For the first time, we’re asking YOU exactly what you like and don’t like, want and don’t want, on this site.

It has been a little over two years since Why Choose? went live, and although real life slowed our development down this year, we’re back with a vengeance.

We have a very long list of features and builds that we want to implement, including the App.

BUT we want your feedback first!

Why?

Simply, we want to make sure the features we think you want are the ones you’re going to use before we spend time building them. We want to make sure the site as currently is works for you, or if there is more we can do to improve what’s already here.

We’ve compiled a bunch of questions, which should take about ten minutes to complete, and in doing so, you’re in with the chance of winning a $50 Amazon gift card.

The Why Choose? database has grown far beyond our expectations (do you see how close to 15,000 books we are now??), and that’s largely due to you guys using it, so we want to make sure this site is the best it can be.

We hope to hear back from you!

Serenity and Charlie

xoxo

If a harem is a group of women sharing a single man, then a reverse harem is, quite simply, the opposite – a group of men sharing a single female.

But as to when and where this term originated, that’s up for discussion.

If you Google reverse harem, you’ll often find sites which suggest it derives from the Japanese “ハーレムもの or harumumono”. The direct translation is more like “harem stuff”, and really, doesn’t imply whether it’s a male or a female at the center of the attention.

There’s also the suggestion that reverse harem takes its origins from the Arabic “حَرِيمٌ” or harim, which can mean “a sacred inviolable place”, or “female members of the family”.

Seeing as none of these sites and sources lead back to a source that I’d be happy quoting, I’m going to leave that researching to you and focus on the what…

Only, even the “what” isn’t quite so cut and dry!

For a book to be considered reverse harem, it needs three things:

1. There needs to be a female at the heart of the group
2. There needs to be three or love interests (two is ménage)
3. She absolutely cannot choose just one person at the end of the story.

But, as with most things, here comes a caveat.

When it comes to the harem members, over the last couple of years, it has become more and more common to see some of the guys either in established relationships with one (or more) of the other guys, and even a female in there too.

We get it – some of you like books with MM or FF in them, and some of you don’t. That’s why there are four tag options to help you with your searching (this is, of course, dependent on whether a book has been tagged correctly):

• MM within the harem
• MM outside of the harem
• FF in the harem
• FF outside of the harem

If you want it, include it, and if you don’t, have the search exclude it for you.*

Ultimately, what I can say with certainty, is that about five or six years ago reverse harem was considered a “trope”. A theme within the romance genre, that so many people said would die off into obscurity.

Nearly 15,000 books later, I think we can all agree that reverse harem has firmly rooted itself as a sub-genre of romance!

*Please note, regardless of your opinion on this content, we will not be moving any of these tags to be listed under kink or trigger – these are people’s sexual preferences.

You’re probably reading this wondering what on earth is going on at Why Choose?

Back in the beginning, when Charlie and I created Why Choose? as a joke, while we were still deciding on our look and branding, someone (Serenity) had the brightest of ideas to use Comic Sans at the site’s font. And someone (Charlie) decided that was a brilliant idea, and did just that.

We laughed.

A lot.

For the first two weeks, long before we went live, everything was written in Comic Sans and it looked AWFUL!

Unfortunately, that decision has haunted us until this week!

I’m trying to find a place to rent in Delulu land and convince myself that none of you noticed the lingering traces of the font. That, when you loaded the home page, for the briefest of seconds, you didn’t see the menu bar flash to Comic Sans…

We’ve spent all this time trying to find where in this site the font was hiding, but Comic Sans was pulling a Where’s Wally? (or Where’s Waldo?).

However, last night, something in Charlie must have snapped because he went checking the code to see where that font was clinging on.

Today, I can report, Comic Sans has gone.

Honestly, in the grand scheme of the site and everything we’ve built—and have yet to—this is small. But for us, it really is a victory, and I’m celebrating!

Happy Wednesday!

Serenity

PS. No, I didn’t toy with the idea of posting this in Comic Sans at all…

It’s been a while, but new tags have been added to the site this week! (Actually, a few have been here for a little while, but we never made the announcement, so I’m doing a round-up here.)

Genre – Human Omegaverse (This is for non-shifting omegaverse/sweetverse. Please do not combine with the “Omegaverse” tag as this is specifically for any shifter/alien romance etc)
Trigger – Pregnancy Complication
Trigger – Somnophilia
Trigger – Homophobia
Trigger – Racism
Kink – Somnophilia
Kink – Pet Play
Trope – Forced Proximity
Trope – Office Romance
Trope – Arranged Marriage
Trope – Found Family
Store Availability – Kobo Plus
Translation – Portuguese
MM Outside of the Harem
FF Outside of the Harem
HEA
HFN
Cliffhanger
Jealous/Possessive FMC

If you have read any books where you think these new tags apply, please feel free to help us update the site and make suggestions to the relevant books!

