In the wake of the
Ellora's Cave vs. Dear Author lawsuit, some discussion has cropped up in various online venues (most recently Twitter, which is where I first saw it) about the birth of the erotic romance sub genre. Did, in fact, Ellora's Cave "invent" erotic romance? My name was subsequently dropped as someone who could possibly detail
some history and viola! The idea started to burrow into my brain like a tick on a hound dog's behind.
First,
a disclaimer: I've only been reading romance since
1999, and my "history" with the genre is completely tied up with the Internet. There are
countless erotic works pre-Internet that have, over the years, inspired a
slew of writers. For the sake of this post I'm mostly going to focus on the 1990s to present day.
The rise of erotic romance within the romance sub genre is a fairly complex one, and not something that can easily be condensed down into a magic bullet by saying,
"So-And-So is responsible for it!" So as much as Ellora's Cave has, over the years, marketed themselves as
the pioneer of the sub genre, they didn't really "invent" it. So who did? Well, a bunch of people.
The first faint rumblings of steam launched with a quartet of writers, some of them working as far back as the 1970s and 1980s. That would be
Bertrice Small,
Thea Devine,
Susan Johnson and
Robin Schone. These ladies were not strictly marketed as erotic romance - they were all, simply, historical romance writers. However it didn't take long for romance readers to notice and these authors eventually created a brand around themselves.
Authors, what is first and foremost your "brand?" Yeah, your name. You read one book by Small, Devine, Johnson or Schone and
you knew the next book you pick up by them is more than likely going to singe your eyebrows off.
In 1999, it came to pass that
legendary editor Kate Duffy had an idea and that idea eventually launched
Kensington Brava. Duffy wanted to head up an imprint with a strong sensual element, and since Devine and Schone were already writing for Kensington Zebra, she didn't have far too look. She corralled all four of these pioneers under the new Brava banner and in 1999 the first Brava release, an anthology titled
Captivated, hit the shelves. Those early Brava covers were understated and simple but inside readers found the sensuality and erotic tones they had come to expect from these four writers. And now they were all in
one place, publishing under a
new imprint.
What Brava did was begin to mainstream erotic content. Yes,
Ellora's Cave launched in 2000 - but to say they mainstreamed it is fairly misleading. For one thing, they were a digital-only publisher for a long while and
the first generation Kindle didn't launch until 2007. Yes, people were reading digitally prior to Amazon, but I think we can all agree that Amazon is largely responsible for the sonic boom. Even among romance readers who were
very early adopters. Ask some of those very early EC readers and you'll find more than a few who downloaded the PDF files and then printed them out (!!) to read. Whereas imprints like Brava (and a few others I'll mention in a bit) could be found to varying degrees in a bookstore. Remember those? Bookstores?
As much as we like to think that every romance reader is online, they aren't. And that was doubly true 15 years ago. Countless readers "read in a vacuum." So stumbling across a digital-only publisher like EC back in the very early days of digital reading? Not an easy thing unless word of mouth hit their ears. But walk into any bookstore and chances were pretty good that you'd find a Brava title, or for that matter - a
Harlequin Blaze.
People like to think of Harlequin as a "old gray lady," but when they get their branding and marketing right they
really get it a right. Blaze originally launched as
a promotional series within Harlequin Temptation. Near as I can tell the first one was
Outrageous by
Lori Foster in
1997. The books had the familiar Temptation branding on them, with a little Blaze logo slapped on the cover. This was the signal to readers that the stories were going to be "hotter" than a normal Temptation (and that line was no slouch). Temptation released one Blaze title a month, a promotion that got so popular that in
2001 Blaze became it's own line launching with
Notorious by
Vicki Lewis Thompson. Eventually Blaze eroded away Temptation's readership and after 20 years that line folded. I know romance readers who still light candles in church over the demise of Temptation.
Things were picking up by the late 1990s and readers were getting some more options if they wanted steam. But what about those readers who predated this era? In many cases they had to look outside the genre. Case in point, in 1993 Virgin Publishing (as in
Richard Branson) launched
Black Lace Books and their mission was to publish
"erotic fiction written by women, for women." Fiction is the key word here. Black Lace did
not promise a traditional happy ending like romance, but savvy readers soon glommed on to key authors within the Black Lace universe who delivered happy endings, albeit nontraditional ones for what the romance genre was offering at that time.
