My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled – and I soon found out why

From fairy porn to romantasy via the Omegaverse, publishing is sexier than ever. The reason? A big shift in gen Z and millennial attitudes to respectability and shame …

I spent a fortnight reading nothing but smut and I don’t need to give you a reason. But since there is one, here it is: business is booming in the publishing world of love and sex. Aficionados draw fine distinctions – between romance and erotica; “steamy” and “smutty”; fantasy and saga fiction – and endlessly subdivide the genres, but the takeaway is that the stigma around what used to be called “books that women like” has gone. And, as the UK literary agent Alice Lutyens puts it: “The steamier the sex, the better the book does.”

I started two books simultaneously, which just happened to span the gamut, from the almost completely chaste The Stars Too Fondly, by Emily Hamilton, to the most pornographic thing I’ve ever read (and I’ve read De Sade): Heat Clinic, by Alexis B Osborne. So, I could give you a take on the difference between romance and erotica, but I would rather throw it to an expert. Leah Koch started the independent romantic bookshop Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles with her sister, Bea, in 2016 (they recently opened a second shop in New York). She says readers tend to assume erotica is sexier. “The technical definition is that, in erotica, character development happens from sexual situations. We stock both.”

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