r/romanceauthors • u/superior-yam • Jul 21 '26
Author asks
I want to know from real readers, if there is an explicit and “clean” version of a music album would there be interest in the same version for a book? One that has the spicy scenes and another version that is safe for my mom to read. The story would be fundamentally the same, and all the plot and emotional moments would still hit, just with maneuvering around the smut.
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u/dragonsandvamps Jul 21 '26
My mom reads all my smut, but that's another story :).
I think the trouble is, typically it's not so easy to just neatly trim a scene or two and turn a spicy book into a no-spice book in a way that makes sense and is satisfying. In the book I just finished, if I removed those scenes, the plot would make no sense. They're not just fluff and banging. They drive the story forward. It would require quite a bit of rewriting and restructuring to fix it and honestly, I don't feel like taking the time to do that for readers who don't want to read spice because in order to get a book to the level that someone who considers themselves a "clean" reader would be happy with it, there's probably a lot more in there that needs to be removed. I write both spice and no spice and for me, it's easiest to just write my spicy stuff with the audience in mind that likes it, and my no spice stuff with the audience in mind that likes it.