Cornelia Quick's Annual Report, Part 1

What happened in 2024, and what's coming in 2025

As we wind down 2024 and get ready to launch into 2025, I thought it might be interesting to look back at what I’ve accomplished and forward to my plans in the coming year. Things didn’t always go to plan, but I think that Cornelia Quick Enterprises LLC had a solid 2024, and I go into 2025 with a tempered optimism.

When I put together last year’s review, I had 35 titles in my catalog. I’ve nearly doubled that, with 61 stories available for your reading pleasure (not counting 3 that are bundles consisting of multiple works), ranging from several dirty little 5K word shorts to 6 that are sprawling 40K+ works of exquisite filth. I tend to land in the 10-20K word novelette range: I like a slow buildup to the heat, and then enough space to let that heat really rage for a while. (None of my stories could be described as fade-to-black …)

Top Sellers

Last year, The Betwixtmas Switch, Off the Leash, and Mashed on Moving Day were my best selling stories. This year, my new favorite heroine, Dorothy Warren, edged the Fox Run Swingers out of the top spot with Dorothy’s Domestic Bliss, and the fifth book in the Mapping the Boundaries of Love series, The Contours of Desire, grabbed the third spot.

Dorothy has been the big star for me since she made her appearance in April. While her second adventure, Dorothy’s Double Delight, hasn’t made much of a ripple (it’s only on Smashwords and Payhip due to its taboo topic), her third book, Use Me at the Fair, cracked my top 10 for the year, and her newest book, Dorothy’s Stocking Stuffer, is climbing the charts despite being out for only a couple of weeks. Clearly the people want stories about an unrepentant small town nymphomaniac and her long-suffering husband; and who am I to complain?

Series

I’ve also started, or attempted to start, a few different series. Last year, I had my baseball series Winning With the Wildcats, the swingers of The Fox Run Swingers’ Club, the playful polycule of Fun for Four, the erotic romance epic Mapping the Boundaries of Love, and my catch-all gangbang series All For One and One For All. In 2024, I added Dorothy’s Farmhouse Flings, Hot Mess Express, and Callie’s Costume Closet, as well as building on some standalone stories from 2023 for Tiffany’s Spring Break, Carnival Dreams, and Love on Lake Makanogin. I also released some stories with darker and more taboo subjects under the Quentin Quick name.

Some of the new series have been more successful than others. The Dorothy stories in particular really took off, which was a fun surprise. They started in a fit of pique in March, when Amazon tightened the screws and started putting more erotica into the “dungeon” based largely on covers and blurbs. I wanted to write the absolute filthiest story I could imagine, but slap a relatively innocent cover onto it, which resulted in Dorothy’s Domestic Bliss, a loving cuck smalltown raunch fest.

When I look at the numbers, “Callie’s Costume Closet” is actually punching above its weight class, though the three titles so far — Night Nurse, Touchdown!, and PURSUED — didn’t perform as strongly as Dorothy out of the gate. I expect to continue with the series — I have three more titles outlined for next year — because I like the characters and the setting, and I trust they’ll find and hold their audience.

The “Hot Mess Express” series, alas, was a bit of a flop. I’ve got two more episodes roughly outlined, and I may revisit it next year, but there hasn’t been a whole lot of demand for it.

Platform

Looking at my 2024 vs. my 2023 earnings by platform is enlightening, and will be directing my 2025 strategies to some extent. When I started putting out stories at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, they were “wide” — meaning they were available from multiple e-book retailers, like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo. But I started getting advice later in 2023 to try Kindle Unlimited (“KU”): if your book is exclusive to Amazon, it can be enrolled in the KU program, where people who subscribe can check out your books and you earn from page reads in addition to sales. I was skeptical at first, and planned to put a couple of books in as an experiment. For all of 2023, KU accounted for 14% of my earnings:

I put most of my 2024 publications into KU, and its share has risen to 34% of my income. “Wide” sales (primarily through Draft2Digital) have shrunk as a share of my income, and the earnings on the books that aren’t exclusive to Amazon have been eclipsed by the KU titles.

