submitted on the weekends. Why, I don't know and it may be urban legend, but multiple sources out there in Kindle Author Land have commented on it.
Some very useful information. Thanks!
Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not yet ready to expose myself to such a knowledgeable group. Besides, as I mentioned in my OP, there may be some sexual content, which I understand is taboo here. Kind of weird, when half the stuff DAZ 3D peddles has a sexual angle...
If anyone is really curious, he or she can find my amateurish stuff by searching on 'glasseyed' at DA. *gulp*
One of the problems with making content available online is piracy. A few months back, I stumbled across one of my renders being used to advertise a charity push bike race.
You could also check out https://www.patreon.com. Looking at the monthly amounts some people are gathering for "your" type of content (although I looked mostly at 2D comics and pictures), its not so hopeless (money wise) at all.
That kind of piracy is innocuous and likely not harmful to your bottom line. Write to them and ask for a credit line and link. The type of piracy to be aware of is wholesale stealing of an entire work and posted (usually with a profit motive) on a file locker. Or these days, they put it on a site that points to malware downloads as a way to monetize.
For adult content the main benefit of Kindle (or Nook, etc.) is as a sales opener. Just as some hardcore porn studios post PG-rated trailers on YouTube, you can generate leads by creating a tame version of your work. As someone noted, it's true you can't mark your Kindle eBook for less than 99 cents, but you can approve it for Kindle Unlimited, in which case it's free to KU members. Even when it's free, a download and read counts as a "sale" on Amazon, so it rises in the category ranks. Amazon will disallow internal links to hardcore adult content, but there are clever ways to deal with this.
The biggest problem with 3D content is that it has to differentiate itself from live action, or else why bother. This is where it goes into slippery slope territory, subject matter wise. To hit an audience the content has to be harder and more outrageous, and it's not hard to cross the line. It's another reason to go the opposite direction and make the content tame but sexy. The challenge here, though, is that you need mad skilz to pull it off. There are lots of really good softcore 3D artists out there.
As I said in my OP, I'm aiming for erotic, not pornographic and certainly not violent or gory. [ side note: For what it's worth, I don't think anything is truly erotic without tension, and that includes touches of humor, which I hope to achieve in the story I'm working on. ] But I'm afraid Amazon and B&N are pretty much ruled out for me, since my 16:9 1080p iRay renders (which will include a fair amount of dialogue) would be unreadable on their devices.
For now, I'm not worried about anyone distributing the preliminary pose & character renders I've been posting on DA, but I have been disappointed by the lack of feedback. Half a dozen downloads and half a dozen faves may be mildly gratifying but doesn't tell me anything worth knowing.
...Especially when I see the kind of stuff that gets faved and downloaded by the score. Much or most of it is definitely not my cup of chai.
I'm not sure what this means, and no one but you can define your personal definitions. Erotica can be, and usually is, pornographic. It sounds like you're making a moral judgement on what's "pornography" when the classic definition is merely a depiction of sexual subject matter for the purpose of arousal. Wouldn't most people apply the same definition to erotica? They do, and this is why hosting platforms like Amazon or Wordpress .com or a slew of others will turn such materials away, full stop. They cast a very large net for this subject matter. The size of your renders are irrelevent to what they accept in this genre, and in any case, a graphic erotic, even a hardcore one, story doesn't need such large renders to be appreciated by readers.
3D rendered erotica tends to be blasé and uninteresting when it consists of the same subjects that live action can depict. That's why you see so much off-the-wall and outrageous content. It gets favored simply because it's weirdly unusual, technically or physically impossible, or pure fantasy that cannot be easily reproduced by human models. These niches address a particular kink, and the artist generally doesn't do it to make money. I'd say 99% of it would not cover a week's worth of groceries.
I wouldn't count on much feedback on DA unless you're attracting a stream of the kind of traffic that wants the content you're offering. For a small gallery, DA traffic can often be very generic.
I'm not overly fussed, I must admit. But, I do use a noticeably annoying watermark now.
As for DA? Favourite everyones images, make suitably nice comments and give points and llamas, they return the favour, look at your page and increase your pageviews. Repeat a few times to raise your pageviews and voila!! You've got 50k pageviews, so you must be popular artist of note. But, all cynicism aside, DA can be a useful tool to get your work seen, however it's a slow process.
Still, I can understand being pissed off. In a former life I wrote some software for surveyors (the kind that use tripods and survey instruments, not telephones) at $45 a shot, and found it was being freely distribiuted at the local technical college. Nothing much I could do about it.
As for DA, that's been my impression since I began posting images a week or 2 ago. I don't even know what a friggin' llama is, though I've allegedly received a couple. You want 'em? If so, where do I send them?
Cheers, eh?