If you’ve read a decent amount of my posts, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve spent a long time struggling with the fact that what I want to write is almost dark romance or, fairly often, technically is dark romance. But my novel ideas are, nonetheless, not well-targeted to a dark romance readership. I vent my frustrations about this in my post, The Frustration of Having Unpopular Kinks.

I mostly wrote this current post for myself, for the next time I’m tempted to market myself as a dark romance writer. This post is just a little less focused on what, specifically, I like that’s unpopular and more focused on why what I like writing doesn’t work well as dark romance.

Anyway, my novel ideas aren’t too gory or realistic or unromantic to be dark romance (okay, sometimes they are too unromantic). No, my real disqualification is that I write casual nonmonogamy that often involves the main male character getting with other women. It doesn’t matter that my female protagonists are into this or that they also get with the other women (and men) or that my MMC usually only cares for the protagonist. Involving other women in sexy times ain’t popular with the dark romance crowd (though some will tolerate a little FF).

Which, totally fair. If you want to fantasize about being everything to someone else who’s utterly and completely obsessed with you, having them fuck other women probably isn’t going to help.

Based on my research, if I wanted to write romance with multiple partners, I could write:

• Dark romance with one woman and multiple men
• Non-dark polyamorous romance with whatever queer configuration I want

Unfortunately, I’m not into either of those niches enough to dedicate my writing career to them.

Of course, I’m sure there are dark romance readers out there who like it when both the “hero” and the “heroine” get down with people of different genders, but I doubt they’re in any way a sustainable audience, which defeats the purpose of me trying to force my fiction into the romance mold in the first place.

That’s why I’ve embraced the approach of writing novels more in the vein of Tanith Lee and Octavia Butler: darkly erotic, non-monogamous, and often queer. I do have the odd novel idea that is pretty standard MF monogamous, and those, I can label as dark romances (if they end up having HEAs/HFNs), but everything else will probably fall under the label of erotic horror/gothic fiction or dark erotic fantasy/paranormal fiction.

My books aren’t for dark romance readers and that’s okay. I’m excited to contribute to the much smaller pool of non-romantic dark erotic books I crave more than any others.