Inspire desire with ‘the good bits’ from great books By Siobhan Fitzgerald, co-founder, thegoodbits.com
Romance readers have long known the power of the erotic to awaken desire—but for the uninitiated it can be a shock. Imagine reading, or listening to, Sierra Simone’s Priest for the first time on the bus home from work, and being just a little bit overcome with a compelling attack of WOWEEEEEE. Glancing at the other passengers to check if they’ve noticed that your cheeks have gone pink, and your breathing has quickened.
The physical power of words is astounding. When I discovered erotic writing in Romance (and once I’d managed to be still my beating heart) I felt a whole new world opening up to me. While the internet is full of sex, it’s often seedy at best. Romance novels, meanwhile, are full to bursting of female pleasure exquisitely expressed. This is what was lacking not only online, but in my life.
Together with a fellow Romance convert, Carol Battle, I created The Good Bits, a good sex story platform sharing the good good bits from great books. Via our website and erotic audio podcast we inspire desire of women (and anyone else who cares to join) all over the world, and help romance readers find new authors via their hottest passages.
Our podcast—chosen as ‘New and Noteworthy’ on Apple podcasts, and a Spotify feature podcast—has just launched featuring sexy scenes by authors including Alessandra Torre, Fiona Zedde, Katrina Jackson and Sierra Simone. Here’s a sneak peak of a couple of the scenes we’ll be featuring! If you let me know what your favorite scenes are in the comments, we’ll try and feature them on our site or in the second season of our podcast.
This scene from Stefanie London’s The Fling
Emboldened by the fact that he’s still watching, I draw the hem of my T-shirt up higher. Cool air grazes my bare stomach, and I hold the material just over my breasts—teasing at what might be beneath without actually showing him.
This scene from Fiona Zedde’s The Magical Femme
Her fingers are slightly salty, bitter and smooth from the fresh nail polish. She strokes my lips and it feels even more like a touch on my lower lips, steady and hypnotic. Heady. I moan around the slide of her fingers. What’s she doing? If her plan is to get them wet so she can finger me, she doesn’t have to bother.
This scene from Sierra Simon’s Priest
She backed up a few paces until she bumped against the baby grand piano set below the choir platform. She still didn’t speak, but she didn’t have to, because I could read every tremble of hers, every breath, every goose bump. Her teeth still bit her bottom lip and I wanted to bite that lip, bite it so hard that she would squeal.
The Good Bits Podcast is now live. Follow, rate and review them from your favorite podcast app
I remember reading my 1st erotic romance in the late 1990’s. I became quite the reader of Elloras Cave and for the first time read an ebook. Authors like Jaid Black, Angela Knight, Lora Leigh and too many others wrote with an incomparable sensuality because they invested in the characters and the plot. Writing a sex scene is nothing if there isn’t a couple and a story that we care about. Maybe I’m wrong–I probably am–but women are not wired that way. What I read above left me bored or cold. Sorry.
Don’t be sorry—I think the majority of the comments here (including mine) agree with your contention. In order for a sex scene to work, there has to be a development of the characters and their interactions with and feelings for each other. A disconnected sex scene without context is of absolutely no interest to me.
I agree about the whole story being needed to provide the full context for sex scenes. Some Amanda Quick historicals provide good examples. In Desire, all the scenes use imagery based on flowers & perfume. In Ravished, all the scenes build on the h/h relationship—they are not generic. Sex scenes in many JAK/AQ/JC books build on the whole story in ways that extracting the scenes would lose.
Whatever floats a person’s boat I guess.
But this sounds about as interesting as reading the box scores on the sports page because you missed the game.
Wow! Thanks for the website link. From what I’ve perused so far, The Good Bits has a nice setup. Literotica is the famous free online smut story website, but the interface is extremely difficult to navigate and is generally not female-centered like The Good Bits. (No complaints here, just an observation.)
For another female-centered erotica website with free stories, I recommend MMURE. Actually, I just got off the chat roll with them before writing this comment to ask them some questions, and it turns out they are updating their site to include payment rates for accepted stories. (While we chatted, I put in a good plug for AAR, and she was really interested in visiting your site. So yay!)
Finally, on the audio end of things, I recently discovered a Tumblr page called “SoundsofPleasure.” It contains regularly updated explicit audio recordings (sex tapes basically, but also some audio stories).
