Spanking Romances

I've begun to investigate the genre known as the "spanking romance". This is something that has sprung up in the age of the internet and seems to be growing rapidly. Partly this is fueled by the ready availability of ebooks and the numerous self-publishing sites like Lulu.com, but also as a genre it seems to be increasingly popular.

Spanking Romances (SR's) are the logical heirs of the traditional "bodice ripper." As one can gather by perusing cfpub's fine bibliography many conventional romance novels have included spanking scenes (and just as many have featured disappointingly truncated or aborted scenes). I suspect that the rise of the SR was partly in response to the fall off in such scenes in the PC 80's and 90's. This has been "documented" in "How the Beatles Ruined Spanking". (Actually a joke—cfpub's commentary on this essay is much closer to the real reason).

SR's are novels, mostly. There are some novella-length collections and there are short stories by many of the same authors. The authors are overwhelmingly female. There are not many novels of this type here at LSF. Here we have mainly short stories of 1000-5000 words. The only SR's of any length that I know of here are Ruegirl's "Akira" and "Priestess", the flopsy/DJB collaboration, "The Prophecy" and my "LaForge" trilogy (although the latter is more of a supernatural thriller with romance elements), and sort of mini-romances like my "Anne of Wulfstedt" and "A Princess of Vernonia". If someone knows of others, let me know.

The SR is characterized by many of the same elements found in conventional bodice ripper romances. We have a handsome, strong male protagonist. We have a heroine who is invariably headstrong, feisty, smart and of course, beautiful. Better throw in bratty too. The two meet and sparks begin to fly. They meet on the high seas, in regency England, in medieval times and out West, as well as in modern settings. The SR always has an external plot—the heroine tries to run the ranch, the heroine sneaks on board the ship, the heroine aids a spy against the king. This is all conventional stuff. The difference is, the heroine gets herself spanked. And the spanking is vividly described. There is none of "and then he spanked her" and that's it. Frequently there is sex, lots of it. It's not porn, but it tends to be pretty steamy.

I sense the target audience is mostly women. Certainly the authors are mostly female. You can find SR's at blushingbooks.com, allromance.com, Lulu.com, Amazon.com., and pinkflamingo.com and smashwords.com. Smashwords and allromance frequently have free or very low cost ebooks and most sites have sample chapters. Search engines at all these sites will steer you into the SR's.

The big question is---are they any good? The answer is, unfortunately, a mixed bag. Frankly, much of the writing is on par with what you would find on LSF. That is to say that it is not any better than some of our authors, and in many instances, not as good either. In fact some of it is just plain bad, but that is endemic to self-publishing in general. But even some of the "pro" writers are (no pun) nothing to write home about.

But there is a more subtle problem. It is one thing to write a romance in which there is a climactic scene in which the hero is finally fed up and puts miss heroine over his knee. It is quite another to go in a fortiori and say "this is a spanking story that I'm going to shoehorn into a romantic novel." The result, unfortunately, are multiple spanking scenes that are contrived, forced and unrealistic. In a nutshell, that is the problem.

As this thread develops I'll identify some that I have found and provide reviews like saetana is doing with the BDSM novels. In the meantime, if anyone has recommendations either way, please share them here.

I'm not really interested in writing for money, but if I were, romance fiction is big business. This could be a place where a spanking author could actually make a living. Harlequin and others churn out a never-ending stream of new books. They are forever starting new series in graduating levels of "hotness". I could easily see a mass-market series where the occasional erotic spanking is allowed to happen.

Judging from the ever-increasing shelf space my local library devotes to them, and the women I see checking out stacks of them, there is no denying the popularity of romances.

In the LSF you will find Kimmy's two Romances "Discovering Jordie" and "Rob and Sabrina". I love both of them, but "Discovering Jordie" is my favourite.


I think Kimmy solved this problem quite well. Many, many spankings but still a good plot.

Another one, which I like very much is "Angela's story" from DJB.


