All These Roadworks 2024 Survey Results – Part 1

Thank you to everyone who took part in the 2024 All These Roadworks survey! I ended up closing the survey early, because I’d been expecting that I’d get 100 responses if I was lucky, and instead I got over 500 within a very short period.

As best as I can tell from my website, I’ve only ever had about 2,800 unique people purchase from me total – over all time – so I’m happy that this is a very good sampling of my current readers and customers.

In terms of sampling bias, the survey was only advertised on AllTheseRoadworks.com, BDSMLR, TwiXter and Threads, so it’s most likely to have attracted people who were already using those platforms, and may undercount people who primarily read me on platforms like EMCSA, Reddit, ROM, Hentai Foundry, or CHYOA. Still, it’s good enough to be useful.

This post just covers the demographic information. I’m going to talk about preferred content/kinks (and the question of politics) in a second post later.

I’ll go through all the chartable questions first, and then at the end I’m going to address some specific feedback from the text-answer questions.

Commentary: Honestly I got more paying customers in this survey than I thought. My website stats, and my experience with free book giveaways, suggests that free readers dwarf paying customers by an order of magnitude.

Commentary: Not a surprising gender spread, but all things being equal I’d prefer to have more women in my audience than I currently do – that is, more women total, not women in preference to men – and I’m going to take steps to make that happen. (What the other feedback tells me, generally, is that more Reality Check articles is the clearest way to improve those stats.)

Men were also more likely to be paying customers (72% of all men) than women (42.5% of all women), which is unsurprising given what we know about gender imbalances in pay, financial privacy, financial security and financial access.

Commentary: The interesting data here is not the age spread, which is unsurprising, but how it relates to paying customers. Respondents aged 23 to 37 are vastly more likely to be paying customers than all other segments, and specifically that 30 to 37 bracket are the most likely to be big spenders. I’d always assumed that my older readers (37+) were the big spenders, by reason of different buying habits and more disposable income, but this data tells me I’m wrong.

Commentary: At a purely mercenary level, I’d love to know how to get more money out of those earning $100K+ – and particularly those earning $300K+ – than I currently am, but the long-form “what can I do to please you more” answers from the 300+ cohort were mostly (though not entirely) variations on “more of what you’re already doing”. The 100 to 300 group were more varied in their responses but none offered a clear, realistic path to talking them out of more of their money.

Commentary: I probably didn’t need to include a $1,000 tier on this question, as even if you’d been a continuous Premium Member since the site opened in August 2019 you still would have only spent about $850 on membership, and I *think* the full site catalogue of books comes in under that too, presuming you take advantage of the bundles.

Heartfelt thanks to those in the 100-300 and 300-1000 brackets, though.

Commentary: Note my earlier remarks about only advertising the survey on AllTheseRoadworks.com, BDSMLR, TwiXter and Threads. This is largely in line with the clickthrough data I get on my site (that shows me where people are reaching my shop from).

For that one person who asked what my professional Fetlife profile is, it’s “ATR_Fiction” and you can reach it by clicking here.

Commentary: The sexual experience question was mostly aimed at pitching future Reality Check articles, to get an idea of what level of advice is beneficial for my readers. Inexperience readers are beloved (and check out my post So You’re A Virgin (link) on why virginity is a bullshit concept). Also to judge how much of an obligation I have to clue readers in if I’m describing something that sounds like it might be real kink but which is actually impossible / implausible / unsafe.

Commentary: Again, mostly about pitching Reality Check articles.

Commentary: I’m a dom, and all my stories are written by me, to suit my tastes. I was curious about the dom/sub balance in readers, but it looks like I’m aiming very neatly into the centre of that space, which is great.

Free-form feedback responses

Okay, I’m just going to go through a few of the categories of responses I got in the text boxes at the end here. I’ve got more to do, but I’ll do them on future posts.

