[Selkie TG] Gender Swap, Feminization, Sci-Fi, Fantasy

[Borfberg]

Artist Support Link

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/elken

Here are some books by Selkie TG. Enjoy.
Please share if you have more.

Author is on Fictionmania:
https://www.fictionmania.tv/searchdisplay/authordisplay.html?word=4846

 

[SelkieTG]

Hi - Selkie here, the author of all these.

I was a bit troubled when I noticed my non-free works copied here. I estimate my first draft for the bulk of my Arabian Nights series (which you can still find under one very long branch at writing.com under the Arabian Nights Gender Changing World CYOA story), of about 400k words, took me about 2,500 hours to write. When I eventually found time to polish them for publication, and complete the story, that took me another 12-14 months of work (about another 2,000 hours).
So a lot of effort went into them; and I think my pricing for each of my books is very reasonable - like the price of a cup of coffee, or maybe two.

I now earn maybe two or three dollars per month (total!) from all of these books on Smashwords and Amazon, and it feels to me like it dropped off rather suddenly - maybe after they all got shared here?

Now, I don't want to ask for them to be removed. My plea instead is that if you read them here and really enjoy them, hop over to Smashwords or Amazon and buy a copy. TBH, if I did start earning a modest amount from them, it would encourage me to write more (e.g. as you could see from the afterword in the final Arabian Nights volume).

I do have a few other free short stories on fictionmania and I think AO3, and I've done collaboration comics (one with Squidz and another with SturkWurk) on tgcomics.com, both of which are free I think.

So please, could you look at this as a "try before you buy" resource, where you can reward me if I've, er, pleased you enough?

Regards,
Selkie

 

[SelkieTG]

I'd love it, BTW, if you recommended my books, or wrote honest reviews for them.

It would be so cool if I started earning money for these again, just because people here spread the word out about them!

Amazon ads pour money into Jeff Bezos's pockets by making authors bid for ads on Amazon, and despite studying how to do it, and trying it, those ads don't seem very effective. (I suspect he earns as much money from authors paying for clicks and "impressions" of their titles, as he does from his 30%+ share of the royalties.)

 

[Borfberg]

Hi - Selkie here, the author of all these.

I was a bit troubled when I noticed my non-free works copied here. I estimate my first draft for the bulk of my Arabian Nights series (which you can still find under one very long branch at writing.com under the Arabian Nights Gender Changing World CYOA story), of about 400k words, took me about 2,500 hours to write. When I eventually found time to polish them for publication, and complete the story, that took me another 12-14 months of work (about another 2,000 hours).
So a lot of effort went into them; and I think my pricing for each of my books is very reasonable - like the price of a cup of coffee, or maybe two.

I now earn maybe two or three dollars per month (total!) from all of these books on Smashwords and Amazon, and it feels to me like it dropped off rather suddenly - maybe after they all got shared here?

Now, I don't want to ask for them to be removed. My plea instead is that if you read them here and really enjoy them, hop over to Smashwords or Amazon and buy a copy. TBH, if I did start earning a modest amount from them, it would encourage me to write more (e.g. as you could see from the afterword in the final Arabian Nights volume).

I do have a few other free short stories on fictionmania and I think AO3, and I've done collaboration comics (one with Squidz and another with SturkWurk) on tgcomics.com, both of which are free I think.

So please, could you look at this as a "try before you buy" resource, where you can reward me if I've, er, pleased you enough?

Regards,
Selkie

Hi! First, thank you for your writings. I really like them. And thank you for a reasonable and humble response to finding your books here. I will of course recommend them. As you can see, i have shared the link to your smashwords page in the original post. I own most of the books, on either Amazon or Smashwords, already.
I'll do what i can to help spread the word about your books.

 

[yano2mch]

I now earn maybe two or three dollars per month (total!) from all of these books on Smashwords and Amazon

I remember as a teenager buying my preferred author's books in the 90's from Barnes and Nobles, and it was $15 per book. (and that's for 200-300 page paperback, $40 for a hardback).

and it feels to me like it dropped off rather suddenly - maybe after they all got shared here?

Doubtful, unless you only had 150 potential customers left (as that's the average aprox download count).

Rather i think it's likely combination of you not being suggested in recommended lists, or Amazon pushes their subscription Amazon Unlimited over physical or books that pays creators more.

Otherwise it will be a lot more people having to choose food over entertainment, so free options (like Literotica) have quite a large archive for free. Add on that some people enjoy gaming and with companies raising the prices pushing to $100 for a single game quickly empties disposable income.

I remember in about 2008 when gas suddenly rose and the housing crash was going on, a lot of these little gas stations and businesses like flower shops and coffee shops within 6 months closed up, as people ended up going with the cheapest workable option over their preferred spending patterns.


Just saying, when things improve for people financially and the current tensions alleviate a bit, I'll bet you'll see a bump up back in your sales.

Amazon ads pour money into Jeff Bezos's pockets by making authors bid for ads on Amazon, and despite studying how to do it, and trying it, those ads doesn't seem very effective. (I suspect he earns as much money from authors paying for clicks and "impressions" of their titles, as he does from his 30%+ share of the royalties.)

I've been quite annoyed at the corporations for a while. Valve/Steam, Amazon, etc taking 30% when it doesn't cost nearly that for upkeep and their own share. It should be more like 5%. They aren't selling a physical product to justify that percentage.

If i could, i'd give 100% to the devs, and authors and NOT give 30% to the storefront, 40-60% to the publisher and 3% to the payment processor (which leaves something like 5-30% to the actual creator. Basing this loosely on Bethesda's attempts to monetize mods where the mod creator got a piddly 10% or so).

