6+ Romance Related Yahoo Groups Discussion Lists

What?  Didn’t know that email discussion lists were still going?  With Facebook’s interface getting clunkier with each progressive update, these days, Yahoo Groups and even the really old-fashioned listserve where you have to subscribe via very precisely worded text-formatted emails are starting to look good once more.  They provide in-your-inbox content, and if you’re using a desktop mail program, that content is brought down to your computer where you can read it all at your leisure, without a heuristic program filtering it for you and deciding what you should or shouldn’t read.

Here are 6 or so of the biggest Yahoo romance-related discussion groups and their pros and cons.

TRS Blue

Group Information

Members: 1,150
Founded: Jun 23, 2003
Subscribe: trsblue-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

The Romance Studio – Blue is the erotic romance wing of the Romance Studio. They have a “straight” romance discussion group, too.  The traffic at TRS Blue is moderate to heavy – around a 1,000 messages a month is normal.  Much of it is promotional in nature, but this is a great way to keep up with contests, giveaways and your favourite authors.

Romance Junkies Readers

Group Information

Members: 2,557
Founded: Jun 12, 2003
Subscribe: RomanceJunkiesReaders-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Romance Junkies is not specifically erotic romance, but they’re more than happy to discuss erotica, or anything else romance related.  Promotion is regulated on this list, so you won’t be inundated with it.  Contests are a regular feature and “shout outs” can cause the traffic to bump from a light day of a couple hundred messages to over a thousand.  The traffic can be enormous, and there are regular emails sent out giving guidance on how to handle the traffic.  Still, if you love freebies, and talking about romance, this is a happy, friendly community and you never know who will show up.  The group is also closely joined at the hip to the Romance Junkies site and blog.

Ellora’s Cave Chat

Group Information

Members: 3,619
Founded: Mar 16, 2004
Subscribe: ellorascavechat-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

This group is a one-publisher group, devoted to all things Ellora’s Cave.  Surprisingly, given the huge number of subscribers, traffic is not enormous on this group, and promotion is not rammed down your throat.  Be aware that I am an Ellora’s Cave author myself, and my opinion is probably somewhat biased.  There is more general chatter on this group than others of the same size.   When an EC author does a “list-mom” day, there will be a flurry of traffic, contests and giveaways as excerpts from other authors are aired.  These are popular days.

Traffic flexes anywhere from 2,000 down to 1,000 posts a month.

Paranormal Romance

Group Information

Members: 3,437
Founded: Oct 30, 1999
Subscribe: paranormalromance-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

The group is not specifically erotic paranormal oriented, but erotica is not barred from discussion, either.  Promotion, however, is ruthlessly squashed.  This makes the group 100% discussion only.  Readers are encouraged to join the sister group The Haunt if they want to keep up with their favorite paranormal authors’ activities.  Authors are free to promote (under strict controls) in The Haunt.

Either the repressing of promotion on the list shows in their traffic stats, or the maturity of the group.  Despite the huge numbers of subscribers, there’s only an average of around 500 posts a month.  The Haunt, with only 683 members, generates just as much activity.

Romance Only Excerpts

Group Information

Members: 1,222
Founded: Oct 11, 2005
Subscribe: romanceexcerptsonly-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

The concept sounds odd, but the number of subscribers, and the number of years the group has been going clearly says the idea is a good one.  Each post is an excerpt from a currently available romance novel, along with a link where you can buy it.  That’s all that gets posted.  There are no promotions permitted except for the excerpts, and no other discussions.  The group averages around 700 messages a month.

Fallen Angels Reviews Chatters

Group Information

Members: 1,642
Founded: Oct 1, 2003
Subscribe: FallenAngelReviewChatters-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Not specifically erotic romance oriented, although erotica is welcomed.  FAR say promo is not permitted, but many of the posts look suspiciously like promotion in disguise.   Traffic is averaging around 1,000 posts a month at the moment, which is not stupefyingly heavy.

L-Soft

This isn’t a Yahoo group at all. This is a generation back from Yahoo Groups, but it still exists and works just fine, and hackers and spammers have long since moved onto better things like Facebook, so it’s very quiet here.

If you’re feeling adventurous, try searching for your favourite genre or sub-genre, and see if there’s a discussion group running on an server somewhere in the cloud.  This link will take you to a simple interface that lets you search for lists by subject, and gives you instructions on how to subscribe to any you find.  There’s no fancy html home pages like you get for Yahoo Groups.  It’s raw listserv information.  But this is discussion groups at their most basic, and you get 100% content, all the time, so if you can find a good one, stick to it.

If you’ve got any sort of geek tendencies at all, you might like to try starting up a group of your own, and be proudly throw-back.

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