These aspects (psychological/emotional/sexual) can't separated without the story failing to some degree.

In my books, the hero and heroine’s sexual journey toward love and acceptance of themselves provides the driving force of the book. If you skip my sex scenes, you might as well not bother to read the book. They are an integral part of the whole, and the books wouldn’t be the same without that added conflict of finding your true sexual self and also finding a partner who loves you just the way you are. (that’s where the romance part comes in :))
And there are quite a few erotic romance writers who manage to do that very well and I love to read them.

Were I to define erotic romance using those definitions, many mysteries and fantasy novels would suddenly be reclassified. Heck, the Dragon Riders of Pern were busy in the sack before any of today’s erotic romance authors picked up a pen.

I did read the Publisher’s Weekly article and I think the problem is more than market saturation, I think it’s the customers getting to know what they do and don’t enjoy reading. I’ve been exploring erotic romance for about a year, though I’ve read erotica on occasion since I was old enough to know what it was. As I read I learned – what I enjoy, what bores, me and what annoys me. Now I select more carefully. Is my spending down? Yes. Why? The books are not what I’m interested in. I do the same with any new genre I explore.

I’m not sure such a diverse genre will lend itself easily to a short definition. And I’m not sure we’d all see the same thing as “erotic”. M/F can be quite erotic in the right hands. M/F/M can be as boring as watching paint dry. Like any other kind of writing, it all depends on how well the writer and the reader relate.

Danille I think you asked the key question, I think you need to know what romance is and then it's easy to figure out how sex relates to it to make an erotica romance. IMO romance is the female reaction ot the romantic movement. Larger then life charactedrs and exotic locations, but all centerted around a female lead and among other threads the key plot is one where she falls in love. As time has gone there have been more bountries, like no affiars and no rape, but the main thing is it's a story about falling in love, which features a female lead, and has a HEA

I actually thik romance is much more simple, hero and heroine fall in love and live hea, readers each have their own guildlines for which books that belong to these rules will and won;t work for them, but if you;re a writer, I think the most important thing to remember is that it’s about love. So I guess erotic romance would be about two people falling in love, and expressing it formost eroticly.

“Romance wherein the sex provides the conflict.” really doesn’t work for me and I was surprised to see others say that they consider it so. I don’t think I’d want to read a book where the sex provides the only conflict.

I’ve read some books by e-pubs labeled ‘erotic romance’ that were no more than lukewarm and I’ve read some ‘historical romance’ by major print houses that definitely sh/could have been labeled ‘erotic romance’ if they weren’t too cowardly to do so.

As far as I can see the distinction between ‘romance with lots of sex’ and ‘erotic romance’ currently lies in which label the publisher is willing to put on the book and it’s applied haphazardly and inconsistently.

Obviously, we’ll never all agree and it’s really hard to quantify even in my own mind where the border between ‘romance with lots of hot sex’ and ‘erotic romance’ is, so I’m starting to think it’s one of those ‘I know it when I see it’ deals that varies by reader expectation and experience.

I just mentioned on another thread how I can take or leave sex scenes, but that I’ve been feeling recently that a lot of books are promising more sex/more out of the norm sex than they actually deliver. That really bugs me. Don’t tell me that X character really likes rough/dominant/submissive sex and then show him/her doing a nice gentle vanilla coupling that doesn’t even make them break out in a sweat.

Right now I’d really love to see a character who’s worried that his perfectly ordinary vanilla tastes aren’t exciting enough for the heroine. That would be different for sure from all the ‘I’m so dark and deviant, the poor lassie can’t take my badness…’ we are being served with no follow-through.

To a degree this wishy-washy stuff is probably a reaction of print houses trying to cash in on the current popularity of the ‘erotic’ without being willing to really go there in an effort not to scare of the more conservative readers.

All it’s doing is making me really crabby at the false advertising and resulting inconsistent and unbelievable characterizations.

Whether there’s sex and how much is just a detail which has nothing to do with whether or not it’s a romance. Whether it’s a man and a woman, or two men, or two women, or three men, or two women and a man and an alien from Aldebaran IV, is also just detailing, and has nothing to do with whether or not it’s a romance.

Angie

My definition? The sex is an integral BUT NOT ALL of the plot. Character growth through sexual contact. Does that make sense?

Angie