Perhaps “scorching” would sound less like “ooh, it burns”?

That’s interesting, because I’ve read most of those authors and it wasn’t immediately obviously to me how to distinguish the heat level between those two groups. After a few minutes’ thought, the primary difference I cam up with is that Leigh’s westerns and Holly sometimes include menage. Which gets back to listing sexual acts.

As Ellie says, the “burning” publishers have had to deal with this. I can’t find Ellora’s Cave’s heat ratings right now, but their description of their erotic romance and erotica lines may be useful.

My response: I can see how that could be a problem at times, LinnieGayl, especially since you say that the sensuality rating is/was less important to you than the actual review. Maybe the best way to describe what the ratings could mean to me if I paid more attention to them is a “feeling” I would get from the entire story rather than a definition of whether certain scenes were very graphic or body parts were mentioned in a more nitty-gritty fashion compared to flowery words. So the book would be warm to me because the whole story gave me that feeling, or it could be hot because I felt it was intense. But obviously we’re talking about actual degrees of sexual tension here in the ratings, so then I think I’m out of the game.

Now, one of the hardest things for me in writing a review is assigning a sensuality rating, and it’s usually a difference between the current “warm” and “hot” ratings.

My response: Sandy, I’m embarrassed to say that I scanned over the definitions of the classifications, which just goes to show that I think I “knew it all.” Sorry. Each separate division appears to be clearly defined which should mean the ratings would work most of the time. But in my own mind, those words could take on a different meaning occasionally. For instance, some authors could write a really hot book and maybe not necessarily be very explicitly graphic. It’s all in the way they make me feel while reading it and that could be very hot.

So what you really need here is feedback more from people who use the ratings a lot to choose their reading material and not readers such as I who tend to bypass that particular field to head straight to the review.

I do agree with Laura about the difference in your proposed definition of “burning”. I definitely think there is a difference between erotica and romantica/erotic romance, and there is a quantifiable gap between the “hot” of a romance and the “burning” of erotica. You can’t just jump from a “hot” romance to “burning” erotica, there must be a definition for all the romantica/really really hot hot paranormals, etc. that fall in between these two types of books. If that makes sense??

I think that deleting erotica would side step the issues you’ve pointed out, so thanks for the suggestion!

As for the whole mainstream thing, this is an area I s-o-o-o-o do not want to get into, so, again, thanks for pointing out the issues. What we want to avoid is getting into detail in these descriptions – the previous ones were overly bogged down – and just want to give people a general sense of where we are, so I really don’t want to start listing sexual acts. I’m not sure how we’ll solve this one.

Tee: Thanks for posting. I’m not sure what you mean by somebody’s “mediocre” being someone else’s “burning” because the ratings are referring to specifics that are – or aren’t – present in a book. If her “mounds of pleasure” are the terms used in a book, it’s probably warm. If the male appendage is described with…well, that word we all know for the male appendage, then it’s probably hot.

Jessica: Thanks for the comment! What we’re trying to accomplish with sensuality ratings is to avoid everybody using their own definitions and to quantify it as much as possible without going into specific details. Our goal is to avoid confusion, though maybe that’s not possible.