"The Billionaire and the Dancing Slave Girl" by Pat Powers, known on Amazon as "The Billionaire and the Dancing Slavegirl" by Skyler Kennedy, is now on sale on Smashwords.
There's an interesting story behind the name change. "Billionaire" is a kinky erotic romance with an HEA (Happily Ever After). I've read that the vast majority of erotic romance readers are women. And that they tended to be suspicious of male writers of erotic romances. So for this story I decided to don a blonde wig and write as Skyler Kennedy, female erotic romance writer and see what happened to sales. Would a female name make up for the lack of the Pat Powers imprimatur?
The answer, sadly, was "no." Sales were poorer than most of my Pat Powers stories. Though the book didn't fall off a cliff economically like my lesbian sexual dimorphism fantasy erotic bdsm romance "Tiny, Big." Which may have been a much tinier niche thant it should have been. Microniches lead to micro sales.
My current WIP is novella length and will very likely go to novel length, so to get something published this month I dusted off "Billionaire" which is a FINE kinky erotic romance with lots of maledom/femsub sexual bondage, as well as an orgy, public nudity and public sex, involving a motorcycle gang. It's a much better story than its sales under the Skyler Kennedy pseudonym would indicate. We'll see how it does on Smashwords. Er, Direct to Digital.
I created new cover art for "Billionaire." My original cover art for the Amazon edition is here:
It's a fine cover, just not as sexy as it could be. The hardest part of it was the veil. The model for the bellydancer's face was bare in the Deposit Photos image. Clothed models often do not care to have their faces visible on erotica novel covers. So I did the logical thing: I went to Second Life and pulled up a veil and made screenshots of it at the angle I needed. Then I pasted on top of the model's face. It took a bit of finicky work to get it to look natural, but when you're a whiz-bang GIMP user like me, no problem.
The only real change to the new cover is the dancer. I wanted someone more naked to take advantage of the greater freedom Smashwords gives to authors with regard to covers. I also wanted a more active, sexy pose. So it was off to Second Life where I ran an appropriately costumed avatar through a few dance animations and took photos of the avatar as it danced. I got quite a few lively images but the one that really stood out is this one:
I liked the exploded hair, the way the arms are lost in the hair, the curvy hips and breasts, and the dynamic pose of the legs. But a lot of the joins in the body, like the inner thighs and especially the left waist were off, and the hair was too angular. So it was off to Leonardo AI, where I was planning to go anyway.
I ran the image above through Leonardo AI's Image to Image program and after several iteration, I got this:
I ran the Leonardo AI image through a background remover on Deposit Photos and the image above is what resulted. I shrank it and placed it on the Deposit Photos background image of the billionaire and bob's yer uncle, new cover.
The End
