Get "So This Is My Life Now" Here!
When a high-powered corporate exec discover that lower tier employees are unexplainably happy, she investigates and thanks to a mysterious new kind of brain implant, shortly thereafter somehow becomes a sex slave to the Lesbian Janissaries of the Thongan Resistance! It's lesbian BDSM erotica with a science fiction flair!
It's a tasty 13000+ novelette (another thousand words and it would have been a novella!) set in the Your Fantasies Unlimited milieu of my Basic Income stories. It's the same story that's been on sale on Amazon for a while, now available on Smashwords because I think it has appeal for all the lesbian sex slavery erotica fans out there.
It's been rewritten, about a thousand new words have been added, and some of the text throughout has been improved, but there's no point in buying it on Smashwords if you have it on Amazon, because it's the same story in both cases.
There IS a point to buying it on Smashwords if you haven't bought it on Amazon, and that point is that it costs a buck less: it sells for $2.99 on Amazon and for $1.99 on Smashwords. Ah, the vagaries of the marketplace!
If You're Interested, Here's Why The Cover Got Changed
The new book has a different cover. Is it better? I don't know -- it's certainly sexier. Here are both covers, so you can compare for yourself:
Old Amazon Cover:
New Smashwords Cover:
I've got both covers up side-by-side on my computer and to my mind, the new cover beats the old cover hands-down, even though it violates several rules of good cover creation.
Both covers violate one of the most basic rules of cover creation, which is, don't make the cover up yourself, get an artist to do it. I understand that rule and totally agree with it -- most artists create MUCH better covers than any writer/editor ever could.
But I LIKE making book covers, so the hell with THAT rule.
The new cover violates another basic rule, too. Generally, photos are considered to sell erotica better than artwork, so you should use photos, preferably of naked women (which you are not allowed to do by either Amazon or Smashwords, so you use photos of scantily-clad woman).
In my first cover I followed the rule, but didn't like the results I got. I started out looking for an image of a corporate type (left) and a sexy almost naked woman. In the course of looking for cover art on DepositPhotos.com, I found two such images of women whose faces vaguely resembled one another. So I used those two, although they weren't really typical erotica models (though one was naked and had a spectacular body). Using them, I was able to get a strong image that did a good job of portraying the corporate executive/sex slave conflict, but which wasn't all that sexy.
When it came time to publish the Smashwords edition of "So This Is My Life Now" I knew I wanted to use a sexier image to take advantage of Smashwords' looser style guides and I wanted to be truer to the image that inspired the story.
Because there was a specific image that inspired the story, seen below:
It's from a NSFW bondage video by Carissa Montgomery for the BorntobeBound website.
To approximate it, I used an image created with Second Life avatars. (DEFINITELY a no-no! Covers made with gaming images are, to be fair, often horrible.) But I think I did a pretty good job of capturing the image. I used two avatars on poseballs created by a Second Life sex rug that was hidden beneath a green screen room (that I had set to black). The background of the cover is decorative background art that I bought from Deposit Photos.
I was able to use my control of cameras and lighting to get the angle right for my image, capturing June's face from straight-on instead of the 3/4 shot from the video. And I was able to make it look as if June might be getting spanked rather than fucked. (Because that's what the poseballs had the avvies doing.)
But to be honest, I don't think my cover completely matches the image that inspires the video. There's just a wonderful "How the fuck did I wind up getting bound and fucked like this?" look to Carissa Montgomery's face that is just incredibly powerful and hard to replicate. And the smirk worn by the actress fucking her is just wonderful. The Second Life avvies, although sexy, can't match the intensity of the original image.
Also, Montgomery's body is sex and sensual in a way the Second Life avvie doesn't match.
That said, the Smashwords cover gets maybe 75-80 percent of the inspiring image, which is a huge improvement over the Amazon cover, IMHO. And I'll take that, you betcha.
