How times change...or do they?

How times change…or do they?

When I was a teenager, I remember there were books containing the odd sexually explicit sentence or reference that my older sister referred to as the “mucky bits”. And, of course, we younger ones all wanted to get our hot little hands on said book and find out for ourselves exactly how mucky those bits were. And then, once we’d read and savored these titillating items, the whispering and giggling would begin: “Did you read that bit on page nineteen? Well, if you thought that was wicked just wait until you get to the end of chapter five. I couldn’t believe it, it actually says the guy unzips his pants, and he…ooh, I daren’t say it because if my mom found out…”
Despite the delicious chills and thrills those steamy excerpts produced in our young minds, they were never enough. We always wanted more. We wanted the excerpt to be a little longer, a little more explicit; we wanted the hero to be even better endowed physically; we wanted to know what happens next, and then what happens after that, and so on and so on.
Since then, bedroom doors have been thrown open and those filmy curtains blowing in the soft summer breeze have disappeared as readers gradually demanded more and more. Nowadays, in response to reader demand, books run the gamut from sweet to sexy to a little explicit to tell it all like it really is, including fetishes and spankings, domination and submission, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender, as well as les ménages à trois and even orgies, and the stories are told through the medium of werewolves, dragons, witches and warlocks, faeries, space aliens, shapeshifters, vampires, ghosts, people from the past, as well as ordinary everyday people.
But despite the bigger selection of everything including the heat factor, I doubt things have changed since those days when we borrowed books in brown paper wrappers and rushed to read the few well-thumbed pages in the privacy of our bedroom or behind a locked bathroom door. There are still those readers who want more. They want more thrills, more shocks, and some want a little more kink--according to some, the kinkier the story the better it is. Readers are constantly pushing the envelope because the demand for more never stops.
So, my question is, where does it all end? Must we invent more and more bizarre worlds and strange characters with even stranger behavior and appetites? Or do we go full circle, back to the time when nice girls kept their knees and ankles covered, and had sex in the dark with all (well, almost all) their clothes on?
So come on, tell me…what do modern romance readers really want now? What would you like to see more of, less of, or are you happy with the wide choice currently available? Like everything else, romance stories go through phases--today vampires are all the rage, tomorrow it’s dragons, the next day the demand is for plain and simple Mary Jane who works in an office by day and indulges in orgies in her leisure time (I think perhaps I smell a new plot here). Do you want more series with more continuing characters, or do you prefer one-offs? Are you content with any handsome hero, be he Joe from next door or a sexy knight in shining armor, who will make you catch your breath and cause your heart to beat a little faster as you imagine it’s you he’s carrying off into the sunset for that fabulous HEA? Or does your perfect hero come with a list of requirements--he must be a vampire, he must be very tall, etc. etc. Or is it simply a case of I’ll know what I want more of when I read the blurb?

Please, let me know, I’m interested in hearing what readers want more or less of.

Christiane France

P.S. The cover for Amorous Intentions, an anthology of four of my erotic romance stories, was designed by Trace Edward Zaber of Amber Quill Press.

http://www.amberquill.com/AmberHeat/AmorousIntentions.html