Hiya!
And all good! The genre differences can be really significant in publishing! For example erotica books are: less likely to be published in search results, less likely to be listed in libraries, less likely to be listed on multiple publishing platforms, and more likely to be throttled/restricted in sales. They’re also less likely to be found on ‘people also read’ lists.
That’s just the marketing side. In terms of the reading side, the general consensus is that people who primarily read published m/m romance (instead of say, fanfiction like the rest of us who read a mix, or mainly only fanfiction), strongly do not like erotica peeking into their romance series. Erotica can be defined by: the number of sex scenes in the case of non-BDSM, or the book being primarily sex-focused, or it can be defined by the presence of BDSM (though this is a grey area, some people will automatically call any book with BDSM elements ‘erotica’ even though that’s not true at all).
Idk about you, but people like myself used to fanfiction are happy to bounce back and forth between the two, regardless of the series, and don’t always see a really distinct difference. But that’s because fanfiction regularly breaks the formula (or isn’t even aware there is a formula) for the sake of self-satisfaction and what feels right or what feels most self-indulgent or for whatever reasons!
But in publishing…I mean you can set about to break the rules if you want, but it’s generally discouraged, and anyway, in Perth Shifters I wanted to see what it was like if I mostly followed the rules. It’s not as natural to me as writing fanfiction or Fae Tales, and the kink is certainly a lot lighter than what I normally write!
I do think it’s partly one of the reasons why I am so drawn to fanfiction and fanfiction-style serials in the first place though. Because I like heavily character-focused erotica, with solid worldbuilding, and some romance, and that doesn’t really neatly fit into many categories in the current publishing world.
As soon as you have the erotica, they (many publishers and many readers) want to turf it into pulp erotica. It’s as though…once you have a focus on explicit sex, you can no longer actually have a story, or people don’t realise you can have one. But I don’t know why this is the case, when you can see explicit violence in a ton of stories that still have plot (i.e. Game of Thrones). Just because there’s a lot of something explicit – violence or sex – doesn’t mean it’s by default pulpy.
But unfortunately erotica as a published genre is still…thorny for a lot of people. And definitely for folks who consider themselves romance readers, which, when it comes to published books etc. is a very different world to people who also consider themselves erotica readers.
“fanfiction regularly breaks the formula (or isn’t even aware there is a formula)”
I’m not sure this is quite it – I think it’s more that fanfiction has its own formula, which just doesn’t map to anything that you can find in published fiction. @earlgreytea68 did a great post on fanfiction-as-a-genre (which I just spent, like, an hour going through my fandom tag to find, lol) that goes into this concept.
Fandom’s rules are obviously not as formalized or as strict as the rules for published fiction. But there are rules, and I know this because I’ve read fanfictions that aren’t written “like fanfiction” and… it’s weird! and noticeable! And – although fics like that can be a badly-needed breath of fresh air, sometimes it’s just annoying, because it’s like, I came here for fanfiction-qua-fanfiction and this is not meeting my expectations.
So, yes, from a fic reader’s perspective splitting up romance and erotica is bizarre. But it’s also true that we have our own things like h/c that totally cut across traditional genre lines and probably seem equally bizarre to outsiders. I mean there are published books that do fall into the h/c genre (obviously – like, Blackwood) but it isn’t something that people outside of fandom have a concept of as being its own specific thing. I think “erotica” is like that for us, in that it’s just not definitional in the same way.
Case in point, earlier today I saw a post about porn consumption in men vs women and I realized I have no idea how much porn I consume, because basically all my porn is delivered to me via fanfiction and I just don’t categorize fic that way in my head. I almost never go into a fic thinking, ah yes, this is porn, it’s Porn Time now. I can easily go for quite a while not encountering any explicit sex scenes at all without feeling anything lacking, and then on the other hand I once made a recs list for someone who was not in fandom and I had to really triple-check that I wasn’t letting anything through that might scare them off – I’d go back to a fic that I remembered as being tender romance and it’s like, 20% hardcore BDSM by volume, lol.
God, this post was meant to be really short and concise and basically just a link to that other post and it ballooned out of all control and ended up being not that. oooops.
Yes! Getting into m/m original for-profit fiction has been interesting. There’s a lot of overlap with slash fandom, but a lot of differences too.
HI :) I’m the anon who asked about Blackwood and kink. Thanks for the genre explainer, I mainly read fanfic, so I hadn’t considered the differences between published romance and published erotica. Happy hiatus! I hope you get lots of rest.
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Question of Smoke 