Passionate Ink

Passionate Ink (Angela Knight's Guide to Writing Romance)
Angela Knight
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2024 Angela Knight

It’s considered an established fact that the American public doesn’t read anymore, preferring movies and television. Yet romance publishing is a one point forty-four-billion-dollar industry. Somebody out there is definitely reading those books.

Trouble is, the original readership for romance -- those who devoured Barbara Cartland, Harlequins, and regencies -- is leaving the scene. Those who have taken their place like their romances darker -- outlaw heroes in motorcycle gangs or the Mafia. They’re not shocked by the “F” word, and they see no reason anybody should skip a love scene’s juicy details. They like sex, and unlike their predecessors, they weren’t raised to believe “good girls don’t.” As a result, many longstanding publishing-industry assumptions about the romance readership no longer apply.

Thanks to self-publishing, and e-publishers like Changeling Press, readers have discovered the pleasures of no-holds-barred romance. Heroines don’t have to worry about being “good girls” who only engage in carefully bland, vague sex. They can be just as passionate as heroes and enjoy edgier pleasures like bondage and submission -- or even dubious consent.

Twenty years ago, online readers weren’t a very large share of the market, but now they’re the majority. Traditional print publishers took note and realized the wave of the future might be hot and steamy.

Soon every print house started publishing erotic romance, and the market rewarded them as intrigued readers discovered the hotter, more sensual books.

I’m one of the authors who has reaped the benefits. My erotic romances have appeared on the USA Today, New York Times Publisher’s Weekly, and Barnes and Noble bestseller lists.

But that kind of success is more than a matter of stringing a few explicit sex scenes together. Just as in any other genre, best-selling erotic romance novelists write with the kind of creative power that seizes the imagination of fans. If you want to succeed as a writer, you need to do the same. Readers exploring an intriguing fad market will sample all kinds of things, but you want them coming back to your work.

Fads fade. Two decades ago, romances set during the Civil War and Indian wars were hot, but now those books would be very difficult to sell.

So why bother?

I believe that even when publishers are no longer interested in erotic romance, readers will still expect more than the pallid passion of earlier years. They’ll still want steam, and it would be to your advantage to learn how to write it with as much power as you possibly can.

In this book, it’s my objective to help you learn how to write the strongest novel you can. I intend to cover both basic and advanced concepts of romance writing, as well as techniques specific to erotic romance. I recommend you then follow up by reading some of the other books on writing that cover the specifics of plot and character construction in more detail. You’ll find some of those books listed in the bibliography. The greater your knowledge of story construction, the higher your chances are of achieving publication -- and hopefully, best-sellerdom.

But what exactly is erotic romance?