I posted on Love Bytes Reviews about questions that came up as Scott was designing this site…
“One of the things I’ve been doing this past month is helping get the Queeromance Ink book-link site up and running. And in the process, I stumbled across an old question. When is a book really “Romance” and when isn’t it? And while Queeromance Ink has inclusiveness and wide access as a primary goal, it still arose in some discussions of how the site would function, and in reader questions.
Defining romance came up in two ways. One was in deciding which books actually belong on a site labeled “Queer Romance?” We want readers to find all the stories they’ll love, but without being lost in unrelated books. That means deciding what type of books to include, or not, at some level, to avoid being swamped and to keep the site on focus. When will it be helpful to the readers to say “that book is outside the purview of this site?” Lack of LGBTQIAP content is an easy answer, but what about lack of enough romance content?
The other was in the discussion of custom fields, to help readers with searches. Scott’s beta testers said they wanted to be able to search for “HEA- Happy Ever After” or “HFN – Happy For Now” or “Bittersweet” or “Cliffhanger” endings. (Hidden behind a spoiler tag, for those who don’t want to know.) Which raised the question – if a book is bittersweet, is it really a romance? Does it belong on the site?