Lower price (4 responses)

Several readers asked for prices to be lower. Realistically speaking, that’s not possible. The reason that my lowest prices in the store have historically been $3.99, and are now $4.99, is that the lower the price, the larger a percent my payment processor takes out of it. If I sell anything for less than about $1.99 USD, I just don’t make any profit on it. The $4.99 price point gives me a reasonable price point for every day sales, while leaving me room to offer 20% or 25% off during sales and still be worth my while.

In terms of memberships, honestly, if anything these are currently underpriced. The Stories tier is $9.99 a month, and it includes at least one free book every month valued at a minimum of $4.99, and sometimes as much as $7.99. That’s before even getting to the main reason people purchase the membership, which is access to 50 days of stories early and downloadable.

The Premium Tier is twice the Stories Tier, and before I talk about the value here, I want to come back to the underlying logic of both membership tiers. They originate from when I was on Patreon, and they should be seen in the context of a Patreon subscription – you’re showing your appreciation and financially supporting me to keep doing what I’m already doing. The member-exclusive content is just a bonus.

In the case of Premium Tier, that bonus is 18 or more completely free e-books at sign-up, at a minimum value of $90 USD, and six more every month for a further value of $30, so that’s a huge value – more than the price of entry – right there. And then you also have the benefits of the Stories Tier, including its free book, plus additional exclusive content.

And that’s all on top of the satisfaction of knowing you’re helping me to keep writing hot new stories.

I know some readers really financially struggle – but luckily, they can read almost everything I write completely free, subsidised by those with a bit more disposable income who can pay for it.

Include 3rd Party Books in Membership (1 response)

I’ve thought about this a few times but there’s just no way it makes economic sense. As pointed out above, the value of the books included in membership already exceeds the price of that membership, so I can’t see what realistic terms I could propose to 3rd Party Authors that would see them compensated in a way that doesn’t reduce my total profit from membership.

As an example, if I included *one* third party book per month, and paid the author for it at their normal rate per membership sale, I’d have to raise the price of that membership by $3.50 per month. (Unless the inclusion of that book caused me to sell *significantly* more memberships total, which seems unlikely.)

However, what I could do is see if any of my 3rd party authors wanted to offer an older book for free as a loss-leader, to get people to try their other works, and that *could* lead to a 3rd Party book occasionally joining the library rotation for Premium Members…

Lists of stories (2 responses)

I had a response from someone asking for “a comprehensive list of nonpublic material”. To which all I can say is that there is VERY LITTLE material that isn’t available for free, somewhere. Basically the stuff you can’t get for free is the contents of the e-book Golden Sins, the several pages of bonus material in the back of each paid e-book, and the three unfinished long-form stories made available to Premium Members.

Plus, of course, the 50 days of stories that haven’t been released yet. I provide an update on what’s in that queue every month, and the most recent one is here (link). I do those updates somewhere between the 14th and 19th of each month.

(And everything by the third party authors. Some of their work is available for free on other sites. Some isn’t. Best to contact them directly if you have questions about that.)

Someone else asked for “better organisation of serials on the main site”, and I assume that they’re just not aware of the Story Index (link) which contains a link to every chapter of every free story that appears on this site? If that’s not enough, then unfortunately the nature of WordPress makes it hard to organise things any better than that.

Audiobooks (3 responses)

I had two requests for more audiobooks, one noting that they’d prefer a female-voice narrator. I also had a request that audiobooks should have free samples so you can see what they’re like.

My current program of audiobooks, narrated by me, is basically dead. Almost nobody bought them, and there wasn’t enough interest to justify the time costs of producing more. Nor was there likely to be enough money in audiobooks to justify hiring a woman to narrate them.

The free sample request is a great idea, but I’m not going to apply it to my current audiobooks because, again, they’re simply not popular enough to justify spending time on.

However, I do have something new in the audio space coming, hopefully, which is a full audiobook of Emma’s Policy, narrated by a very sexy female professional voice artist, which is going to be done on a profit share arrangement, where the narrator gets the majority of the sale price. I don’t have a specific timeline for that, but keep an eye out! And if you like it, buy it, because how well it does is going to determine whether we’re able to do more.

