I've got loads of ideas for this series, but I wanted to start off with some basics because I think there are some questions you should consider before you commit to writing an erotic scene (or novel) and I want to cover those before talking about anything else.
I was going to call this post 'dos and don'ts' but I realized as I was writing it that I am not really sharing a set of rules at all, it's just a question I ask myself that I would like to share with other people.
Why should I care?
Why should you care? Well, that's the question.
This is a pretty broad question to ask, but it is really important to consider why people should care about the mature scenes in your book because if they don't care they won't find the scenes interesting.
More specific questions to ask when you are deciding if you want to include a mature scene include:
Do your readers know who the characters are?
Do they care about them? Or their relationship?
Do you learn something new about the character(s)?
Is this a scene that has lasting consequences?
Does it change anything at all?
I'm going to use my book Morrigan: I Am Your Fate as an example here, because Morrigan has a lot of mature content but it is all there for a reason.
The tagline of the book is 'a story of recovery, revenge, passion, and destiny' and those things are extremely important themes throughout the book because it is the story of a young woman who was sexually abused.
The first erotic scene of the book is in chapter six and before I wrote that scene I asked myself all the questions above.
Do your readers know who the characters are?
They know who Morrigan is, and they have been following her for six chapters / eleven thousand words. Ares was mentioned in the first chapter, and they met for the first time in chapter four.
Do they care about them? Or their relationship?
Hopefully! She has lost everything, survived for months in the wilderness, and is starting to feel optimistic about her future. She had a vision of Ares as she was close to death all the way back in chapter one, and she believes that they are destined to be together. If I have done a good enough job as a writer my readers should be really eager for them to hook up.
Do you learn something new about the character(s)?
Yes. You learn about Morrigan's previous experiences in a way that she would not have considered otherwise because she had nothing to compare them to, and you learn more about what Ares is really like.
Is this a scene that has lasting consequences?
Yes - Ares has to accept that he can't ignore his feelings for Morrigan, and Morrigan begins to accept that what she went through in the past was abuse.
Does it change anything at all?
It changes a lot. It's the catalyst for the main events of the story. If I hadn't been able to answer all of those questions, it would not have been the right time to include the scene.
You don't have to make every mature scene you write significant, but if your book is littered with mature content between characters who you haven't even introduced properly who are forgotten about by the next chapter it is not going to be easy for your editor to promote, and you may find it is turned down for the Pay to Read program even if you have a lot of followers.
There is one particular book on the platform that I want to give as an example here because even though it has had about 17000 reads it has been turned down for the PTR program multiple times. If you make it to the end of the first chapter, which is a graphic sex scene, you don't know what the characters look like, what they are called, or why they are hooking up. Loads of people open the book because they like the salacious opening, but very few people continue to read past that first chapter because ... they just don't care.
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