Mixed pairings/kinks in the same collection

I'm just as eclectic, Rowan.

Conventional wisdom says that erotic romance genre readers are among the most clannish around: some het readers shy away from 'all that gay stuff', many M/M readers take mentions of M/F sex in stories as an insult, a number of people who like mild kink are afraid of heavy BDSM. To some extent, and especially in the inexpensive short-fiction self-pub markets, that seems to be true.

But if you can work erotica and erotic romance into other genre crossovers like mystery, thriller, horror, fantasy, or science fiction, and build a rep for quality, the barriers don't seem as high.

I listened in on a discussion today where a number of authors talked about scarce reviews and skittish/cheap readers. I can't give earnings, but many of these folks are probably making between $25K and $80K a year, and fighting tooth and nail for reviews. Several other authors who barely promote but have focused on large but high-quality backlists are making considerably more...in one case, near $500K. They've built a rep that now lets them experiment away from formulas.

Whether a starting writer should focus on formulas and quantity, or buck trends, is their own choice. I have noticed that for those choosing quantity and low price, it sometimes comes back to haunt them when their writing improves and deepens. It's like they have to train a new readership again.

This was just one observation, Rowan. I'm sure you can get equally valid advice that tells you the opposite. It's publishing, which has a high degree of random outcomes.

Be honest as you can in your blurb, so most readers will get an idea of what awaits.

I think Filigree gave great advice. If you decide to mix it up, and I sure as fuck do with everything I write so take this with a grain of salt, make sure you LABEL. Yes, if there is some Tom foolery happening between M/M in a blurb that only mentions M/F parings, mention it. I usually do it in the blurb because, like I said, I like to write all kinds of gender pairings in my books that my readers may not be ready for.
Example:
***Warning: This is a steamy BDSM romance with a sexy as hell Alpha male submissive and a sensual Dominatrix who loves to please her man in the kinkiest of ways including bondage, flogging, spanking, pegging, light F/F play, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and a M/F+M/F scene so hot it just might melt your panties***

So you can inform your readers as to what the book contains in whatever entertaining manner you want, but I think it is important to have that warning there or people that HATE xxx gender pairing will send you nasty emails.

And they will, along with one-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

What blows my mind is even on sites that have stories tagged with tags for every conceivable fetish from netorare to futanari to forniphilia, people still get pissed off when they read stories about kinks they don't like, when they could have avoided it by just reading the damn tags.

Yeah, lots if us like variety. But lots of people will get pissed off if they run into anything that doesn't tickle their fancy. Label it so it's their own fault. (But somehow they'll still blame you...)

^^ Ann's words of wisdom is very true. Labeling is key, and so is appropriate cover art. You have no idea how upset people can get when they discover BDSM (or *gasp*, an implied F/F scene), even though it's explicitly stated as a content warning in the blurb. One of my pubs favor relatively tame covers even when the book's at a higher heat level, and I occasionally get the "I didn't expect there to be sex" reaction.

Pssst. Some readers are idiots. There's nothing you can do about that.

By the way,Tara, your covers are inspirational to me, as I muddle through self-pub.

Lol. Thanks Filigree! I love my covers, don't get me wrong . I've gotten better at blurbs now too. My first book taught me that not everyone scrolls all the way down to the end of the blurb to read content notes .

Btw, both my pubs send a lot of work to Tibbs Design . I've never been able to communicate directly with the artist, but she's accommodated every single one of my weird nit-picky requests. I'd definitely recommend her to anyone who asks.

Ann_Mayburn said:

I think Filigree gave great advice. If you decide to mix it up, and I sure as fuck do with everything I write so take this with a grain of salt, make sure you LABEL. Yes, if there is some Tom foolery happening between M/M in a blurb that only mentions M/F parings, mention it. I usually do it in the blurb because, like I said, I like to write all kinds of gender pairings in my books that my readers may not be ready for.

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I agree that labeling is key. As a reader, I find it frustrating when it's impossible for me to tell if a book is M/F, M/M, F/F, or some combination. I don't read M/F as a rule (except, occasionally, for femdom stories), but would consider buying a book that had M/F if there were other pairings, too.

