It’s been long known that the romance genre for women’s fiction has long been dominated by pornographic books masquerading as reasonable content. However, now, Men’s Adventure Fiction has been taken over by similar pornography in recent months, and readers are eating it up.
A large part of the trend in bookstores to have bland, non-descript covers for fantasy books is because of the romantasy elements taking over the genre. Authors like Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J. Maas dominate the top of “fantasy” book-selling charts, but their books are glorified romance novels in a fantasy setting that delve into the realm of written pornography.
These authors capitalized off of a trend that’s been happening on Amazon for over a decade, bordering on the absurd, where fetish-themed books have taken over. A favorite in these genres is taking werewolves or vampires and turning them into sexy tropes with half-naked men on the cover for the authors to sell to a porn-addicted female audience.
For a long time, it seemed like men’s fiction simply disappeared while these took hold of genres, but over the last year, a category called Men’s Adventure Fiction” has been slowly replaced with AI art covers of half-naked women, often supernatural-themed like elves, demons, or witches, where the storylines are basically men’s harem romance where a male protagonist accumulates a subservient group of young girls to fornicate with.
Looking at the Men’s Adventure Fiction category, nine of the top ten of these books are dominated by these types of storylines, including series like Trailer Park Elves, putting covers of tattoed elf women baring their midriffs in front of a trailer park, described as a “hilarious LitRPG” even though it’s pretty obvious what the content is inside.
Horns and Hugs is another one of these, and its genre is more obvious since the cover describes itself as “a yandere succubus romance for men.” All of the books by Logan Stone offer some variation on this theme, such as a vampire woman or a catgirl, with similar AI art used for the cover.
This is a disturbing trend as when one thinks of men’s adventure fiction, it harkens back to works like Louis L’amour, the famous Western writer, or Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote incredible science fiction and fantasy with John Carter and Tarzan. Unfortunately, it looks like the top sellers aren’t actually adventure fiction anymore.
A side-effect of this is that authors who actually write in the genre don’t get seen on the searches as easily. Robert Peecher is a modern Western writer who’s had success on Amazon, and these books flood the top of the charts, hurting the discoverability of the books that should be seen in the genre,
like his Blood On The Mountain.
Amazon never seems to do much about these out-of-genre books dominating charts as it’s occurred with romantasy taking over fantasy, as well as LitRPGs taking over a lot of the science fiction categories without much action being taken.
Peecher told Fandom Pulse, “I market both my westerns and my crime fiction under Men's Adventure Fiction, and it is a little jarring to look through the top 100 bestsellers of Men's Adventure Fiction and feel like I'm browsing the magazine racks in some kind of elvish porn store.”
He continued, “I don't begrudge other authors for marketing their books in a way that’s successful for them. But when I see ‘Trailer Park Elves’ and ‘Renegade Ravager’ alongside a James Patterson thriller or Kyla Stone post-apoc novel or one of my westerns, I can’t help but feel like someone’s novels are out of place.”
He concluded, “I’ve seen a lot of categories on Amazon taken over by misplaced books, and that’s always frustrating. It means I have to remove books that are rightfully in a category and find a new home for them because my books just don’t belong with a wall of AI-generated elves thrusting half-exposed breasts at the reader.”
As long as pornography is allowed to be a part of the ecosystem, it impacts not just the men’s adventure fiction genre but others as well. Amazon’s inability to do anything about it has long been a problem for the site, but now it’s bleeding over to men’s fiction as well.
