Erotica, Erotic Romance and Romance – Do You Know the Difference?

There’s a huge difference between erotica, erotic romance, and straight romance and if you want to break into the erotic romance market, it pays to know how to pick the species apart, even if the general reading populace can’t and your mother definitely won’t.

Erotica

Erotica is written purely to arouse, to titilate.  There is a story there, but the conclusion of the story may or may not be well defined, or even follow standard literary structure.  Erotica most often features scenes of sex, but it doesn’t have to.  Erotica will use whatever it needs to touch the reader’s senses.  The point of the fiction is only to arouse the reader.

Once that job has been achieved, the fiction can halt.  There may or may not be an attempt to provide any sort of story conclusion, although erotica can sometimes be very literary in tone, delivery and execution.

Erotica can also be delivered via imagery – erotic art, graphic novels, etc, have a strong niche market.

“Straight” or Traditional Romance

This is the romance novel as your grandmother understands it — the Harlequin Silhouette, mainstream romance where boy meets girl, and may or may not have sex with her once or twice before the novel ends.  Or may possibly have sex with her several times before the book ends, but always in euphamistic terms, with vague details, and the sex is periphery to the story — a nice little bonus for the reader.   These are the “steamy” romance novels that were pushing the envelope before erotic romances burst on the scene in the early twenty-first century.

If you were to remove all the sex scenes from these romances, you could still tell the story.

But if you were to remove the romance from the story it would evaporate.

Erotic romances

Given what I’ve written so far, you should be able to define erotic romances for yourself:

Erotic romances are traditional romances with strong sexual plotlines.

If you take out the sexual storyline, the story would collapse, and you wouldn’t be able to tell it.

If you took out the romance, the story would likewise collapse.  Unfortunately, there are a few erotic romances out there that have a weak romance tacked onto the sex storyline that give lie to this assertion, but I have stated elsewhere that there are good examples and bad examples of erotic romance out there, and these are bad examples to follow.

When you’re plotting your erotic romance, pay attention to both storylines.  They’re equally important, and your reader will feel cheated if you don’t deliver the goods on both romance and sex…if you get the novel past the editors in the first place.

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