Our Story

KiKi Greene never fit neatly on a shelf.

Too sharp for literary fiction. Too interested in beauty for the horror blood and guts crowd. Too invested in story and prose to settle for erotica that treated the writing as an afterthought. She kept finding herself in the “almost” right rooms. The ones that made her feel like she needed to choose between the dark and the pretty, the explicit and the literary, the genre and the craft.

She didn't want to choose.

She looked for a press that got it. One that understood you could want the darkness and the elegance. The heat and the intelligence. The horror and the beauty. A press that didn't ask its writers to file down their edges to fit a category someone else invented.

She didn't find one. So she did what writers do when the story they need doesn't exist yet.

Candy Riot Press is that story. Built from scratch, by an outsider, for everyone who has ever been told their work is a little too difficult to place. We are not a compromise between genres. We are the space that opens up when you stop apologizing for what you actually want to write.

We publish literary erotica with real prose. Horror that looks stunning doing it. Urban fantasy with stakes that mean something. Romance that takes its time and earns its ending. In every genre we touch, we care about the writing . Not just the concept, not just the heat, but the actual sentences on the actual page.

This is the press KiKi wished existed when she was a writer looking for a home.

It's yours now too.

sweet on the surface. feral underneath.