u/koalaisabear

A cat is the reason Mei ends up living with three men.

When her housemate’s boyfriend moves in with Mr Whiskers, an orange cat to whom Mei is spectacularly allergic, she suddenly needs somewhere else to live. Fast.

Mei is an accounting student working her way through college, so the outrageously cheap room offered by a classmate’s former housemates seems almost too good to be true.

The house is enormous. The room is beautiful. And Elias, Zach and Brad are wealthy, gorgeous, sexually experienced men whose home comes with a revolving cast of women and a very relaxed attitude towards who sleeps with whom.

Mei is fairly certain none of that has anything to do with her.

At first, it doesn’t. She works shifts at ValueWay, studies at the kitchen table, bakes when she is procrastinating and keeps her attraction to her housemates safely theoretical.

Late-night conversations become friendship. Rides home from work become part of the household routine. The men learn how she takes her tea, what makes her laugh, when to leave her alone with her books and exactly how stubborn she can be. Mei learns them too, until wanting one of them would be complicated enough and wanting all three becomes impossible to explain away.

By the time sex finally complicates things, the household has already changed.

Mei has spent most of her adult life being responsible, careful and independent. She has also spent years assuming that being a Good Girl means wanting the right things in the right way.

It turns out there is more than one way to be a good girl.

Elias, Zach and Brad are just as taken with the woman who studies at the kitchen table, works too many shifts and argues with them about money as they are with her increasingly adventurous side in bed.

And Mei may not have to choose between them.

A quick warning before anyone innocently follows the cat into this: although there's a very long, warm, domestic setup, this is a very explicit adult MFMM romance with a high-heat second half. Please read the full Amazon description and content warning before buying it, because I don't want the cuddly tone to give anyone the wrong idea about what turns up later. :D

Part of why I wrote it was that I wanted to see what would happen if I wrote a very explicit story in this particular corner of romance without automatically importing the jealousy, possessiveness, high angst, bullying or darker relationship dynamics that often come with that level of spice. I wanted the explicitness to grow out of friendship, affection, trust and four people gradually becoming a household.

It’s a standalone and is available to be outright or read through Kindle Unlimited:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0HHSYKYDC

If anyone does give it a try, I’d love to hear what you think. It is admittedly a slightly odd contribution from Down Under to the romance shelves, and a bit of a chimera. I still haven’t quite found the subgenre box it fits neatly into. :D I loved writing it, though, and I re-read it a lot myself.

I’ve been thinking about something recently and I’m really curious to hear other people's perspectives on it.

I know race and representation can be a fraught subject, so I want to say at the outset that I’m totally not judging anyone’s reading preferences or trying to catch anybody out. I’m genuinely just interested in whether other people have noticed the same pattern and whether they think it has any effect on marketability.

Growing up, I consumed a lot of Asian media alongside Western media. If I watched a Japanese, Korean or Chinese drama, an Asian woman being the romantic lead was simply normal. She was the heroine, was a "normal" person and she got the romance. Her ethnicity, of course, wasn't pushed forward.

In a lot of the Western media I consumed growing up, the pattern was VERY different. Asian women were comparatively rare as leads and when they did appear, I kept running into the same cluster of stereotypes: the generically named “Mei Ling/Mei Li”, the sex worker, the maths genius, the martial artist, the exotic love interest, the tragic victim blah blah blah. Quite often she either died or if she didn't, she certainly didn’t get the guy and misery ensued for her or all. Some of the stories I have in mind were The Dream Traders and The Blue Dress Girl by EV Thompson, Madama Butterfly, Miss Saigon, Sayonara, South Pacific, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, The World of Suzie Wong, The Quiet American, Indochine. Trying to avoid more recent ones so I don't give anyone the snots :P

Later, there seemed to be a move towards the Asian best friend in a lot of stories. Hallmark movies, I’m looking at you. These Asian characters generally survived till the end, which was progress I guess, but often didn’t have much of a storyline or backstory of their own, let alone being the person whose romantic story we were actually following. A lot of the time their job is to hang around while the FMC is packing and ask her questions like: "Oh my God - are you really going back to the Christmas tree farm? What if Todd is still there? You know he's still into you and looks totally hot in plaid."

Obviously Western media is so much more diverse now, including romance, and there are tonnes more Asian female leads in books, TV series and movies. One thing I’ve sometimes noticed, though, is that when an Asian woman is the heroine, her ethnicity is quite often foregrounded as part of the premise or marketing in a way that a white heroine’s ethnicity generally isn’t. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a problem. Cultural identity can obviously be an important and valuable part of a story, I just notice it for obvious reasons as Asian FMCs rarely get to just be a Normal Person. So it got me thinking about what readers and publishers regard as the “default” romance heroine.

Recently, after I started publishing on amazon, I began lurking in some of the more niche parts of romance. I mean I get why you're not going to fall over Asian FMCs in a small town romance novel, but I also noticed it in why choose/reverse harem and poly romances, too. This is totally anecdotal and based only on the books and recommendations I’ve happened to see, but the FMC seems to be overwhelmingly white. The group of men may be more racially diverse, although even there I seem to see Black and Latino men considerably more often than Asian men, but women of colour seem way, way rarer at the centre of the relationship.