Emma Holly is probably the biggest name here, having published
Menage and
Cooking Up a Storm in
1998.
Portia Da Costa was another known quantity at Black Lace who delivered happy endings and her book,
The Tutor (a librarian heroine!) was published in
1995.
The issue with Black Lace however was
always distribution. Being based out of the UK, getting your hands on Black Lace titles in the United States was not easy. If a bookstore carried them they were typically in the "Sexuality" section interfiled with the
I Can't Find My G-Spot self-help titles. I'm telling you, Amazon was the best thing that
ever happened for Black Lace fans. Seriously.
Also around this time
Red Sage Publishing launched their Secrets anthology series.
Volume 1 appeared in
1995 and the latest,
Volume 31, was published
this past July.
Alice Gaines,
Angela Knight,
Saskia Walker,
Charlotte Featherstone, and
Jennifer Probst are
just a few of the names that have been featured in Secrets anthologies over the years.
So if EC didn't "invent" erotic romance, what did they do exactly? Well they really helped ramp it all up. Blaze and Brava were heavily focused on "sensuality" in those days. As much as naysayers like to claim that the romance genre never changes, that's a bunch of hooey. If you pick up, say, an early Brava title and read it today it's going to seem
really tame. Hard to believe that when the line launched there were corners of the online community that were signalling it as the beginning of the end for the genre. I remember reading light bondage and spanking (for example) in early Brava titles - but hardcore BDSM? Yeah, not so much. Also EC was one (if not the only) publisher at that time publishing erotic romance content in science fiction and paranormal worlds. Red Sage did some of that as well, but in those early days they were doing anthologies only.
EC was offering stand-alone novels.
EC also played a healthy hand in marketing. As I've already detailed, erotic romance did exist before EC we just.....
didn't know what to call it. I was reviewing for
The Romance Reader at this time and while I cannot recall for certain now, I was either the only or one of the
very few reviewers who welcomed reviewing this "new" type of romance. I slogged through a lot of
"I'm a good girl virgin who wants to be baaaaaad" stories. Seriously, you all owe me.
Big time. Anyway, looking at my early reviews I called this "new" type of romance everything from romantica to romance-erotica to erotic romance. Finally, we all settled on erotic romance, although where that term actually came from is anybody's guess. I think I first heard it via Kate Duffy - but cannot definitively say
"She's the one!!"
So all this begs the question - if erotic romance has been around so long why did everyone lose their minds over
Fifty Shades of Grey? I get this question a lot from work colleagues. My answer is that for many non-romance readers, the idea of erotic romance was a completely foreign concept to them.
Remember that first Black Lace novel you read? Remember how it blew your mind? Yeah, that's what
Fifty Shades did a bunch of readers.
Fifty Shades also brought back the tamer covers
a la those early Brava titles, so the packaging was eye-catching while not being salacious (well, except for the handcuffs cover!) and word of mouth took off among non-romance readers. Once that happens, all bets
are off. What most of us found increasingly frustrating was the idea
that somehow
EL James had "invented" erotic romance and putting BDSM into a romance novel. Which,
hello? Go back to the top and reread this post.
What also tends to get lost in all of this history is how ground-breaking the first wave of erotic-romance was. I honestly remember a ton of hand-wringing on listservs and the
All About Romance message boards. To be fair to those readers who thought "erotica" was the beginning of the end, they had been dealing with a-holes
for years who were calling romance "porn for women" (not much has changed). Now, hello erotica! Sexing up the
Sexy Times isn't going to do
anything to dissuade that "opinion." But soon enough most of us were having too much fun reading it to really give a flying hoot what non-romance readers thought anyway. Bugger off and all that. And if you think that was brain-bleed inducing? I remember
plenty of early "discussion" that if you were an author who published with a digital-only publisher you weren't a "real author" and was erotic romance even really romance?
Seriously. It really was this incredible. I spent a lot of time biting my tongue and saying
"Seriously?!?! Seriously, now?!?!?!?"
That's my quick and condensed dirty version of erotic romance history in the past 15 years. I could go into quite a bit of depth on how I, personally, came to discover the genre - but I've rambled on long enough. I'll just wrap it up by saying Thea Devine, Emma Holly and Portia Da Costa - y'all changed my life. Bless you from the bottom of my dirty, dirty heart.
Note: Thanks to
Ridley and
Lynn from AAR over on Twitter for inspiring this post.