I would also like to mention "Erins Adventures" from Flogmaster. But after your definition it's more an "Anti-Romance". The heroine is more or less just running her own butt. It's more a "coming of age"-novel, but in the end she founds her "hero".

I can't remember the publishers, but a few years ago there seemed to be a plethora of these sex and spanking romance novels, I think they were referred to as erotica. One of the best examples I can think of that had mass appeal was the Victorian classic 'Frank and I'. I don't really do a lot of romance myself, but Hypnosis and Masks both had that feel, and School Days and Nights did as well. I doubt I could do something novel length, though.

Sturgeon's Law: without quality control, 90% of everything is shit. That's true of all kinds of art, period.

Actually, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm focusing here on the modern day stuff being written for the ebook publishers noted above. Some of the most prolific authors are Carolyn Faulkner and Lisbeth Dusseau.

I expect some mainstream romantic novels would be of interest. I once ran out of English books whilst abroad and managed to borrow half a dozen well thumbed romantic novels, nothing else in English was available. Maybe I was lucky but most of them seemed to have at least one reference to a spanking. One stood out in my mind because it contained two very well described spankings in which the daughter of a brothel owner was spanked first over her school knickers and then some weeks later on her bare backside.`An erotic classic almost! I am sure their was a happy ending!

I find the rise of the spanking romance industry to be fascinating. It coincides very closely with the rise of the internet. Not surprisingly, I have some theories about this. Let us start from the sexist, but I think true, claim that spanking romances as romances in general are a female dominated genre. Certainly before the internet, spanking writing in general was male dominated, both writers and readers. The reason would seem to be that access to spanking writing was generally thru disreputable, i.e., male channels, men's magazines and dirty book (of course I mean adult book) stores. Most women, especially in more repressive times, would not be seen to patronize either source. So, although there is as much interest in spanking among women as men (beyond the scope of this thread), the customer list of providers such as CF was over 80% male.
The internet provided two valuable qualities for women interested in reading (or writing) about spanking - accessibility and anonymity. So they moved in large numbers into spanking groups such as, oh I don't know, the Kilhara Library, and into spanking publication in such numbers that CF is the only company I know selling spanking fiction and run by a male. Not I believe, coincidentally, CF is also the only company I know selling spanking fiction which is not preponderantly publishing spanking romances.
Interestingly, none of the female run spanking publishers (with the possible exception of Pink Flamingo which has morphed into a more full-service erotic publisher) publishes any femme-dom fiction at all.

@cfpub, I have not yet read a spanking novel by a male author that I have enjoyed, admittedly I haven't read hundreds of them but its indicative of something, I'm not sure what exactly as I tend to read more male than female authors when it comes to my "vanilla" reading of mainly fantasy fiction.

I don't know about publishing but I have noticed that most of the female writers I've read have included far more F/f (I'm not interested in F/m so can't really speak about that) than any male writer I've read, male writers tend to dwell more on the typical male fantasy of having two women in bed worshipping him - I know for a fact this isn't reality, LOL, if two women are interested in a threesome like that then its playing with each other that is the attraction, the man is almost incidental or an excuse if you like. Maybe I'm biased as the BDSM books I've read by male authors have been pretty dire, I have to assume they aren't all like that as there are plenty of good male writers on this site so surely there are a few published ones that are worth reading?

@rollin, before the advent of Black Lace (aimed mainly at women) and Nexus books, I used to love "bodice ripper" fiction and soon found that some authors almost invariably included at least one spanking in their novels, the ones I recall though were proper historical romances with some spanking, I don't think these are exactly the same as the spanking romances described in this thread.

I love historical spanking fiction so any recommendations along these lines would be much appreciated, reviews even more so, you did mention reviews did you not? I'll hold you to that

Slightly off topic, but its interesting you should bring that up. I have plenty of threesome fantasies, but in them its pretty much always two doms (of whatever sex) focusing their attention on a sub (of whatever sex). As often than anything else, its a man and a woman torturing and pleasing another female.

Maybe I'm in the minority among male erotic writers for being this way, but for me the object of the threesome's attention is determined by d/s divisions rather than gender ones.