Recommended MMF Books. (I was mad. Mad, I tell you…)

I’ve made a habit of directing a lot of people over to the Goodreads recommendation lists over the years, and it’s always mildly annoyed me that the lists are subjective and voter driven, and I’m not on them.  [What? I’m not allowed to have an ego? 🙂 ]  I wasn’t annoyed enough to go vote myself onto the lists, which I could do as I’m a member of Goodreads.   I suspected there were a few authors who had voted themselves on that way, because when you read through the list, there are places where one author’s books are all listed together in one chunk, one after another.  Dead give away.

But, no matter.

I thought, rather than making readers take that extra step over to Goodreads, and then over to Amazon, I’d start building my own list of recommended MMF romance titles here on the site.

Oh, idiot me!

Approximately six hours later…

I’ve just got through the first list on Goodreads.  Ugh.  I always knew my list would be a permanent, living document that would take consistent updating, but I didn’t think it would take so much effort just to build in the first place.  So I’m going to put up the list I have for now, and keep plugging away at it in spare moments over the next few weeks.

The reason it is taking so long is because I’m not simply siphoning off the list of titles from the Goodreads lists over to mine.  Just reading through the recommendation lists made my antennae twitch enough that I started vetting the list as I built mine.  Good thing, too.  Some of the titles on the list aren’t MMF romances at all.  Some only have MMF scenes incidental to the main romance — so I left them off the list, too.

It also puzzled me that books with ratings barely above two stars were making it onto the list.  But if anyone can add a book to the list, then there’s no quality control.  So I put a quality control on mine.  Only books with aggregate four or five star ratings were listed.  And that means that if they had a 3.75 star rating on Goodreads, but a 5 star rating on Amazon, they made the list, because the aggregate rating would be 4.375 stars.

Books that were listed on Goodreads, but were not for sales on Amazon I didn’t list.

If I couldn’t find an indication of MMF activity in the descriptions, categories or tags, I erred on the side of caution, and left the book off my list.

If the book only had one five star rating on Amazon, that looked like it was from a friend or might otherwise be a set-up job, and it had sucky ratings on Goodreads, I also left it off the list, even if it did scape into the 4-5 star ratings.

At all times, I kept in mind if readers would be happy about being guided to buying this book.  If I thought you’d get snarky about shelling out for the book and then being disappointed, I left it off the list.  If I find out later my assessment is wrong, I can always add the book back in.

Oh yes, and in the interests of full disclosure, I have added Amazon Associate links for all the book titles.  But don’t think this is a big money grab for me.  I use Associate links all over my site, and most months I don’t make enough to buy a cup of coffee from all the links combined.  The point of the links is not to make me rich.  🙂

So, have a cruise through the titles and see what you think.  Of course, it’s not complete.  The list I was working from leaned heavily into BDSM and contemporaries, and didn’t seem to have anything from the last twelve months on it.  I have some catching up to do.

Recommendations gratefully received.

Recommended MMF Titles