posted by LadyLit on Publishing

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Ladylit is proud to publish Fool for Love, Harper Bliss’s first novella in the brand new High Rise series.

Here’s the blurb:
Betrayed by her long-term girlfriend, Alex moves into The Ivy to share a flat with her friend Nat. When she meets their neighbour Maddie, a jaded expat who’s had about enough of Hong Kong’s demanding life style, both Maddie and Alex are forced to reassess their warped view on love.

This new title is novella-length, meaning 23.000 words of lesbian erotic romance goodness. Fool for Love is free until Saturday on Amazon, so go grab your copy now!

The next High Rise novella will be released just before Christmas.

Why is Fool for Love only available on Amazon?
Once again, we’ve opted to put our latest release in the KDP Select program. This allows us to do a big promotion off the bat, by giving Fool for Love away for free the first five days. I wish I could say we’re only doing this out of the goodness of our own heart, but publishing is a business just like any other and, business-wise, KDP Select has been very good for us.

The first book we put in was Learning Curve which, as a result, has been in Amazon’s lesbian best sellers list since the beginning of August. Quite a feat for a short erotica story. Summer Heat and Younger Than Yesterday followed the same pattern, soaring into the top 20 a few days after their release date, and remaining there until now. (In fact, Younger Than Yesterday has been holding steady on number five the past few days.)

In all honesty, we never expected this kind of immediate success. We believed, like with many good things, it would be a slow build, with sales increasing after every new release, but KDP Select blew all of our expectations right out of the water.

I’m not saying that every book put into KDP Select will be a success. A few other key elements need to be present for a book to work. It needs to be good, for starters. (You may think this is a no-brainer, but, sadly, it’s not.) You need an attractive cover and, last but not least, you need to publish in a competitive category.

Erotica as a genre has been doing astonishingly well in the aftermath of Fifty Shades of Grey and I believe Harper’s books are filling a certain void in lesbian erotic fiction. All too often, lesbian erotica is written by men posing as women, resulting in the same old tale of a young straight girl discovering the joys of lady-loving with her roommate/best friend/other generic partner. Harper writes stories about real lesbians (and the occasional straight woman) and her characters don’t just meet and dive into bed together. They actually have conversations and… chemistry.

Add that to what KDP Select can do for a book, and the last three Harper Bliss stories have been very successful. But what does KDP Select do for a book exactly? Here’s our experience.

It makes your book visible
This is probably the single most important advantage. Thousands of new books get released every day. When a few thousand people download your book for free, it will very quickly make an appearance in the ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ lists, which is of vital importance.

It makes your book lendable to Amazon Prime members
Prime members get to lend one free book per month, but the publisher still gets paid for every borrow. Even better, Harper Bliss’s last three short stories have been consistently priced at $1.99, but when someone borrows it we get royalties as if the books were priced at $2.99. With the difference between the 1.99 and 2.99 price point being 35% in royalty rate, this is very advantageous for lower priced titles.

These are the main two reasons why we love KDP Select and will take advantage of it as long as it’s available. Don’t worry if you’re not an Amazon fan though, we plan a first High Rise Omnibus by the end of the year (which will be available from all retailers) and a second one, including a paperback edition, by March 2013.

Still haven’t downloaded Fool for Love? What are you waiting for?