I'm an adult games maker, and I'm looking to expand my audience. Making and selling adult games remains very difficult due to censorship pressures from payment processors, but I've been keeping my eye out for other opportunities. In my view, the romance book market is one of them. More romance books are sold each year than any other type of book. It's a big business, but it's also a very demanding audience. I'm wondering out loud: Is there a chance to turn some of those readers into gamers?
The event itself was surprisingly cheap for being so niche. They had just over 1,000 attendees, and I paid around €35 to get in at the very last minute. The vast, vast majority of the attendees were female-presenting. In fact, during the entire day, I saw only about two dozen male attendees, and most of those were with a partner. So a cishet man by himself, unattended by his partner, was a peculiar sight indeed.
More than that, what I found interesting to observe was the audience was very engaged. People swarmed the booths for their favorite authors, and I saw many carry-ons dragged around filled to the brim with new books. Many of these authors were even independent, striking out on their own without a publisher. It was a very inclusive event, explicitly pro-queer and pro-indie. Also, some of the merch I saw was absolutely unhinged in the best way. Love that for them!
Besides the artist alley, there were some interesting panels scheduled during the day. I tried to attend as many as I could.
Spice Levels & Consent
The first panel I attended was about how to navigate consent in romance stories. Obviously, romance stories are fiction, but authors still want to assure their readers about what's going on.
Karen Nappa, whose publisher dubbed her the "Queen of Consent", ironically loves dark romance. This is a genre where the lines between consent and assault aren't always clear-cut, which is part of the appeal. What she does herself is sliding in a disclaimer at the front of her books, explaining that a romance novel is not a how-to guide on how to practice safe BDSM sex.
An interesting challenge for these authors is presenting consent as something fun and engaging. They want to put consent on the page because it's important, but they don't want it to be a boring chore that takes the reader out of the story.
One author had an interesting approach, which I want to call preening. She wrote a story between a boss and an underling where they almost hit it off but then decided against it because it would be wrong. Three weeks later, they met up again under different circumstances, and the female main character mentioned she got tested for STDs and came up up negative. The boss admits that he got tested too, right after they met up last time. It's a very clever solution, because it shows enthusiastic consent and safe sex practices and shows the boss character already having feelings for his underling before he was "allowed"!
I asked the panel how to approach consent in my own writing. My next visual novel is a femdom story about a teenager being seduced and/or manipulated by an older woman. Obviously, there's a lot of consent in there that's only semi-implied, and that's part of the appeal. But it can also be problematic, so it's been difficult to navigate. The advice from the panelists was to make my main character, the teenage boy, more experienced already. If he already knows what he's into, he can be more ready to jump into the deep end with this woman.
Behind the Scenes
The next panel was all about the practical matter of how to do research for your romance novels. All three panelists usually start by writing from their personal experiences.
One author mentioned that she likes to use Google Maps to ground her stories. Obviously, you can't go visit every place, but you can place a marker pretty much anywhere in the world with Google Streetview and have a look around. This is something I should be doing more often myself, to be honest!
Another panelist talked about how there's always a Reddit thread. She was wondering if it would be possible to fill a sex doll with helium. Indeed, claimed Reddit, you can do it, but the doll won't actually float. You still need additional balloons for that. And that's exactly what she ended up putting in her book.
Finally, sometimes it just comes down to scrolling TikTok. Many people put their lived experiences on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for all to see. This can be a great window into their lives when we're stuck on specific details in our stories.
My question for the panel was that these are great tips for writing contemporary fiction, but how would they research historical fiction? The consensus, besides "don't write historical fiction", was to look it up in the library. One of the panelists even suggested secondary sources, i.e. other historical fiction, as inspiration for your stories.
What was left unsaid is that the turn-around time on these books is insane. When you go from pitch to printed book in three months, of course you don't have time to research the exact street layout of Venice in 1536.
The Popularity of Dark Romance
The last panel I attended was also the most popular one. Dark romance is a subgenre of romance novels that deals with themes that are little more hardcore, like kidnapping, stalking, and murder. Three veteran dark romance authors talked about what attracts them to the genre and how they approach it. One author focuses on stalker romance, another on dark historical romance, and the third on psychological dark romance. Each agreed that the main attraction is being able to explore darker themes and allows them to play with things that would be "wrong" in real life.
Topics like sexual assault, stalking, and even bad parenting can be taboo to discuss, and dark romance is one way to give it a place. For one of the authors, it was all about the fantasy of someone being completely obsessed with them, to the point of being stalked. Something that would be completely unacceptable in real life can be quite thrilling in fiction. Besides, who doesn't want a big, bad villain with a soft spot for a plucky female protagonist?
At the end, I asked the panel how they find an audience for their novels. I mentioned that I've released Gas Station Dick Pills for free, but struggled to find an audience for it. Even with the explicit content warnings, many potential players are turned off by the themes of hypnosis and implied noncon in this short visual novel. Their answer was very interesting: TikTok and Instagram. Obviously, you can't show anything explicit on these platforms. But the panelists suggested making videos where you overlay the most fucked-up lines of your stories over a very normal video of you drinking tea or something. It gets the point across while making some of your viewers ravenously curious for what you're talking about.
When the panel was over, someone immediately tapped me on my shoulder to ask me about my game. She said she and her friends treat content warnings more like a "menu", and she would be definitely be interested in learning more. This simple interaction proves to me that there's definitely an audience overlap for book readers and my adult games, but finding those new players is going to be a challenge. Regretfully, I think I will have to start posting on Instagram...
Conclusion
One of my big learnings is that I need to make business cards that can point people to my games. I've already made stickers to promote my games, and I tried something new at this event: I asked authors if they would trade one of their stickers for one of mine. The response was overwhelmingly positive. People loved my "Weak to Dick" and "Wait your Turn" stickers, and they're a great conversation starter. But because I didn’t have a card to go with them, they had no easy way to follow me on the socials.