Nothing goes wrong for months. Then one morning the checkout stops working and your launch money is sitting somewhere you can't get to it. I build backends for romance and erotica authors on tools that won't do that.
Ask me something PricingStripe's banned business list says literature. Not images. Literature, spelled out. And almost every checkout you can sign yourself up for runs on Stripe or PayPal underneath, which is why Gumroad, Payhip, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle and Ko-fi all say the same thing in slightly different words.
The email platforms are no better. Klaviyo, Mailchimp, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, beehiiv, SendGrid, Postmark. Brevo goes out of its way to name graphic sexual text.
Hours of warning, no appeal, and money in transit when it happens.
Meta and Google won't sell you ads. Amazon flags books it decides are too adult and drops them out of search without telling you. Processors file you under risk, somewhere near gambling.
None of it is about quality. Romance is the best selling genre in publishing and has been for years. Dark romance, romantasy, monster romance, MM, sapphic, why choose, all of it. Over a billion dollars a year in the US alone, written mostly by women, read mostly by women, and handled like an embarrassment by every company taking a cut.
Notice what never gets frozen. A thriller can describe a murder in as much detail as it likes and no processor has ever held that author's money over it. Violence is fine. A woman writing about wanting someone is where the line apparently sits, and the people drawing it have not read a page.
You already know all this. You've watched a book you spent four months on get buried while something with a fraction of your readership sat on the front page.
There are places that will take you. Not many, and you have to know which ones, but they exist and they pay better than the companies pushing you out. Finding them and building on them is the whole job.
Price a book at 99 cents on Amazon and you keep 35 of them. Same at anything over $12.99. In between you're on 70% before delivery costs come off. Sell that book yourself and you keep somewhere north of 80%.
That sounds like the whole argument, but it isn't. Card processing takes a flat 30 cents a transaction on top of the percentage, and 30 cents hurts on a 99 cent book. Selling cheap singles direct is better. It's not transformative.
A reader paying you $5 a month pays that 30 cents once. The same reader buying five 99 cent shorts pays it five times.
That's why subscriptions are the thing worth building. Your readers don't read one book of yours. They read everything you've written, get attached to a character, and then sit there waiting for the next one. You already release on a schedule to feed that. Nothing about it fits Amazon's model and all of it fits a direct one.
I'm not going to tell you to leave Amazon. Kindle Unlimited pays real money and Amazon finds readers you never could. Keep it. Add something next to it that you own.
Which brings up the list. Everything else here can be taken away from you by an email you didn't ask for. Your reader list can't, as long as it's somewhere with no rule against you in the first place. It's the only asset in your business nobody else gets a vote on.
Four months on the draft. Then edits. Then a cover you paid a designer for, an ARC team to wrangle, release week, the newsletter, promo swaps, and the next book already due.
And somewhere in the middle of that, at eleven at night, you're logged into a dashboard checking whether your delivery links still work.
That was never your job. It's just that nobody else was going to do it.
Set up once, in your name, on things that permit what you write.
Running cost afterwards is usually under $15 a month. Agencies charge ten times that for software you never log into.
Nobody emails you before they change a policy. Gumroad's authors found out the same day everyone else did.
So I check. The policy pages on every platform your money passes through, your domain before it expires, your buy links, your delivery links, whether your checkout is actually up, whether your emails are landing. Your list and your files get copied somewhere you own, every week.
Most of what I do you'll never see. I watch the things that break, fix them before you notice, and when something does land in your inbox you forward it to me and it stops being yours.
First of the month you get one page. What came in, what I caught, what went out, and one thing I'd do next. Some months there's almost nothing on it. That's what you're paying for.
Fixed, quoted before anything starts, paid up front.
Everything above, built once and handed over working. Two to three weeks.
I run it, watch it, fix anything broken inside 24 hours, and ship one new thing a month. You never log in.
If that's more than you need right now, say so and I'll scope something smaller. I don't quote hourly and I won't take a cut of your sales.
One person. I'm Marlowe ♥
I built my own book funnel from nothing: a scored quiz, four branching email sequences, checkout that routes by country, delivery that happens without me. I run all of it myself. When I tell you something works it's because it's working for me this morning, not because I read a thread about it.
I've also gone and read the terms of service. Every payment processor, every email platform, every host in this space, the actual documents rather than the marketing pages. I know which sentence in each one is the problem. Most people who'd happily take your money haven't looked, and that's how authors end up frozen.
I work with pen names. I don't ask who's behind one.
The name isn't a joke, or not only. Aftercare is what happens once the scene is over and someone stays to look after you. That's the part I do.
MM, FF, sapphic, BL, GL, omegaverse, why choose, reverse harem, monster and alien romance, dark romance, trans and poly romance. Any heat level. Any trope. If a platform has a problem with it, that problem is the thing I'm here to solve.
Mostly authors, but if you draw it or record it rather than write it you're still in the right place. Same processors, same bans, same build. Illustrators need an age check on top, and I set that up as part of the work.
I don't read your books. I don't need to, and that's rather the point. What I need to know is where they're being sold and whether that place will still be there next month. You will never get a raised eyebrow out of me about a tag, and you'll never have to justify your genre before we can talk about your checkout.
There's one line, and it's the same one every platform holds and every author in this genre already keeps: everyone on the page is an adult. Past that, your work is your business and I have no opinions about it.
No call to book. Send me a question about your setup and I'll answer it properly, whether or not you ever hire me.