It’s hard to believe that, back in 2020, in the middle of a lockdown, Why Choose? was nothing more than an idea in this author’s head.

As an avid reader of reverse harem stories, I had gotten so frustrated trying to find more books to read. There are some brilliant, active Facebook groups dedicated to reverse harem book lovers, but I was frequently only ever seeing the same books being recommended (and don’t get me wrong, they’re constantly recommended because they’re good books!) when I knew there were more out there.

We all know that searching for reverse harem books on certain retailers is far from easy and code words have to be used/deciphered.

Which led to me starting a simple excel spreadsheet of reverse harem authors. A list that I wanted to share with everyone.

I had two goals. Goals which are the same back then as they are today:

1. Help readers to find their next favourite author, and collect all the book boyfriends.
2. Help authors to find readers to who will fall in love with the characters and worlds they’ve created.

There’s no gatekeeping here. If there’s any reader out there that can understand the concept of having more than one favourite, it’s the reverse harem reader, right?

In my other, other life, I am a nightclub DJ, which is how I know Charlie (the site’s developer). Knowing that he knows way more about developing sites and apps than me, I gave him a call to ask him how much it cost to make an app because the figures I were finding were making my eyes water. Apparently, that’s right.

But Charlie was intrigued and the next thing I knew, he became my business partner and Why Choose? was born.

By the time the site went live, we were at close to 6,000 books. Today, we’re close to 15,000!

We didn’t start tracking page hits until a month later, but in September of 2021 we had 44,292 hits. In June 2023, it was 261,078!

But this is still the beginning for us.

We’ve got a few more site features to come (it’s easier to build them on a website and test them out than to do an app because you have to force updates to each device), so keep your eyes peeled.

And the app?

It’s coming. We’ll be wanting app testers too, and I’ll personally be reaching out to some of the most active members on the site.

Disclaimer: none of these are requirements. We authors love our readers just for reading our books!

We’ve seen it in reader groups; readers asking what’s the best way to help their favorite author? A lot of the time, they think there’s not much they can do because they can’t afford to, but actually, just telling another reader about the amazing book you just read helps more than you can imagine. That’s why Why Choose? encourages you to tell your reader groups when you loved a book you’ve read. Or if you’ve discovered a new author (and if you’ve not, why don’t you try our random book generator? – you can find the permalink in the Extras menu!)

Share, comment or like an author’s posts (or ours – we won’t complain about that). You’ve probably missed dozens of posts across all the social media platforms and that’s because of the way these platforms work. If you keep interacting, you will keep seeing them. Then they will show you similar posts and yay, more RH content. But it also helps an author because these sites recognize that people are interested and won’t suppress them. If you’ve signed up to a newsletter, actually open it to read it. Quite a few email providers allow you to look at the email without opening it. That’s great for them, but for us, our email provider deems you as not interested. It also means that you don’t lose our emails in the junk box black hole.

We’ve probably all seen the various memes about reviews, but they really are like magic juice (not that kind of magic juice – behave!). The big thing is that it helps an author get visibility and on a site where we get locked in a dungeon for having the words ‘reverse harem’ anywhere near our books, visibility there is a huge deal! Not only that, but there are some readers who won’t read a book unless they’ve got a few reviews to back them up. No one expects you to write a book – we did that for you (;-)). Just a couple of words to say why you liked it.

The next one, I wish I didn’t have to say, but I will anyway – read the books from a legitimate site! If you read a pirated book, aside from taking money from the author, you put them at a real and legitimate risk of having their account shut down on Amazon. 99% of reverse harem authors are in Kindle Unlimited. We’re there because of you – our reader. Our readers read unholy amounts of books (seriously, your annual book reads are no joke!) and the best thing for you is Kindle Unlimited. Our sub-genre has the highest number of readers enrolled in KU compared to any other genre – we’re in the high 90%+ of members. Which means we authors need to put our books in KU even though everyone but the author is getting the better deal. (Did you know authors only get $0.004 per page read. Yep. Less than half a penny.) The books go into KU and we have a contractual obligation to only have them in KU. And somehow, if they end up on a pirate site, that’s our responsibility.

Which leads me to the next way you could help an author out. (And I’ll explain this because I see it get asked so often).

If a book is in KU, the author only gets paid for the first time each page is read. If you read it a second time in KU, there’s no payment. If you borrow the book and read 100 pages, return it, come back to it later and read all 300 pages, those 100 pages don’t count the second time. It’s fine – we authors know this. We wouldn’t expect you to go to a bookstore, buy a book, then go and buy another copy if you want to read it again! But, did you know that making sure you go all the way to the end of the book helps?

