Top Sites for Erotic Romance Writers

I was going to give a list of all the on-line resource sites devoted to helping writers interested in writing erotic romance, today.

So I rolled up my sleeves and went researching and guess what I found?

There isn’t any.

Oh, there are a slew of books that have just hit the market right now, including a Idiot’s guide by an author I’d never heard of – Alison Kent – who, I discovered, writes Harlequin Blaze and Kensington Brava titles.  She certainly doesn’t write for Ellora’s Cave.

And there are some excellent generalized writing sites out there, and they do deal with the romance genre.  I’m just not sure how much help they’re going to be when it comes to erotic romance.  And if you asked them for help with MMF romance, well….  <wince>

What it really comes down to is that there are no sites specifically designed to help erotic romance authors.  The genre is either too new, or too in-the-closet for writer sites to handle openly.  I’d like to think that erotic romance is so generally accepted these days, that it has joined mainstream romanceland and doesn’t need its own special sites, but I’m just being silly now. :)

I know how I got into the business:  I started off learning how to write “straight” romance, that got steadily steamier and edgier, story after story.  Then I discovered Ellora’s Cave, read book after book after book, and sat down and wrote my first official erotic romance the hard way: trial and error.

The “monkey see, monkey do” method seems to be the way all writers are breaking into the erotic romance field, but that seems to be horribly inefficient, especially when the erotic romance landscape is changing so quickly.  What you’re reading today may not be what publisher are looking for by the time you get around to finishing your own manuscript.

And how do you know that what you’re reading isn’t poor technique that the author is getting away with just because she’s brilliant at maintaining sexual tension, or some other compensatory gift?

For now, the best thing you can do is read all the erotic romance you can.  But not just read…deconstruct a book when you’ve finished it.  Not just the book, but each sex scene and each moving passage.  Figure out why it worked well (or, why it didnt!).  What made it moving for you?  Take notes – copious notes!  Don’t be tempted to copy pieces of text, though, because that will lead you to stealing snippets and turns of phrase that you’ll end up using — even accidentally — in your own work.  And nothing is worse than unoriginality, as flattering as it might be to the original author you borrowed the phrase from.

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As resources for erotic romances writers are so desparately thin on the ground, I will run a series of posts here on erotic romance tips and techniques.  But you should also be learning everything you can about romance writing in general, and there are many excellence resources for romance writing.

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