I’ve noticed something similar in some sports romance spaces, especially hockey romance. There definitely are Asian and other WOC heroines written by eg Kate Willoughby, so I’m not saying they don’t exist, but the default FMC still seems to be white much of the time. Hockey romance is not very diverse generally because hockey itself is not very diverse.

So I started wondering about this specifically from a writing and marketability perspective: to what extent, if any, do you think the ethnicity of the FMC affects how readily readers will pick up a romance?

I’m interested in both conscious preferences and the less conscious assumptions we all acquire from decades of seeing particular kinds of people presented as the romantic default. Do you think an Asian, Black, Latina, Indigenous or otherwise non-white FMC changes how a book is positioned or marketed? Does it affect cover choices, discoverability, click-through, reader uptake or how easily an unknown author can attract new readers? Does it depend on whether her cultural background is central to the story, or whether she is simply an Asian/Black/Latina/etc woman having a romance in which ethnicity is not the main point?

If I’m writing fan fiction, I stick to a character’s canon ethnicity, but when I create a FMC myself, she pretty much always shows up as Asian. That is not something I’m going to change depending on the answers here, I’m just interested in whether other writers think that choice has any market effect, particularly in genres where a white FMC still seems to be the norm.

On sites such as Romance.io there are tags for things like an East Asian MC, but as far as I can tell you can’t simply sort the catalogue by the heroine’s ethnicity in the way you can filter for a lot of romance tropes. So it’s quite hard to tell whether readers actively seek this out, actively avoid it or mostly don’t think about it at all.

From my own reading experience, because white FMCs were overwhelmingly the norm in much of the romance I encountered, I never expected the heroine to share my ethnicity in order for me to identify with her, like her, care about her romance or be interested in her journey. I honestly don’t know how much other readers notice the heroine’s ethnicity when deciding whether a book feels “for them”.

I have had people tell lme I should try to “hide” the ethnicity of my FMC on my covers if I want more people to read it, which made me laugh because I was basically thinking, “Err, I think they’ll figure it out pretty fast from her surname...” :D But it did make me wonder whether some writers have actually encountered pressure, explicit or otherwise, to make a heroine more racially ambiguous or to foreground or downplay her ethnicity for marketing reasons.

I’d be especially interested to hear from people who write in niches such as why choose/poly, sports romance, dark romance, historical romance or small-town romance, where some subgenres seem to have a stronger visual or demographic “default” than others. Have you noticed any difference in reader response, discoverability or marketability when the FMC is a woman of colour?

Longish post because I'd rather tell people what I like first, because if your tastes are very different you will probably hate my stories and have a way better time reading somebody else’s stories, not mine.

Overarching philosophy: I like romance where the people involved genuinely like and respect each other. I like competent characters, decent people, humour, friendship and relationships where the romance is something they actually want rather than something they have to endure. My stories have conflict, but I prefer it external rather than exist solely because the people in question didn’t talk to each other, so I like communication.

Outside the Scope. A hockey romance about Willa, a corporate lawyer who gets involved in fixing her younger brother’s NHL contract problems, and Tanner, the elite NHL defenceman she works with. He eventually makes the very practical suggestion that they should get married. This explores a lot of the contract, offersheet stuff I personally find fascinating. https://a.co/d/0jgPj870

Pit Stop. A hockey romance where NHL defenceman Josh finds Mackenzie stranded at a gas station at 3 a.m. and offers her his spare room. They become friends, then housemates, then eventually something else. https://a.co/d/07CUEMfy

Penalty Box. A hockey romance about Robin, who has been shoved into working as a penalty box attendant after her career gets derailed, and Noah, the star NHL forward who keeps ending up sitting beside her while she is professionally supposed to ignore him. This is very long sorry. https://a.co/d/07uOGNVS

Good Girl for Three. A very slow-burn MFMM romance about Mei, an accounting student who needs somewhere cheap to live and moves in with three wealthy male housemates. There is a lot of college, work, cooking and ordinary household life before anything sexual happens, and then it gets a lot less restrained. I normally only write M/F but I wanted to see if I could write an extremely explicit poly romance that still felt cosy and affectionate - almost like a warm hug - just one with a lot more sex but no jealous-alpha stuff. This started life as a short, mindless MFMM smutfic that was supposed to be 7K words. I failed and it ended up being a 693-page story in which I attempt to make the relationships plausible so I don’t break my own immersion. https://a.co/d/0jgPj870

Take the Long Way. A rock-star romance novella about a woman driving a musician around London. They spend months taking the long way without really noticing what is happening between them. She thought it was casual, he didn't. Ooops. https://a.co/d/027eaMPd

I like to include a lot of what I privately think of as scaffolding: the everyday details, transitions, conversations and practical bits that stop me feeling as though the story has jumped from Important Scene A to Important Scene B while somebody ripped out twenty pages of what happened in the interim. Some people like this, most may not.

My brain is also always asking: what next? How did that happen? Also, if he's the billionaire CEO of a listed company, why does he never work? If she's such a good journalist, how come she never actually does journalist work? Huh?

If you prefer very fast, trope-forward romance with every scene driving directly towards the next major beat, my stories are definitely not for you and you will hate them with the passion of a thousand suns but if the above sounds vaguely interesting, then it might help you while away some time happily :)