Seriously though, we authors are incredibly grateful for all our readers just reading our books. There’s absolutely no expectation on anyone to do any of the above!!

Is there anything I’ve missed? What do you do?

Our goal at Why Choose? has always been to help authors find readers and readers find their next book boyfriends. To help with that, we’ve now branched out into more social media platforms.

You can now find us on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest! We’ll be posting new releases from all the verified authors so you don’t miss their new books (providing certain social media platforms don’t decide to hold posts in review… you know who we’re talking about…).

If you want to help us and your favorite authors, if you see one of our posts, please come interact – tell us what you loved about that book. Help another reader fall in love too!

We listen to the suggestions and we add in bulk…

Recently added tags:

• Secret Societies
• Trigger Warning – Eating Disorder
• Kink – “Call Me Daddy”

We already have DDLG as a Kink tag, however, we realised that there is a difference between this (age/role play) and a character calling another “Daddy”.

If you want books with true DDLG dynamics, it’s the “Kink – DDLG” you need to search. If you like it when your FMC (or one of the MMC’s – who are we to say) to call another “Daddy”, this is the tag for you.

Did you know that all the books on Why Choose? can have a Heat rating tag? We (Admin and Mods) don’t add these unless we’ve read the book, so there are many books which aren’t rated – and we need your help!

We understand that “Heat” is subjective, so we have a scale here on Why Choose? to make sure we’re all talking on the same page:

🔥 Clean Romance (No on page steam – our Fade to Black option)
🔥🔥 Sweet Romance (Some sensual scenes, we’d rate it PG-13)
🔥🔥🔥 Middle of the Road (Some on-page naughtiness)
🔥🔥🔥🔥 Steamy Romance (On page scenes)
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Explicit Romance (Erotica or Hot! Hot! Hot!)

If you read a book and you see the Heat tag missing, please give a suggestion!

We’re trying to let as many readers know that authors have new releases as possible, so Why Choose? now has a TikTok account!

We’re posting new releases and a monthly round-up… And there will be competitions too… so if you don’t want to miss out on anything, follow us on TikTok:

@whychooserhbooktracker

We’re reaching nearly 10,000 books on Why Choose? but did you know that as we’ve been adding them, we’ve been trying to tag them to make your searching as easy as possible?

When adding books, we’ve relied on either guessing from the blurbs (where there are blurbs), or from when the admins or mods have read them. Which means, although we’ve tried, we may have either missed some or put the wrong tags on.

If you’ve read the book and you think there’s a tag missing, please do help us out by suggesting tags. We’ve got nearly 350 tags including triggers and kinks.

Trigger Warnings

At Why Choose? we know that some readers need Trigger Warnings. That’s why we give you two options (editable in your profile) to make searching safer for you. Hard Triggers mean that any book with something you cannot read will not show up on the site for you, provided you’re logged in. Soft Triggers are for those who can read books with certain triggers provided you’re in the right frame of mind. These will give you a warning bar at the top of the book page for you.

If you see a book which is missing a Trigger Warning, please do let us know. We want to make reading as enjoyable experience for everyone as possible.

Searching Tags

There are now two ways to search a tag. If you’re on a book page, you can click on the tag and it will show you all the books listed with that tag.

Alternatively, you can visit our amazing search page and filter down even more – putting in what you do and don’t want. Please note, this is an ‘AND’ search – you want vampires AND werewolves.

When it comes to searching by Triggers, these are not listed in the search option. We understand that there are occasionally topics that have overlap, such that some may find it a trigger and others may find it a kink. To keep it simple in these situations the books are tagged with both the “Trigger” and “Kink” tags. Kidnapping is one of these examples.

And of course, if you set your profile to exclude a certain trigger, you won’t have books with those Kinks appearing in your searches!

If you want to see our full list of tags, you can visit:

https://why-choose.com/extras/tags/

We have spent the Christmas break working on a few things to improve Why Choose?

Most of this was things you can’t see – we’ve improved the servers and performed some maintenance on the database – which should mean the searches and loading times have improved dramatically for you.

We’re also introducing this newsfeed so you can see all the new releases from our verified authors, and we’re going to give them a shoutout on Facebook too! Due to several requests, we’ll be introducing more author driven content and interviews.

We’ll also keep you updated on site developments. There will be a lot of these over the coming months as we strive to improve user experience at Why Choose?

As always, thank you for using Why Choose?, and we hope you’ve been able to find many more books and authors to fall in love with.

Charlie and Serenity