A conversation I have had with a lot of authors is, how much sexual content is too much, both in terms of quantity and strength of the scene. there is never a hard and fast answer, in my opinion, some stories suit more, some suitless. Some romance stories are fine to concentrate on the emotional element. This topic came into focus with two stories I edited recently, I was drawn to both stories, but the sexual content in both was a bit thin, given the subject matter. I won’t name either as I don’t want to embarrass either author. The first, the subject matter concerned a group of women making a bet as to who could seduce a man. Considering the subject in the original script sex was a little thin on the ground, so I felt we needed to up the content in terms of frequency of events and strength of content. In the second story, the number of sex scenes was fine we just deepen the emotional content. As a publisher, I feel strongly that in romance stories you need to get across the emotional elements or you fail in the genre. I think that separates romance and erotic romance from erotica and porn. Don’t get me wrong I am at ease with the last two categories, it is that Black Velvet Seductions don’t publish them. We do publish erotica with a separate sister company, but that is for another blog.
Which brings me back to the question, in romance stories, how much sex is too much sex? Is there even such a thing as too much sex?
As always I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on the blog, Facebook, or twitter.