I think with a collection, it's going to be hard, if not impossible, to put together a grouping of stories that everyone will enjoy equally. I think going with a common genre/theme is a good way to go, and personally, I think it's fine to go with mixed genders as long as people can tell what they're getting.

My god, Tara, you have infinitely more kindness than I do. If a reader can't read a blurb all the way through, I...I have no words to express my dismay.

This thread is the perfect thing for me to read today--have just been contemplating going through my blurbs and more explicitly stating in the first line (above the fold on Amazon) any content warnings/advertisements that might be relevant. I bought a book yesterday that clearly stated it had BDSM elements and sure enough, was dinged in a one star review for having "too much" BDSM. Headdesk. (So I promptly bought the book. Too much BDSM? Bring it on!)

But I will say, as a reader, that I love reading collections with a lot of different things in play, and it's definitely the way to my heart. If you can write incredible femdom, snappy dialogue, kink that goes beyond ropes and into character, and queer people who aren't paper-thin, then I'll read anything you write, even if it's straight vanilla cisgendered white folks having sex in the missionary position. (Er. I mean, theoretically, anyway. Not that I have anything against straight vanilla cisgendered white folks or the missionary position.) I'm less likely to spend money on a collection of all one thing, but it looks like that's what most collections tend to be.

Filigree said:

My god, Tara, you have infinitely more kindness than I do. If a reader can't read a blurb all the way through, I...I have no words to express my dismay.

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Right!? I'm a reader with *extremely* specific tastes (certain pairings written certain ways will produce an anxiety-rage reaction in me), so I take it *upon myself* to read every single scrap of information about content which I can get my hands on. I have written irritated reviews of books that misrepresented that content (stating the wrong gender of sub or dom, for example), or that didn't give me anything to go on at all, mostly to provide more info for other readers doing the same research I do. But if I just lazily click download halfway through a book description, I realize the risk I'm taking and that it's all on me!

MumblingSage, I want to hug you. Failing that, write you something that makes you happy without setting off triggers. Because I know my own triggers intimately, and I'm dealing daily with someone whose PTSD has switched to the insidious 'unknown trigger' stage.

Plus, I need to stop reading Goodreads comments.

I usually keep it in the same neighborhood. Like if it's M/M noncon, I might have a few violence-related kinks (beating, whipping, choking, etc) where as I wouldn't throw those into a more romantic story.

Filigree said:

MumblingSage, I want to hug you. Failing that, write you something that makes you happy without setting off triggers. Because I know my own triggers intimately, and I'm dealing daily with someone whose PTSD has switched to the insidious 'unknown trigger' stage.

Plus, I need to stop reading Goodreads comments.

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Aww, thanks. I'm hesitant to call my reading squicks (in the TV Tropes sense, meaning no moral judgement, only a personal reaction) "triggers" per se, because they're not rooted in a deep personal trauma. Although they definitely can make me feel frustrated and oftentimes there's some anxiety related to encountering one unexpected in the wild--or when I was expecting something different. So definitely not healthy for my psyche, and I imagine it's even worse for anyone who does have triggers and wants to navigate the erotica scene, especially BDSM. I have a few friends with similar feelings and we all sort of share our recs & warnings around. A lot of us have a background in fanfiction, too, where people seem in general to be much more thoughtful about content descriptions (and it is a norm to read them...although some people still seem to miss that).

And may I offer you an internet hug in return? "Unknown trigger" sounds nightmarish .

So, yeah: labeling is super important, and shame on authors who don't do it (there are unlabeled noncon stories on AllRomanceEbooks, despite the fact that you as a publisher can't actually upload a file without confirming either that it has content to be warned for or does not have any). But past that, it behooves readers to know roughly what they're looking for. And yet I think it's a different thing to, say, be upset by a surprise edgeplay scene in what was advertised as a vanilla story than to be upset at the mere existence a F/M side pairing in an M/M story (or vice versa).