Spice levels

Romance with the door closed. Tension, attraction, eventual fade-to-black. Reads like classic literary romance. Good for readers who want the love story without the explicit detail.

On-page kissing, off-page everything else. Romance with chemistry but no graphic intimacy. The slow-burn end of contemporary romance.

On-page intimacy, no graphic kink. The standard "spicy" tier — what most contemporary romance lands on. Three-pepper books include the act without leaning on shock.

Explicit, frequent, and the kink starts to show — praise, possession, light power-exchange. Four-pepper books deliver heat as a *feature*, not a side dish. Most BookTok bestsellers live here.

Five-pepper is its own register. Dark-romance territory, breeding kink, knife play, dub-con, omegaverse heat cycles, monster anatomy — the works. Trigger warnings matter. Reader knows what they signed up for.