Welcome to the board, Grace.Â
So, #Starstruck is my book. As to your question for how clean should clean be - it depends on the writer. Personally, I got tired of sweet romances where there was no attraction, no passion, no physicality of any kind because that wasn't true to me or my experience of falling in love. I think chemistry plays a big part in a romance. But my books are sweet/clean and wholesome (which is not a judgment on anyone else or their writing styles; that is simply the category Amazon uses and I use it so that readers are able to find me). I basically write steamier Hallmarks. The focus is on the relationship and the reader getting to know the characters and fall in love alongside them, but the characters are very attracted to one another.
I also don't have closed door or fade to black in my books for unmarried characters, either. I even sometimes get reviews from readers who say they enjoyed the story so much that they didn't mind the lack of sex.Â
I'm very careful in how I write kissing and attraction scenes. Because of a lot of physical responses are not available to me - stuff can't get hard or puckered or aroused. My heroes sometimes remove their shirts (gasp!). Tongues aren't mentioned (even if I do sometimes imply), there's no grinding or any other type of thing that would feel tame in a more mainstream romance. I have a line that I'm careful not to cross, but it's a self-imposed line. Your line might be different. You might be a hug on the last page of the book type of writer. Which is great! There's obviously an audience out there for it and for all types of sweet romances. Basically sweet romances have a large spectrum of what is/is not appropriate. Sweet romance typically means no explicit sex on the page and no cursing/swearing. How you define that and write it is up to you.
I also telegraph to the reader in the beginning of the book my heroes and heroines' personal standards and lines they've chosen for themselves. The heroine in this book, Zoe, is not religious. Neither is the heroine in the next book, Maisy. They've chosen abstinence for different reasons, and I wrote it that way because it is how I choose to write and because abstinence is becoming increasingly more frequent among Millennials and Gen Z. For entirely secular reasons. I also thought that given the famous heroes in the stories (movie star and pop star), it would have been unbelievable and completely disingenuous for sexuality not to be discussed and not to be brought up. In my current series (just finished book 2 in that one) the characters don't have sex because of outside forces; in my head none of these characters are virgins but they don't ever talk about it because it's not an issue they have to deal with in the confines of my book.
And for the poster who had to gag her way through my passages (thanks for that on a board that I often lurk on - it was fun to read!) I'm not trying to moralize. In fact, in book 3 in the series (#Awestruck) the hero is a famous NFL player who is a virgin waiting for marriage, the heroine is not (guess that destroys the whole virginal heroine/manwhore hero thing you think I must be doing). The virgin trope in romance is a popular one.
I've written books that I wanted to read, with my favorite things in them, and I sold eight books to Montlake Romance (Amazon Publishing) and four books to Kindle Press by myself, so I must not suck too badly. I acquired an agent last year and exciting things are happening for me in the future. I'm always open to going indie again because I love indie publishing (it's how I got started) and it's why I lurk here, just to see what's going on in the indie world.
One of the things I learned - you can't please everybody. I get reviews saying my books are juvenile because there's no sex and then I get reviews saying my books are so smutty and full of innuendo how do I sleep at night, etc. Your readers will find you. It is harder to do these days, but there are people out there who want to read the sweet romance you want to tell them. Good luck!
