Why Clean Romance?

It's a little odd for someone who fell in love with the romance genre on bodice rippers and pirate stories to be writing what is now termed "clean romance" meaning no between the sheets action in the pages, but there is a method to the madness.

After years of being a connoisseur, being a member of writers' forums on and off for the last twenty years, and reading lots of reviews, it's very apparent that there is a whole swath of romance readers out there who really don't like the steamy sex scenes.

Really.

To an extent, I'm one of them.

See, the bedroom can be quite distracting from the actual story, and yes, a lot us writers know this.

The first time I realized that the sex scenes were not "all that" was some time ago in the middle of a Virginia Henley novel. Seriously, this was the soft core porn precursor to "Fifty Shades of Gray." And the sad thing is...not too long ago I read a novel by a different author who outdid Henley on the descriptions, and none of it was germane to the story.

Honestly.

And the big push on sex in romance novels isn't coming from the writers necessarily. Reports are out there that the publishing houses have been known to send manuscripts back to the authors asking for the scenes to be "hotter." Guess they haven't read the reviews where reader write notes saying that such interludes are unwanted.

So, when I started self publishing, I took the chance on clean romance and while there are some steamy scenes (one of them was actually in a steam shower), the characters remain covered. Hopefully. (If I slipped up, readers, please let me know.) The idea is to tell the story, not to get the reader all hot and bothered.

(For more on this idea, the legendary Mary Balogh had a good piece and discussion on her website a few years ago.)
  

New Beginnings

It's time in my life to close a few doors and open some windows. It's time to really make a decision on taking a single path of writing creativity rather than trying to make several different ones work all at the same time.

You see, thanks to the efforts of the owners of various social media platforms, the blogging infrastructure that had built up around politics not as usual was pretty much destroyed. There is no longer an efficient way to get enough views to stay viable.

That being the case, it's time to move on to the one part of my writing that has actually started to build a following: clean romance, as it is called. These are the romance novels that are all story, no sex. Well, at least none that the reader sees. 

In making a go of this, I'm learning along the way. Being from the American Midwest, tooting my own horn has never been looked at with any sort of favor. It was pretty well beaten out of me. Now, I find myself needing to market my own work, speaking of it in glowing terms. What works in political blogging to get the word out, definitely does not work for promoting novels. Plus, when looking around for internet tools to help with the "spread the word" efforts, there are countless ways to do it, and no shortage of advice on how to make it happen.

In short, I'm taking a little bit here and a little bit there, and cobbling together a way to find the clean romance audience and let them know when my new books come out.

It's going to be one heck of a ride.

PH