Although we have this idea of people buying racy novels in plain brown wrapping, there needs to be more to it than just sex. Any novel needs plots and subplots as well as a range of characters. Okay, quite a number of the characters will be obsessed with sex. This should be played sensitively though, otherwise it can be monotonous.
These books tend to revolve around the female protagonist or heroine, but almost anything can happen to her. Well, she can’t get kidnapped by aliens, or win a Nobel Prize (okay, maybe she can, who can say?)
It does help to follow the plots of romantic fiction, usually there is an eternal triangle; which one of two lovers will the girl chose? There should be a range of friends or colleagues offering unhelpful advice (and maybe talking about their unsuccessful or bizarre romantic experiences).
There does seem a formula to follow and so it helps if you read a number of romantic and sexual novels. It is better not to just read the obvious, but diversify. Any book can teach you something about writing, not just these types of books, but as said above you kind of need to follow the same pattern.
Like all novels, characters need their flaws, not just the evil scapegoats-which obviously a novel needs to have-but also the main heroine. Is she a bad cook? Does she make strange faces? Do men find it hard to tell her what she is thinking? Whatever she is like, women have to identify with her.
Characters need to differentiate from each other, there needs to be different turns of phrases. Maybe clothes, tattoos, hair, and so on should be described in great detail. The character can also be described by the house or flat itself and maybe the pets they own.
Children don’t tend to feature in such novels, maybe because it’s too much like real life. There tends also not to be not much about work as such, it probably should be described in general terms.
A foreign location may help, perhaps a bit of research on tropical locales may help. Try choosing somewhere where people would want to be and stylish, the Azores rather than Ibiza. If you went on holiday and you found the hotel wasn’t built and the lavatories were just a hole in the ground, well I’m sorry but these things tend not to happen in racy reads.
Good luck in writing your racy read and may you live life as good as your heroines, or possibly better.
