Interesting survey results at the EREC blog erotic romance author poll - apparently many of those who responded wouldn't mind their works being called "erotica" but object to "pornography". Maybe because it takes more effort to type "pornography" compared to "erotica", I'd imagine. This comment by Erastes makes me think, though.

Probably m/f/m because it's a cowardly way of giving the readers m/m without bending over backwards and publishing gay fiction.

Interesting. I can see where she is coming from, as I can imagine that some readers will get comfortable with MM antics only if there is a female to buffer the scene. However, I also personally believe that MM and MFM don't necessarily have to overlap. There are some MFM stories where the two men do not interact with each other sexually at all - it's all about pleasuring the woman. I may get into trouble for saying this, but I can't help thinking that the appeal of MM romances to some women is, apart from the aesthetic factor, the "if I can't have them, then no one can - let them have sex with each other instead to titillate me!" mindset. That's just a theory I have, though, formed from years of watching teenage girls and some scary older women on slash-oriented Livejournals drooling over the idea of Harry Potter having sex with any random male figure in the series but screeching for blood if some poor young lady shows up to come between Sam and Dean Winchester on Supernatural.

At any rate, I don't think I agree completely with Erastes. While fans of MM may read MFM, the reverse may not be true, and this doesn't have to mean that the person is homophobic. In other words, not everything is about TEH GAY.

Speaking of which, TEH GAY however may be all about the money, though. I understand that starting the Amber Allure imprint may be the smartest thing Amber Quill Press has ever done because by putting all their MM and MFM titles in one place, they have a marketplace targeted at fans of those type of stories. And, from what I hear, those are the stories that sell the most nowadays in the electronic landscape. I've heard and read on blogs about how authors realized that their MM stories tend to outsell their MF stories by a significant margin. By creating Amber Allure, Amber Quill Press has created another easy-to-browse marketplace for those folks who used to buy exclusively from Torquere Press. When I hear that Amber Quill Press made more money last year than before after starting Amber Allure, I'm not too surprised.

I wonder why publishers like Ellora's Cave, Samhain Publishing, et cetera do not follow suit, though. It seems odd to bury the link to a hot-selling genre in the menu, somewhere in the middle, where folks tend not to notice the link. It can't be too hard to just move the titles to a separate sub-website or new domain and put a big banner on the main page of the main site to advertise the new imprint, I'd think. Something like "Come buy our hot titles of hotter men rogering each other senseless in our new imprint, Rainbow Yaoi Bubble Butt Love Forever!"

A friend suggested to me that MM romance has reached a critical mass point, somewhat like erotic romance did two years or so ago when New York folks began swooping in to pick up authors to pad their own stables. I wonder, though, whether the New York folks will do the same with bestselling MM authors like Ally Blue, Sarah Black, Jamie Craig, et cetera. Given how touchy they can be when it comes to stories featuring Middle-Eastern Muslim folks, I can only imagine the kinds of paranoia they will have in their heads when it comes to mass-releasing stories of TEH GAY. Will their office get razed to the ground by angry conservative folks?

I have some questions, if you are still with me - do bookstores in US (chain stores like Borders, not independent GLBT bookstores) stock up on gay romances released via POD by these epublishers? What are the chances of them stocking up those books if they are released by, say, Berkley? And, this is going to be good, how will fans of  more traditional romances react when books with naked men kissing and embracing each other on the cover start showing up on the romance shelves?

It will be interesting to see whether MM romances will become a big enough money maker to overcome any reluctance on the part of mainstream publishers to hop onto the bandwagon too.