Happy reading, writing, and listening everyone!
I’m afraid I first read “I want to bite that lip” in one of the Fifty Shades books, so it just doesn’t evoke hotness for me.
I do agree that romance novels have some exceptionally moving and powerful sex scenes, but like DiscoDollyDeb, part of these scenes’ appeal for me is knowing who the characters are. Otherwise, I think they sound well-written, but not in a way that makes me want to read the books. I only do that when I know what the story’s about.
“I want to bite that lip.”
Considering that Fifty Shades started off as an alternate universe of a Twilight fanfic, I guess that makes sense. Vampires, biting… this stuff writes itself. ;)
As for the sex scenes on The Good Bits, I enjoyed reading “Summer rain,” an excerpt of “Just This One Summer” by Clare Connelly. I’d say it works as both a standalone and as part of a longer work, which makes for a good teaser. I think it helps that this particular excerpt makes it fairly easy to figure out who the characters are from even that brief scene. But I also agree with you and DiscoDollyDeb that reading the entire book would definitely be a fuller experience.
If anything, The Good Bits could help readers discover in advance whether or not they like an author’s sex-writing style before picking up the book. As some commenters on AAR have said, a romance can be going really well, and then the sex scene feels like a bucket of cold water on something that had great build-up.
For me, I’d say it’s a matter of mood. Sometimes exposition can get in the way of a juicy quickie-read, which is the market I think The Good Bits will (hopefully!) tackle with some success. So, good luck to the Good Bits team!
There’s also a review website which features excerpts from hot scenes : Maldivian Book Reviewer. This works better for me than a podcast because somehow having sex scenes read out makes me feel as though there’s a third person in the room telling me what the couple are doing.
Agreed that whether audio or written, this would give readers a glimpse of an author’s sex-writing style, so I hope it helps people discover great reads.
Thanks for the rec!
“…having sex scenes read out makes me feel as though there’s a third person in the room telling me what the couple are doing.” I’ve never thought about it quite like that, but that’s a good point!
The Clare Connelly excerpt is a perfect example of what I was trying to say in my first post. Connelly is one of my angsty favorites (she writes a lot for Dare & HP, and I like to term her books for other publishers as HP-manques). I read JUST THIS ONE SUMMER earlier this year and enjoyed it. The heroine is fleeing an abusive relationship when she meets a man in Italy. She is very unsure about pursuing a relationship with him because of her doubts, worries, and real fears about the way her ex behaved. It takes a lot of courage for her to finally have sex with another man. But would an excerpt of just a sex scene really convey that backstory? I think that focusing only on the sex scenes of any romance novel (even erotica) takes away from the elements of the story that make the sex scene memorable to begin with.
“But would an excerpt of just a sex scene really convey that backstory?”
For me, the excerpt made the backstory pretty clear, and I didn’t have a problem accepting it as a standalone scene. But I definitely agree with you that it isn’t a substitute for reading the entire book.
“I think that focusing only on the sex scenes of any romance novel (even erotica) takes away from the elements of the story that make the sex scene memorable to begin with.”
I absolutely get what you’re saying about context. When a sex scene is lifted out of the middle of a romance, it can feel incomplete. Like you and a lot of commenters at AAR, part of the fun of romance is the build up to the payoff. On the other hand, I guess I’m just not as averse to sexy standalone scenes considering I routinely write 5,000 – 10,000 word stories that are precisely that.
On a related note, I think this is why online female-centered erotica excerpt and short story markets are few and far between. A lot of female readers are going to need a character context that spans almost the length of a novel in order to fully enjoy the sexy times. It’s probably not an accident that Literotica has a reader and writer base that’s approximately 4:1 for a male:female ratio. I don’t think it’s because of the website being unwelcoming or seedy (even though arguments can certainly be made to the contrary). I think it’s because certain forms of erotica are more likely to appeal to one sex or the other on average, with some exceptions.
At the risk of being “that woman” (which I often am), I have to say that I like the lead up to the sex scenes in books, not just the “good bits,” but the entire process that culminates in the sex scene. Don’t get me wrong, I like a hot sex scene—for example, PRIEST is one of my all-time favorite books, but without the lead up to that scene, without knowing who Tyler and Poppy are and how they relate to each other, it’s just a disconnected sex scene without context.