Build Your Own Bundle (1 response)

One responder asked if they could “favourite” stories on the website, and then “purchase them as their own bundle in plain TXT format”.

That sounds great, but I have absolutely no technical capacity to make that happen. It’s not something my site software does natively, and I’m not a web developer, sorry.

Timing of book sales (1 response)

One responder asked me to do “book sales towards the beginning of the month when most people have disposable income”.

Is this a thing in the US? Are you folks paid monthly? The standard in Australia is fortnightly.

But look, two things. One, my sales data shows that the start of the month tends to be *low* sales, and my best sales are in the final week of the month.

But also I put out a new book each and every Friday so I’m not sure, realistically, how I could move them all to the start of the month without crowding them.

Exclusive stories (1 response)

A reader complains that the exclusive stories available to Premium Members are not updated.

That’s fair enough, but they were always offered on the basis of being incomplete stories that may never be finished. I’m stuck on each of them, and don’t see new chapters coming soon. In the meantime, that’s still hundreds of pages of exclusive erotica that Premium Members have access to, with darker kinks than the average of my free releases.

More 3rd Party authors (1 response)

A reader asks for more 3rd Party authors.

I’m trying! There’s not that many people out there writing quality erotica that fits my kinks. When I spot it, I’m quick to offer the author a place in the program!

More Pixie Isobella! (1 response)

I want more from Pixie too!

I can tell you that she’s recently had a promotion in her day job, which is, at least in the short term, requiring a lot more attention from her, and unfortunately that means less writing. However, she *is* still writing, and as soon as she has a finished book, you can expect to see it on AllTheseRoadworks.com!

3rd Party Previews / Guest Stories (2 responses)

Two readers expressed a preference for seeing guest stories and free samples from third-party authors, so they’d know whether they like their stuff.

That’s just good sense, and I’m going to be implementing that wherever possible on third-party releases going forwards, subject to the consent of the authors in question. I might do the occasional guest post unrelated to any specific release, too.

Offer less free stuff (5 responses)

Honestly I’m surprised how many of you were quick to volunteer for getting less free stuff.

It seems obvious to say that if you couldn’t get my stuff for free, you’d be more likely to pay for it. I’m not *sure* that’s true though. Plenty of erotica writers out there offer the “incomplete sample, then pay” model, and the vast majority of them are making significantly less money than me. Offering complete free stories keeps me constantly engaged with readers, and makes me welcome on a variety of platforms that frown on deliberate reader-baiting.

In any case, I don’t really *want* to operate that way. I always wanted to be the kind of vendor that I wanted to see in the world. I wanted to be clear to customers what they were getting, I wanted to avoid being overly manipulative in my sales tactics. I wanted to build a brand that customers felt *good* about. And I’m willing to lose out on some money I might hypothetically have otherwise made in order to do that.

Art and illustrations (4 responses)

I had four quite different comments relating to art, and before I answer them, I need to explain some of the underlying economics of my work.

I publish seven stories a week, four of them new. In order for them to have visibility on social media, they *must* be accompanied by an art asset. That’s a minimum of four new unique art assets a week.

When stories are collected into e-books, they don’t sell a lot of copies. 18 copies for a book in the first week is “okay”. 30 is “good”. Most books have lifetime sales of only about 100 copies, not counting bundles and memberships. I only break even because of the occasional smash hit, and the aforementioned memberships.

You need to understand this: there is no budget for art. I have zero dollars to spend on art. The e-books are barely economical as they are. They do not turn a profit if I have to factor in paid art. This isn’t traditional publishing, where you sell thousands of copies of a single book. I sell low numbers of each title, but keep releasing titles, and that’s what works.

In the dawn of time, before I was fully monetised, I was just using porn photos from the web and doing captions for them. That was never legal, or ethical, but it was non-commercial, so I didn’t care a lot. But when I started accepting money, I knew I had to stop that, so I switched to using Creative Commons Zero images, which theoretically had a licence for commercial use without attribution.