It’s not without a little chagrin that I’ve concluded that KU works pretty well for me. Anyone who knows my personal politics would probably be shocked — the billionaire class is not high on my list of favorite developments of late capitalism — but as far as my smutty stories go, at least, I’m going to double down on KU in 2025 and move some stories out of wide circulation to see if they can pick up traction as Amazon exclusives.

Sales and Promotions Strategies

2024 was a year of experimenting with getting the word out about my stories and trying to build a solid audience. I’ve hit on some patterns that have worked for me, and tried out a few things that didn’t.

Dollar Deals

One of my 2024 marketing strategies that I don’t think I’ll continue with in 2025 is the monthly “Dollar Deal.” This was an effort to get more eyes on some back catalog items: I’d mark down one book, or a series of books, to 99 cents for the whole month, and promote the markdown in my newsletter, social media, and other channels. I tried to be strategic in which books to mark down, selecting seasonal titles (my Mardi Gras book in February, a ghost story in October), or pairing a deal with a new release (like marking down How I Won Spring Break when Spring Break Binge! came out).

The results were mixed. When I look at the proportion of my income that the Dollar Deals made, they seldom accounted for 4% of sales. Overall, they made up a little more than 3%. The titles that did best as Dollar Deals — How I Won Spring Break (in March) and A Siren’s Tales (in November) — were doing pretty well on their own already.

Rather than doing monthly deals in 2025, I’ll probably do targeted discounts around publications and sales, marking down related titles when there’s a new release or discounting a series when I’m doing a free promotion.

Giveaways

There’s a little controversy in the indie publishing world about whether giving stuff away is a good strategy. Some people are dead set against it; others swear by it. In my experience, there are a few factors that can make a free promotion work really well:

1. If the free book is part of a series (ideally the first book in a series)

2. If there’s enough of a back catalog to interest readers in coming back for more

3. If the promotion can get in front of new customers

I started doing one or two books free each month, and timing them with paid promotions like Bookspry and Excite Spice, or with author-run newsletter promotions. And while the correlation isn’t perfect, it does appear that doing giveaways hasn’t hurt my sales. Indeed, my best income month, October, corresponded with a staggering (for me) 11,000 giveaways as part of a big multi-author newsletter promotion.

I think of the giveaways as part of a longer, audience-building strategy. In a big promotion, a reader might snap up a dozen or more books, and I don’t expect them to get around to mine for a while. But when they do, I’m hoping that their interest is piqued, and they’ll check out the rest of my catalog.

One thing I observed that was a bit of a downer, though, is that getting your free book in the hands of the wrong readers can hurt your reviews. I put two books, Shagged in the Bookshop and Use Me at the Fair, in a big promotion in October, and lots of people grabbed them. Even though they were in the promotion’s “Erotica” category, though, they received the critical eye of readers perhaps more geared toward romance expectations, and they were the sort of readers who feel the need to post reviews on Goodreads (which then feeds to Amazon) even if they don’t like a book. I beg you, good readers, don’t ding a book because you’re not the book’s intended audience; you don’t actually have to review every book you read.

Pre-orders

Something I started doing in August, and will likely continue to do in 2025, is putting books up for pre-order on Amazon. In 2023, I more or less released books as soon as they were ready, hoping to build up the back catalog; in 2024, I tried to be a little more strategic about things.

I did the Callie’s Costume Closet books as pre-orders, announcing the next title as soon as one was published. It gave each book a longer marketing on-ramp, and locked in some early sales. I was able to promote the upcoming books in newsletters, and saw good early sales for each title.

My Christmas pre-orders — Jennie’s Christmas Train, Dorothy’s Stocking Stuffer, and Season’s Delights — were even more successful. I was able to do promotions on all three titles starting in November, and saw pre-orders increase each week. You need to put a product in front of customers quite a few times before they’ll buy, and the pre-orders gave me the opportunity to do that while working to build a bit of buzz.

The pre-orders also give me a deadline to work against, which can be useful — when you don’t have an editor or publisher to hassle you, it can be easy to ignore a manuscript, but when you see that readers are actually willing to plunk down their dollars, you’ve got some incentive to deliver. I don’t make a pre-order available until I’ve got a rough draft and am pretty sure I’ll finish in time, but there’s nothing like a looming date on the calendar to make sure I put in the effort!