: My question is which variation would be more attractive to agents, publishers, and the reading public? That is, which variations would sell best? Which is the more attractive drink: chardonnay,

@Rivera824

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My question is which variation would be more attractive to agents, publishers, and the reading public? That is, which variations would sell best?

Which is the more attractive drink: chardonnay, or cherry flavored Coca-Cola?

You described three wildly different books. Books two and three are only superficially similar; removing the sex doesn't turn an erotic story into a romance, and it certainly doesn't make it YA!

There is no one 'general' audience and it's folly to write a book that will appeal to everyone. Some readers like YA novels and don't touch anything else. There are publishing houses that exclusively stock supermarkets with romance novels. Take a bottle of wine and a bottle of coke to the nearest retirement home and see which is liked best, then go to the nearest playground or schoolyard and do the same. Do you think that if you were to make your own drink, "chardonnay and coke", it would appeal equally to both groups?

Which variation sells best? It entirely depends to whom you market to.

How much sex can I write if I'm after mainstream success?

1969 saw the release of the novel "Naked Came the Stranger." The only three things you need to know about the book are

it features scene after scene of hot, steamy, scandalous (for the time) sex
sold gangbusters, and
a committee of 21 authors wrote it with the specific intent of making the most god-awful book known to mankind

Compare and contrast this success with the thousands of unread books that languish at the bottom of Amazon's top sellers list. A good deal of them are at least equally as lurid as "Naked Came the Stranger" yet others do not feature so much as a kiss.

My point is that the amount of sex your book features is a poor predictor for how much success it sees in the market. Far more important is how well the book is written and marketed. Go through your outline and ask yourself what each of your scenes add to your story in terms of character development or the progression of the plot. Maybe your characters undergo character development while they smoke their post-coital cigarettes. Good. That scene's a keeper. Similar scenes that don't progress the plot/tell us something about the characters/the setting (in case you're going with the SciFi story) can and should be cut. Never write filler because you haven't yet met some arbitrary metric.

Write what you want to write about first, then figure out what audience to go after

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