Set the heat level before chapter one

Pick one number from 0 to 5 before you draft. Put it on the tag and in the blurb. Then never write a scene above it or below it. The reader who bought a 2 and got a 4 asks for her money back, and she is right to. You told her something else.

I sold rings for eleven years. Nobody returned one for being ugly.

They returned the ones that were not what the tag said. Wrong stone, wrong promise, wrong story on the little paper. Heat works the same way, and the number is the tag.

The scale has six rungs and each one is a sentence

This is the scale on the tag of every review here. It starts at 0 and stops at 5. Each rung says what is on the page, so you can write to it and a reader can shop by it.

Heat	What is on the page
0	Sweet. Kisses at most.
1	Kissing on the page. The door closes on the rest.
2	Sex on the page, briefly. Then the scene cuts away.
3	Open door. The scenes are on the page.
4	Explicit, and every scene moves the plot.
5	Explicit and frequent. Heat is half the book.

Source: this site's own scale, the same file every review reads. Checked 1 November 2026.

The number carries explicitness and schedule at once

The rungs mix two questions. How explicit is the scene, and how often does one come. A 4 says "Explicit, and every scene moves the plot." A 5 says "Explicit and frequent. Heat is half the book." Same explicitness, different schedule.

So state three things in plain words: how explicit, how often, and whether the scenes carry plot. If you can only fit one in the blurb, fit the number and let the tag line carry the rest.

The same door at three heights

Take one moment. They reach her bedroom door and neither moves.

At 1, she kisses him on the threshold, says goodnight, and the door closes with him on the other side. The chapter ends on the latch.

At 2, he comes in. You get the first touch and the sound she makes, then one sentence about the lamp. Then a line break and morning.

At 3, you stay. The scene runs, it is on the page, and it ends when the scene's job is done.

Same two people, same hallway. The reader chose one of those before she opened the book. Write the one she chose.

A scene earns its rung by what it changes

Past a 3, every scene passes one audit. What does it reveal, and what does it change. If you can lift it out and the book still knows everything it knew, it was decoration.

The first open scene is the one to watch. It is the point of no return. Something becomes known that cannot be unknown: what she let him see, what he said when he thought she was asleep. Write the detail only these two people generate. "He was gentle" is a caption. What he did with the hand that was shaking is a scene.

Heat drifts in the middle, so mark it in the outline

Two things happen to a heat level around the midpoint. It creeps up, because the drafting is going well and the scenes are easy. Or it retreats, because the black moment is coming and the writer gets shy about the last tender scene before the break.

Both are the same breach. Write the rung next to each planned scene in the outline. The number is the ceiling for the most explicit moment on the page, and the frequency you stated is the floor for how often one arrives. If chapter 22 wants to go higher than the tag, the tag is wrong, so fix the tag before you publish. After publication, fix the chapter.

The tag is part of the book

Every review here carries the heat level on its tag, because it is the one fact a reader cannot get back after she buys. Yours fits on one line:

Heat 3 of 5. Open door. The scenes are on the page.

Put the tropes and the content notes beside it. Three facts, ten seconds to read.

Write that line before the first draft, while there is no scene yet that you would bend it to keep.