CC0 images were a bad answer, though, for several reasons. One, they were rarely sexy. Two, you could never be sure the licence was actually valid. And three, you didn’t get model releases for people who may be depicted within those images. I actually had a model from one of those chase me up once, horrified that her image was linked to erotica. It was an ethical and legal landmine, and I needed to get out of it.

A couple of years back I experimented with commissioning covers from the talented BoredArtist4LYF, and you can see them on the current editions of Average Availability and The Convent of Lesba, among others. Those cost $150 a pop, which is relatively cheap for full-colour cover art. Unfortunately, I did not sell $150 of extra copies as a result. In fact, I didn’t see any noticeable increase in my sales whatsoever, versus the CC0 copies. It was lovely to support an artist, but in terms of my business, that was money straight down the drain.

So I use AI art now. It’s not perfect – the current state of the law suggests it’s completely legal, but I don’t own copyright in the images (though no one else does either). But I know for sure I’m not depicting a real person without their consent. And, here’s the thing, when I started using AI, my sales went *up*, by a non-trivial amount (around 10%). Whether they say so or not, paying customers are voting for it with their wallets.

However, AI art is incredibly bad at delivering specific results and complex scenarios. A pretty girl is easy. A pretty girl in a certain kind of uniform is easy. A pretty girl with a certain kind of background is easy. But getting her to hold something, or take a specific pose, or interact with another human, is hard. There are ways to do it, but it’s time intensive. So it’s often the case that AI covers don’t closely match the specific characters in the story – and I’m not going to be using them to “illustrate stories” in the near future.

With that said, the specific comments I got were:

• Don’t use AI art – sorry, no, I will.
• Having images of real models for serialised stories – I have no legal ability to do that without paying, and no capacity to pay for it, sorry.
• Illustrate the stories – As above, AI is bad at doing this, and I have no budget to pay someone.
• Cooperate with visual artists to adapt stories into movies or comics.

Just on that last one, I’d love to, but I’ve yet to have anyone with a modicum of talent approach me about doing so. (People often mention Erenisch, and I’ll just say that Erenisch is aware of and appreciates my work, and I’d love to work with them, but they’ve specifically answered this question with a no – they work best alone.)

I also had one request for “more unique, descriptive story covers” and I have to say I don’t actually know what that means. Are we talking about book covers? Or the covers I use for members and BDSMLR? Or something else?

Be better at checking for typos (2 responses)

Yes, I know that typos get through, and yes, I know that it’s frustrating. I’d obviously prefer to catch them all before they go live.

However, I can say this:

I write upwards of 6,000 words of new content a week, not including posts like this.

That work *is* spellchecked. You very rarely see the kind of typos that are caught by a spellchecker.

The majority of errors are missing words, transposed names or pronouns, and continuity errors. These are NOT errors that I can catch by reading over my work immediately after writing it (possibly due to my neurodiversity). I just see what I meant to write, not what I actually did write. I would need to come back after a cooling-off of several days in order to catch those errors, and it would take a full re-read to do so.

But even then, that’s probably not enough. I actually used to work as an editor and proofreader. They say it takes eight complete readthroughs of text to catch 99.99% of typos, and it’s certainly my experience that you’ll keep catching them after two or three reads.

I do not have time in my business schedule to delay all my writing by an extra couple of days. I do not have the time to read every story through, carefully, a second time before posting it. That reading time would come out of writing time – I would write less as a result. I certainly don’t have any budget to pay a third-party to do it for me.

But, most importantly, my data does not suggest that a book with zero errors sells significantly better than what I’m currently putting out. I know for some people it makes a big difference, but there are simply not enough of those people to make financial sense out of investing extra time in marginally raising the proofing quality.

Nevertheless, I’ll continue to try and release as few errors as possible. 🙂

Write more / write faster / release more content / finish older serials (4 responses)

I’d love to, people! But I have to say that, between my neurodiversity and my post-stroke complications, 6,000 new words of fiction per week is all that I can achieve sustainably. That’s less than some authors, but a lot more than others.

