The Complete Ellora’s Cave Primer for Newbies Who Are Too Afraid To Ask – Part 1

Part 1: What is Ellora’s Cave?

Jump to Part 1: What is Ellora’s Cave?
Jump to Part 2: What Ellora’s Cave Has To Offer You, The Reader
Jump to Part 3: How to Ease into Ellora’s Cave
Jump To Part 4: Other Way To Keep Up With Ellora’s Cave

It still catches me by surprise when I come across romance writers and readers who haven’t heard of Ellora’s Cave, these days.  And I’m not surprised when I meet readers and the odd writer who have heard of Ellora’s Cave, but have never been to the site, have never read an EC book, and their impression of the company is “that porn publisher” that is bucking the system and stirring up trouble for the romance industry in some undefined way in their minds.

There’s also an equally large number of readers who are curious about Ellora’s Cave, but haven’t a clue where to start when they go to the site.  There is a huge range of books to choose from, and the titles and numbers of authors is staggering.  If you aren’t already immersed in the culture, it is frankly a shock to the system.  Ellora’s Cave release a double handful of books twice a week.  At that pace, if you’re not keeping up, you drown.

I’ve been publishing with Ellora’s Cave since 2003, three years after they went into business, and as I write this post, I have twenty titles under contract with them, under all my different pen names.  I’m considered an “old timer” at Ellora’s Cave.  I decided to write this series of posts to offload some of the nonsense floating around out there, and to give you a way to step into the Cave without getting lost (and forgive me for mixing metaphors).

Ellora’s Cave first opened for business in 2000, and has always been in the business of publishing erotic romance, that owner Tina Engler dubbed Romantica^©.  The term is now trademarked by the company.

It’s important to distinguish between erotica and erotic romance in your mind.  It also makes a big difference in the publishing industry, too, in terms of sales and the reading audience.  Erotica aims to titillate the reader’s senses one way or another and isn’t really interested in telling a story with a happy ending, or that features a relationship of any sort.  Erotica is about sensuality, period.

Erotic romance, on the other hand, is about the romance and the sex.  Both elements are vital.  If you remove one element—the sex, or the romance—from the story, the whole story falls apart and can’t be told.  There is romantic conflict, and there is a sexual storyline, and they’re both so tangled up together they can’t be unravelled.

Can you see that erotica and erotic romance are two completely different species?

Ellora’s Cave sells erotic romance—what they call Romantica^©—and they sell lots of it.  They were the first publisher to sell very hot erotic romance exclusively.  And they were the first to sell it in e-book format.  Both aspects revolutionized the romance industry, which was quick to respond.  A number of publishers developed their own erotic romance imprints, and a number of on-line publishers have since opened their doors.  E-publishing is now a multi-million dollar business and thanks to book-sellers and aggregators like Amazon.com, readers are able to access e-books in more and more reader-friendly formats and channels.

A few years after Ellora’s Cave opened their doors, the industry took another evolutionary spin when Print-on-Demand publishing became accessible.  Ellora’s Cave leapt on the technology bandwagon as an early adopter.  They began producing print versions of their electronic titles and distributing them into the bigger United States brick & mortar bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, and via online booksellers like Amazon.

As I write this post, Ellora’s Cave are still working to set up distribution their print titles into international brick & mortar bookstores, such as the U.K., Canada and Australia, but readers in these countries can buy EC print titles via on-line booksellers located in their countries, such as Amazon.com.uk, Amazon.ca, and so forth.  And of course, anyone can buy an ebook title from Ellora’s Cave wherever they are in the world, whenever they want.

Ellora’s Cave also publish many of their titles in Spanish.

Despite the recession, the International Digital Publishing Forum has reported that quarterly sales of ebooks have risen sharply. Ebook sales for the 2nd quarter of 2008 were $11,600,000. 2nd quarter 2009 sales more than tripled to $37,600,000. Erotic romance accounts for many of the sales, so it’s fair to say that Ellora’s Cave, as the largest, oldest and most successful of the erotic romance e-publishers, is doing very well indeed.

Next:  What Ellora’s Cave has to offer you, the reader.

Jump to Part 1: What is Ellora’s Cave?
Jump to Part 2: What Ellora’s Cave Has To Offer You, The Reader
Jump to Part 3: How to Ease into Ellora’s Cave
Jump To Part 4: Other Way To Keep Up With Ellora’s Cave

Tweet This Post

Related Posts

• The Complete Ellora’s Cave Primer for Newbies Who Are Too Afraid To Ask – Part 4 (and Final) Other Ways to Keep Up With Ellora’s Cave Jump to Part 1: What is Ellora’s Cave? Jump to Part 2: What Ellora’s Cave Has To Offer You, The Reader Jump to Part 3: How to Ease into Ellora's Cave Jump To Part 4: Other Way To Keep Up With Ellora's......
• Go Down Under with Alexis Fleming and Win A Copy of Honey Trap Today we're talking to Alexis Fleming, Aussie author, and contributor to the Going Down Under series at Ellora's Cave.  Her book, Honey Trap, was released just this morning.  Because of time differences, it's going to be about 1pm MST before Alexis will be up and about and returning comments, but......
• Upcoming Event: Julia Templeton to guest blog here, October 7th. All you historical romance lovers take note:  Julia Templeton will be guest blogging here on October 7, to celebrate the launch of her new sexy erotic regency romance trilogy coming out with Kensington, The Rakehells of Rochester.  The first book Sinjin, is being released on October 7 (it seems like......
• The Difficulties of Writing Really Old Erotic Historical Romances.  [/caption]Ever wondered why there aren't more erotic historical romances out there? I've always written the odd historical romance, but my output has dropped considerably since the market bottomed out rather dramatically a few years ago.  Since erotic romances bloomed in the early 2000's I naturally switched my attention over to......
• Ellora's Cave Kindle Editions Catching Up -- Good News for You. Ellora's Cave have been slowly converting all their back-list books to Kindle editions and uploading them to Amazon for the last six months or so.  That job is complete, and now the titles are beginning to pop up on Amazon as Amazon catalogue and build pages for them. Unfortunately, there's......

Related Websites

• How Many Authors Can You Name? by Susan Sigler, guest blogger Do you think you know your romance authors? eg (evil grin) I’m going to have you crossing genres, throwing TBR books in the air and calling all your friends. You will learn to curse in 5 languages while googling authors. Kindles will be recharged from......
• The Oxymoronic Genre – Erotic Urban Fantasy by Teal Ceagh, guest blogger and author of Mia's Return. People tend to look at me oddly when I tell them I write erotic urban fantasy. Paranormal romances are everywhere these days. Even erotic paranormals are almost commonplace. But when you say you write erotic urban fantasies, readers’ eyes......
• 4 Things Bloggers Do WRONG! I’m a very prolific blogger and read a lot in my blog community and in other blog communities. I can’t stand some of the things I see and if I have a problem, I can guarantee other readers of your blog do too. Here are four things bloggers are doing......
• Top 50 Romance Blogs, part 5 We made it! The final 10 blogs! This concludes the series of posts for the Top 50 Romance Novel Blogs to Watch in 2009. Now we're not all done... oh no... there's one more post. This post will share with you all the reader recommended blogs that weren't included in......
• How to Write a Killer E-Book Title to Boost Sales Your ebook may offer killer content, but unless you optimize the title to attract potential buyers to further investigate your offering you will lose sales. You need a great title, not just a good one. You need to stop the browser (virtual or in a bookstore) in their tracks......