 

[FC1(SW) Retired]

@SelkieTG and other writers

TLDR Below
Having not yet published any of my own works - I feel you for how much work it takes.
I've all but finished my first 55k word novel with all the proof-reading I've done ...
I can fully understand the demotivational factor of seeing it out there for free, or even worse renamed and completely plagarized - it has made me wonder if I will every publish any of what I've written...

TLDR: Anyway might I suggest putting two tidbits into your intro pages
1. A donation link to paypal, or equivalent, so the money goes directly to you if someone finds your work somewhere else and likes it enough, and
2. A declaration that the work is not authorized to be used by Artificial Intelligence (or it's users) to teach their machines how to write like you.

 

[SelkieTG]

I especially like your 1st suggestion - I should do that!
The second one... well, those sentient AIs may be more fun when they are developed over the next few years, if they pick up some hot fun sexy ideas from my stories.

 

[Curious Ed]

My 2p: sites like this one react very well to authors that are willing to share their older works and the users then refrain from sharing new titles so the author can earn some well deserved cash. I like the “buy me a coffee” idea of including a link to a donation site within the book too.

@FC1(SW) Retired can I suggest you pop the first few chapters of your book on here (new thread obviously) and ask for comments & views? It’s a great way for you to get some free proof reading, as well as interest in your book. Once published, you could link to the book and ask that it not be shared for a suitable period. You’d gain a following and hopefully generate some sales

 

[SelkieTG]

Heh, the one thing I don't need is proofreading. At least in that respect, even my erotica probably contains fewer typos than many traditionally published books. I actually do copy editing for a bunch or erotica writers and artists I like, for free, just because it hurts me when I see a typo.
Oh and by the way, unless you're a megastar, you might sell a few hundred books in the first months after you publish. That's way below the poverty line if you have to survive on that alone. And I don't know of any megastar authors in the erotica area, except maybe the writer of Fifty Shades of Grey? (I'm not complaining, just saying.)

 

[Curious Ed]

Gaagghhh! Typos! There’s only one thing worse than typos and that’s a character’s name changing in the middle of the book! If you name the character “Ian” and then decide to change it to “George”, don’t bloodywell forget to use the “find” command on the original name after you’ve used the “replace all” because there’s going to be at least one page that it didn’t work on!

 

[FC1(SW) Retired]

My 2p: sites like this one react very well to authors that are willing to share their older works and the users then refrain from sharing new titles so the author can earn some well deserved cash. I like the “buy me a coffee” idea of including a link to a donation site within the book too.

@FC1(SW) Retired can I suggest you pop the first few chapters of your book on here (new thread obviously) and ask for comments & views? It’s a great way for you to get some free proof reading, as well as interest in your book. Once published, you could link to the book and ask that it not be shared for a suitable period. You’d gain a following and hopefully generate some sales

I've thought about that, but unfortunately life events have other plans for me right now, and I'd want to be interactive if I did post. As it is I've dropped from on here daily to just weekly, and even then have trouble keeping up. I still owe a follow-up to ? I've got it linked somewhere - I just haven't had the energy to think out an answer.

 

[yano2mch]

Gaagghhh! Typos! There’s only one thing worse than typos and that’s a character’s name changing in the middle of the book! If you name the character “Ian” and then decide to change it to “George”, don’t bloodywell forget to use the “find” command on the original name after you’ve used the “replace all” because there’s going to be at least one page that it didn’t work on!

You really need to use regex in such a case, doing bounds checks so you don't get really weird replacements that technically qualify for short names but are part of other words. Else you might get Librarian becoming LibrarGeorge.

 

[Nuvolari]

Well, those story thieves in the Kindle Store have no problem filing the serial numbers of the stories they swipe. Change names, use characters from different alphabets to confuse plagiarism search engines, even feed the entire story into an LLM such as ChatGPT and tell it to paraphrase it....

 

[Curious Ed]

You really need to use regex in such a case, doing bounds checks so you don't get really weird replacements that technically qualify for short names but are part of other words. Else you might get Librarian becoming LibrarGeorge.

Ooh! Can I be a “LibraEd”? It sounds like an excellent career path for me!

 

[bows66]

Here are some books by Selkie TG. Enjoy.
Please share if you have more.

FictionMania - Stories by Selkie

Fictionmania is a big story archive. Transgender / TV / CD / TG stories, with images too.

www.fictionmania.tv

Borfberg would you kindly add this link or a direct link under Selkie to your artist appreciation Selkie might have more if she cares to share

 

[Borfberg]

FictionMania - Stories by Selkie

Fictionmania is a big story archive. Transgender / TV / CD / TG stories, with images too.

www.fictionmania.tv

Borfberg would you kindly add this link or a direct link under Selkie to your artist appreciation Selkie might have more if she cares to share

Sure, i'll add it to my post. I already linked to her Smashwords page, so it'll have to be a separate link in the post.

 

[SelkieTG]

I've added a couple more links to my About description. On TGComics the Lab Rat Payback comic collaboration with SturkWurk is also free, while the Tabula Rasa collab with Squidz is available under their Backers program.

 

[Rikemiloc35]

I've added a couple more links to my About description. On TGComics the Lab Rat Payback comic collaboration with SturkWurk is also free, while the Tabula Rasa collab with Squidz is available under their Backers program.

Can't register on TGComic (they are very picky to email-services).
Somebody, please upload FREE book here.
Thanks.