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By the start of 2005 it was clear to me I would never make a fortune writing sweet romance. My suspense novels hadn’t done well, and neither had the anthologies, and I was still no closer to retirement than I was when I started writing all those years ago. If you want to make money, write a book, is probably one of the ten biggest lies ever told.

In fact, one thing I’d like to mention here is that I’ve noticed what readers buy in the bookstores is not what readers buy on the ’Net. In the bookstores, the romance, chicklit, mystery etc. aisles all have customers flipping through the books on display, looking for something to catch their attention, but I never see anyone in the erotica aisle. Maybe it’s the anonymity of buying on-line, but the ’Net bookstores seem to be the exact and total opposite. Everyone rushes to buy the latest ménage or man-love story, while everything else, and there are some really fantastic non-erotic stories available, gets little or no attention at all.

Around the time I started to get the message readers’ tastes were undergoing a radical change, some of my fellow Amber Quill writers were also feeling the need to stretch their wings and get a little more adventurous. Some had actually started writing the hotter stories, while some of us were still playing with the idea and inventing new names to write them under. I mean, heaven forbid anyone we knew should find out what we were doing. But then the owners of AQP figured it was time to go with the flow and start publishing what the readers wanted: romance with all the intimate details rather than filmy curtains wafting in the breeze or the bedroom door slammed in their face. And so the Amber Heat line was created which was later followed by Amber Allure for gay romance.

Because these spicy stories are mostly shorter in length, in addition to the stand-alone erotic romance stories, AQP began the AmberPax imprint, a collection of five stories with a similar theme. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing at that popint, but nothing ventured and all that, so I put my name down for a Pax--Lush Encounters Of The Ghostly Kind--a collection of paranormal romance stories that had to feature a ghost. I only wrote that first story to prove I could do it, I swear. I intended THE BUTTERFLY GIRL to be maybe 10K max, but I got so carried away with my characters it finished at almost double that length. The ending was so bittersweet it made me cry, and then the reviewer at The Romance Studio gave it 5 hearts, and I was over the moon.

The Butterfly Girl was my only release in 2005--partly because it was the year my sister and one of my oldest friends died, a young co-worker was murdered, and two other friends lost close family members. Writing romance was the last thing I felt able to do.

2005 was also the year my longtime critique group died, and I needed to get back to my writing. My first erotica hadn’t sold very well, despite the five-hearts review. But now I’d been bitten by an entirely different bug--the freedom to tell it like it is with all the details. My first erotica had received a favorable review, and I felt sufficiently comfortable with the subgenre to switch on the computer and try again.

The next year, 2006, I published three erotic romances. In 2007, my total output rose to five, plus SATISFACTION GUARANTEED, a print anthology of the first four stories.

A year or more ago, reader tastes changed once again. Readers were no longer satisfied with all the juicy details of hetero romance, they wanted more--they wanted ménage stories in all the various variations from a simple three-way, up to and including orgies. They also wanted gay romance, and the more of it the better they liked it. At Amber Quill m/m gay stories sell like the proverbial hotcakes, but f/f stories not so well. Apparently ménage stories with two or more women and one man don’t do very well either.

I’m always willing to try my hand at writing something different, so after reading several ménage stories, my first venture into that world was a paranormal m/f/m novella. INSEPARABLE involves a woman and male twins--one of whom is a ghost, and I must admit it was great fun to write.

But once again, I’d missed the bus, or so it seemed to me. Readers wanted m/m/f ménage stories where everyone gets to play, rather than m/f/m where the woman’s pleasure is the focus. They also wanted m/m gay stories. So it was back to the drawing board to read, read, read, and see what I could come up with.

My first attempt at m/m/f ménage, DOUBLE DELICIOUS, was published this past February, and what happened with that was nothing short of amazing. It’s a simple story of one girl and two guys, who’d secretly been lusting after one another for quite a while. Then Friday the 13th happened, when everything that possibly could go wrong did go wrong. And for the heroine of DOUBLE DELICIOUS it do so in the grandest possible style.

I hoped DOUBLE DELICIOUS would do well. And it did. Far beyond my wildest dreams. But I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.

Chris/Christiane