> But this is looking at the question from the wrong direction. No, you nailed it with the marketing angle, the overlapping audience is the exact reason it's u

> But this is looking at the question from the wrong direction. No, you nailed it with the marketing angle, the overlapping audience is the exact reason it's useful to put them all in one group. > If you ask "what's the term for a book with explicit sex scenes in it?", the answer to that is "a romance novel". No, the answer is just "book with explicit sex scenes". That's a cross-cutting feature across all kinds of genres, some of which are neither romance nor even erotica. You can have a thriller with explicit sex. To my knowledge there's no specific, shorter word or term for it. A romance in publishing-speak is actually a very specific formula in many ways. Romance readers are somewhat infamously picky about their happy endings, for instance. But there's an expected arc of characters meeting, having obstacles to getting together, and finally overcoming those obstacles. That's the heart of the genre, not sex. I know less about erotica, but it's much more specifically and completely about sex. Sorry, but to the extent it's possible to be wrong about terminology, as defined by actual usage, you're just dead wrong about this.