Ellora’s Cave, anyone?
Hey, does anyone here remember Ellora’s Cave? It was an online publisher of erotica geared towards women. Most of their books had a sci-fi or fantasy setting and featured all kinds of monsters, aliens and otherworldly beings. There were a couple of similar online publishers but I think Ellora’s Cave was the biggest.
Anyway, they went out of business. If you want to investigate why you can start here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellora%27s_Cave
Back in the day I sometimes purchased books there and and the reason why I remembered them now was because Ellora’s Cave made it so easy to find something specific. They had search functions similar to what you can do on Ao3.
For example if you were looking for some BDSM three-way action involving an alien, a werewolf and human in outer space, you just checked the boxes (MMF, sci-fi, BDSM,…) and Ellora’s Cave delivered. Or it showed the next best thing. A little browsing to discover new kinks you might be into never hurt…
It was glorious. I just wish Amazon or Goodreads had a tagging system, that was just half as effective as the search function I remember from Ellora’s Cave.