I like good books. Well-written books. I certainly don’t select books based on the fact that I think they will have a certain type of sex scene in them and, frankly, I am baffled by the idea that many readers do. But that is the message that comes across loud and clear when ménage books leap to the top of the e-book sales. It has to be a well-written ménage, the experts will say, but why does a well-written ménage decimate the competition when the competition is well-written books of all other varieties?
A creditable e-publishing guru told me a while back that the best way to boost sales was to write a ménage – even if I only wrote the one. My reaction was a polite, “Good to know.” I then promptly ignored that advice and went back to my plain ole boy-girl book. Am I a dinosaur? Am I, god forbid, a prude?
Every book can’t be a threeway. Suppose I’m writing a new take on the Adam and Eve story, it wouldn’t really work if it suddenly became a ménage. (Hmmm… Adam, Eve & Steve: the New Eden… Steve = the snake, or at least a trouser snake. Oh geez. I’m awful.)
Ahem, back on topic…
Ménage may be hot, but certainly not to the exclusion of all else. I firmly believe that there will always be room out there for a wondrous variety. My (relatively) tame approach to the romance genre (at least in comparison to explicit DP) still has a place, doesn’t it?
A love triangle is a classic conflict. Menage authors are just taking out the middle men (or, perhaps more accurately, throwing the middle man into bed with the hero & heroine).
Ménage represents sexual adventure. Not because it cannot be romantic or loving, but because it is forbidden. A three person novel based on love in which they all wind up happy together in their triangle is no less realistic to me than the candy-coated happy la-la relationships in most romance novels where the relationships are perfect by the last page. It is not that three people can’t have a ménage based in emotion that makes ménage tend to tip the scales in the more sexually-focused erotica direction. It is because adding the third person adds the automatic illicit factor, regardless of their emotional attachment. If you are reading for adventure, you know you are going to get it with three people cavorting nekkid on the cover.
Is ménage a force in the e-publishing world because people are too embarrassed to march into their local Borders and order up some m/m/f action? They can get a cute paranormal romance from a brick and mortar book store, but is the e-world the only place many readers feel comfortable indulging their illicit ménage yen?
I wonder if you can track the upswing in erotica sales to the time when readers began purchasing books online to be shipped to them or downloaded. Remove the embarrassment factor and you see what people really want. But does that also mean that ménage will never make the leap out of the e-world into the brick and mortar mainstream? Or is it only a matter of time? Are we truly becoming more evolved? Is ménage the next step in literary evolution? Or is it just a flash in the pan, a blip on the screen, an anomaly that will last only until it is swallowed up by the more traditional two person romance?
Your thoughts?
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