It's just my own personal preference Silver Midnight it wasn't a comment on your reading tastes, but just on Hart's immense popularity. I recognize her as a very skilled stylist. I guess maybe I just don't personally much enjoy romance and erotica without any suspense or paranormal elements. Straight contemporary is not my thing I guess.
My question came from a genuine place of wanting to analyze what about her writing grabs so many people, which elements appeal, something I always seek to know as an author or try to find in popular works, but it's usually not an easy thing for people to identify. Sometimes with some books I can guess why they are so amazingly popular, I just can't really with Hart. I would have thought a book like Dirty might have been ignored by readers because although the ending is very compelling and the style interesting, I found it a rather slow moving book, but no it was not ignored, it was picked up for the very competitive Spice line and became a smash hit.I was hoping you could shed some light on what grabbed you, in order to improve my own writing, but I know it's not easy to identify these things.
Oh, okay. I can try and explain it, remember, I can't speak for every reader out there who is her fan though. Me, personally, I like the very emotional aspect that comes with her stories. Her novels seem very realistic in my opinion, and I've noticed this same thing with Stacia Kane (who write Urban Fantasy) and even Tiffany Reisz (another erotic fiction/romance author). I haven't read every single one of her books (yet), but from what I have read, even with Kane and Reisz, again, based on what I've read, the relationships(and conflicts within those relationships) go "out there", or the "No Man's Land of a Romance Novel"(basically they have things, IMO, that I heard was not supposed to be in a "true" Romance novel). So, it's those conflicts plus the fact that they're resolved, again, in my opinion, realistically(even if it means the two characters don't end up together). I think I have a very moderate sense of Suspension of Disbelief, and when that gets just obliterated, something that happens with books that aren't just Romance novels, I'm just tossed from the book completely and can't get back in. This isn't to say that books can't end happily or with weddings or anything like that, but the ending has to match the rest of the book.
And on top of that, again, like I said, her characters feel realistic, even if I don't agree with them or really like them. I don't dislike them to the point that I want to stop reading, or I feel like they're TSTL or true-blue-no-doubt-about-it alpha-holes. They're flawed yet likable/readable.
And also I like the quotes/sayings/prose etc. That type of stuff. The points where she(or they) get very-to-kind-of-poetic in their writing.
Maya Banks is another erotica author people seem to think does an amazing job of grabbing readers emotions, but she's more erotic romantic suspense rather than straight contemp.
Lauren Dane is a Samhain author as is Maya Banks, another Samhain author who writes very popular erotic contemp romance is
Cherrie Lynn you might also like Portia Da Costa.
I've read two books in Maya Banks'
Breathless Trilogy. They were good; I like them. The heroes(and even heroines in some cases) in them though were a bit
- worthy for me though. They kind of pushed the limit with that. But it was fine/good.
I haven't read Lauren Dane yet.
The other two authors listed I haven't heard of really.