Bundle longform stories (1 response)

I assume this means the reader would like to see something like the “Collector’s Bundles”, but for the novellas at the $7.99 price point like Average Availability and Tuning Chloe?

Absolutely. It’s been on my list for a while, and I’ll make it happen. They’ll probably be four books per bundle, and retail for $24 USD (a 25% saving over buying the books individually).

Build an app / read e-books on-site (3 responses)

Two readers asked for a dedicated app. Sounds great, but I’m not an app developer and I have zero budget to hire one, so this probably isn’t happening. (I also note that neither the Apple Store nor Google Play would allow an app featuring my content on their stores.)

A third reader asked for an ability to read purchased books directly on the website, rather than having to download the PDF to their phone. I can see how that would be useful, but again, it’s not a native feature of my website software, and I’m not a web developer, so I don’t really have a way to make this happen.

(Paid members, of course, can read e-books directly in Dropbox if they prefer not to download, but I’m not sure that’s an optimal reading experience.)

Phone accessibility (1 response)

A reader asks for “format that allows me to read on my phone at normal font size”.

I don’t know if that refers to the website or the e-books. The website has a mobile version that should automatically display on mobile browsers, and to my eyes the default font there seems generously large.

If you’re talking about the e-books: if you’re finding the PDFs difficult to navigate or read on a phone, then that’s what EPUBs are for. EPUB is an absolute ass of a format, but it *will* allow you to dynamically change the font size to whatever you need it to be, and reformat page breaks and so forth accordingly.

Unfortunately I can’t offer EPUBs for the “Early Access” story releases – it’s simply too much time and trouble to work with Satan’s Format for anything other than paid e-books – so PDFs are all I can give you there.

Dropbox organisation (1 response)

A paid member writes, “I find the organization of the Dropbox for members confusing. It’s hard to tell when something has updated or where to expect to find it.”

Unfortunately that’s probably just a limitation of Dropbox, and I don’t have a better free alternative for hosting this content that allows me to restrict it to paid members, scales to the number of members I have, and won’t kick me off for the kind of content I’m providing.

I’m open to suggestions on how to use Dropbox better, or alternative content hosts.

Requesting stories (2 responses)

I had two readers asking to make it easier to “request stories”.

Just to be clear on this, I don’t take commissions, and the only people who get to “request stories” are the subset of Premium Members who have been continuous members for about two years. (Currently being those who were members in September 2022.) And those requests aren’t a formal part of membership – you’re not paying for it in your membership fee – it’s simply that I’d prefer to be writing the stories that the customers who’ve paid me the largest amounts of money are interested in reading, because it makes good business sense, so I go out to them to ask which serials to continue.

Those members get an email when I’m ready to take new requests, and I notify the existence of that email in the “News” section of paid-member Dropbox so people know it’s gone out in case it hits their spam folder or something.

Less overlap in anthologies (1 response)

A reader asks for “monthly collections having more original content”.

I’m assuming this is referring to the anthologies I release at $4.99, the most recent of which was Virgin’s Descent.

In the past, I occasionally reprinted stories from collection to collection. The logic of this was that different audiences might buy different collections, so if a story was about, for example, religious corruption and hypnosis, the religious corruption audience might not buy a hypno book and the hypno crowd might not buy the religious corruption book, so the story could go in both books to make sure they both enjoyed it.

Over time, that’s not the way I’ve continued to market, so my policy has been for new anthologies to contain only unpublished works. Virgin’s Descent contains only stories that have never previously appeared in an e-book, as did the previous anthologies, The Objectification Artist and The Brain Eraser.

Going forward, new books will always consist solely of material that has never before been published, with only very small and specific exceptions. (Riley’s Documentation reprints the few pages of material from Laid Bare that inspired it, for example.)

In addition, as I prepare new editions of older books, I’m removing some (but not all) of the duplicated stories from those books and replacing them with new material, to reduce the overall level of duplication across those titles.

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That’s all the analysis for today. I’ll follow this up in the next week with another post, looking at kinks and content, and a final one some time after that, looking at questions of politics and payment processing.

• All These Roadworks
  21 November 2024