"Don't judge a book by its cover!" Yet we're all doing it, all the time. Which is why authors need to invest in their covers.
Sorry, We Judge Books by Their Covers All the Time
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Half-Year Update 2026
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It's July, which means we're halfway through 2026. What do I have in store for you?
Why Some People Still Don’t Accept Achillean Romances
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We've been using m/m romance to describe fiction featuring a relationship between two men for ages now. Why can't we move past it and adopt a better term?
The Straights Can Pry Omegaverse from My Cold, Dead Hands
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Recently, a social media site tried to entice me to buy a cishet OV romance novel. It was ... unhinged, to say the least.
What Is With All These Book Retreats?
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A book shop often fulfills similar functions, including author events (Iryna Varanovich / Pexels.com) A recent trend I’ve noticed is the sudden abundance of “author” or “reader retreats”—events designed to put authors and readers in close contact. Many of these are cropping up in the romance space, where readers might be fanatical about an author’s work. Authors, certainly, are always looking for...
Writing Unapologetically Smutty Romance in a Conservative Era
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Or, Why Respectability Won’t Save You I think we can all agree we’ve entered a rather conservative era. It’s been a while coming, the first rumblings of it emerging fifteen years ago now. It gained momentum after the 2016 US election and snowballed from there. The pandemic threw fuel on the fire, and, well, here we are. Neo-fascists and alt-right parties are gaining support across the globe. We...
The “Other” in Romance
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Scary … or sexy? (Lisa from Pexels / Pexels.com) Monsters—or otherworldly beings—have almost always been popular subjects for fiction. We can trace vampire romances back at least to the nineteenth century, when we see Carmilla and Dracula both emerge. Neither is truly a romance, but both of them feature some relatively seductive monsters. Horror and romance have always walked a fine line...
Anybody Seen a Plot Around Here? A Bad Take on Cozy Fantasy
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I’m back on social media enough that I’m seeing bad takes, and whew, do y’all have some bad takes. I want to leave aside the general state of everything—lots of bad takes to be had there—and focus on more bookish things. Specifically, I want to take to task a bad take I saw the other day. Let’s start by saying people are allowed to enjoy what they enjoy and dislike what they dislike. That’s fine...
Is The HEA Predictable?
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Romance novels get a lot of flak. Sometimes, there are good reasons—a lot of them are run-of-the-mill or even bad smut. I’ve seen books with cardboard characters and even flimsier plots. Does a rose by any other name truly smell as sweet? (Dario Fernandez Ruz / Pexels.com) Some of the criticisms levied against romance novels stem from other, less magnanimous areas. Romance novels as a whole are...
Why We Need Queer Books (More Than Ever)
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June has arrived, and with it, Pride Month 2024 has kicked off. Pride started in the 1970s to protest the treatment of queer people, both by law enforcement and society at large. The Stonewall Riots were the last straw for many queer people. They were frustrated by living in fear and denial, always under threat of violence from the state. Pride parades became a way of protesting this oppression...
Coming January 28! Get set for more intergalactic hijinks when a monk inherits a HOST CLUB ON THE PLEASURE PLANET!