Originally Posted by JJStrebas (Post 822045)

Maybe so. There's also a genre known as erotic romance which kind of blurs the line, but from what I understand it isn't a very successful thing. People who like "real" romance don't like it because it goes overboard on the erotica and doesn't necessarily cover the beats and people who like erotica get bored of it and move on.

At first I was going to try to do About Marlin as one big 50-70k word novel, but I just wasn't confident enough that it would work or that I could really go about marketing it as romance, so I decided to go with my usual chapter format instead. I'm still kicking around the idea, with another different story, but I don't think it will grab a larger audience outside of people who already like BE.

I'm okay with that, but at the same time I can totally understand your desire to reach a different and larger audience by introducing "true" romance novel themes to a BE style story.

Originally Posted by somnium (Post 822309)

I think in this case, you have to find the right balance. If you lean a little more towards the erotic side, people will put up with your story line, but a good story line is going to help people enjoy the erotica too. It's not enough, I feel, to just write out an erotica scene. Giving it more context will, in the long run, but a good thing by giving the sexy bits more of an emotional punch

As for longer works, the right approach might be releasing the story on a chapter by chapter basis. People will swallow the story chunk by chunk rather than taking a gamble on a normal-sized book. Later, you can package all tht chapters up and sell them in one volume.