Regina Kammer

Oh, I wish I could had done this! I was at the dentist...

Hi Charity, see my explanation above as to why Jennifer Kacey's book is ranked so low. She wants it that way.

On one hand, it's more about promotion and name recognition. Day has a mega-serious-promo-machine behind her. Anne Rice is, simply put, Anne Rice and has huge cross-genre appeal. Jennifer Kacey is well-known, but not at the level of Day and Rice. Rankings have nothing to do with how well written or well plotted a story is. If that's all it took, we'd all be millionaires, right?! And I doubt the rankings have anything to do with the setting, either. Day and Rice and a handful of other authors are just in a league of their own for so many reasons and one really can't compare other authors to them. That said, I also see that "Together in Cyn" is an Ellora's Cave book. I am not going to get in too deep about the recent history of Ellora's Cave -- there are plenty of blog posts plus the #notchilled hashtag on Twitter where you can read all about what is going on with EC in the event you are unaware of any of it. Back in Sept 2014, EC sued a blogger for defamation. After that, the entire romance reading and writing community decided to boycott all EC books. Later, some EC authors begged readers to not buy their EC books because they wanted their rights back based on low sales. Jennifer Kacey is one of those authors who has requested readers not buy her EC books -- in fact she has requested readers not buy "Together in Cyn" (see her website http://www.jenniferkacey.com/booklist.html). So in this very particular case Jennifer Kacey wants her ranking to be low so she can get her rights back to her book and republish it. So, there are a plethora of reasons why a book may or may not be selling well.

Aidee you reminded me that I have a BDSM erotica short published by Cleis Press with no sex, only a kiss at the end!

I'm currently reading Bared to You and there is tons of sex! In fact, the whole book so far (I have ~80 pages left) is: set up followed by an exhausting amount of sex + misunderstanding + more sex then another misunderstanding. However, I'm not sure how you are defining "sex scene". I'm defining it as a scene with any sort of sexual interaction, not just penetration (although there's tons of penetrative sex in that book!). My books have tons of sex and my story arcs intermingle what I define as erotica (a sexual journey of a protagonist) with a romance (HEA). This is what I've defined as "erotic romance" (and I wrote what turned out to be a controversial blog post about my definitions). I'm not a huge seller, but I recently got a reader email that said (and I quote): "OMG! Why isn't everyone reading this?!!!" So some readers out there want lots of plot-relevant sex with their romance. I just have to find every single one of those readers!! I write kink, but not full out BDSM. My hallmarks are role play and voyeurism, plus I throw in machines and light BDSM. I write historicals so do not have "BDSM club" scenes (although upcoming Victorian stories will have sex club scenes, but such establishments were not BDSM exclusive). I don't divide reader populations by desired quantity of BDSM equipment, I divide reader populations by genre and by heat level. So historical erotic romance readers might not like shapeshifter paranormal romance and don't generally read sweet histrom, but they will read all high heat levels in histrom. The last few years I've been annoyed by the definition of erotic romance being a book with BDSM in it. That seems to be how RT Book Reviews defines it -- they might be driving reader expectations in this. -Regina