I'm thinking of going overseas to publish it. I have a lot of positives and negatives to getting it published.
Negatives:
* It is quite long—about 187,000 words. Most publishers want a length of 50,000. I really could not crop it down.
* There is a lot of raunchy, kinky, unsafe sex. Yes there is a scat scene, but the actual scene is maybe half a page.
* It first appeared on Nifty. It wasn't until I got over 200 contacts, most encouraging me, that I decided to clean it up in hopes to get published.
A lot of the negatives are not really negatives for the German publishers. And something about getting published by a real publisher seems to be a major accomplishment. I will self publish if I have to.
I'm no expert, but after watching what happens with various books, and spending some time learning about marketing in general, I have a few thoughts. Some of the points were addressed in another post here, but I'm not going to try to integrate that here.
Compared to a relatively unknown publisher, self-publishing can take you into more markets. It requires some self-promotion, but that's not difficult these days. You already have one venue for advertising. I understand the desire to have a "real" publisher take it, but given the quality of some books out there, that doesn't hold as much meaning as it used to.
The amazingly successful
Fifty Shades of Grey was originally free fanfiction and not published by a known publisher. Compared to what you'd expect from a proper publication, it was not extensively edited or revised from the fanfiction version. The success was largely driven by the original fans and word-of-mouth.
From what I've seen, the upper limit on length is usually around 100K - 120K, but that depends on the publisher, as you know. FSOG was a single story released in three books, a strategy many writers are using now. I've been doing some editing for an author doing that. (It's not a criticism, btw.) I'm not suggesting it for yours because, as I remember, there wasn't a natural break in the story, but it's something writers could keep in mind. As a more extreme example, I've seen some self-publishing authors put up very short installments on Amazon as individual ebooks. Personally, I find it annoying to buy the books in small sections. From the consumer's perspective, I think it makes more sense for an author to give away a small portion and then sell the rest as a single book to those who liked the first part.
For purposes of this post, I'm going to use "porn" below to refer to materials sold for sexual gratification more than literary content. That doesn't mean there isn't well-written porn or poorly written erotic literature that isn't marketed as "porn." I don't want to get into that discussion here - I just need a convenient term.
The scat theme (and the more explicit scat scenes) are going to limit the market no matter how you do it. There's a porn market for it, but you've written something that goes far beyond that. Unless there is a publisher interested in promoting that, there might not be much advantage to finding a publisher. On the other hand, I don't know much about porn publishers. Those catering to audiences interested in scat might be extremely useful.
One thing I've noticed is that the type of sex tends to put books into a genre, regardless of what the book does for most of its pages. A few pages can make the difference in how the book is categorized by readers. (I'm thinking of sites like Goodreads, where readers create the tags.) My novelette, for example, has been given the menage tag even though there's only one minor threesome scene. Also, the book isn't about BDSM, but because that's the kind of sex they have most of the time, it's being marketed that way. Not that I'm complaining, since BDSM has become very popular among erotic romance readers, but I don't consider it a D/s story, the sort I usually write.
I think working with a publisher helps when you have a series of books or when your work fits in with a type of book they promote actively. A good book can become known on its own, with the help of the author's and fan's efforts, of course.
