The housewife next door has a whole new secret: Meet Alessandra Torre, one of the freshly minted self-published authors making 50 shades of green—turning on women by the thousands and, just maybe, leading a new kind of sexual revolution As soon as the elevators open on the third floor of a lower Manhattan Marriott, attendees of the Authors in the City conference are greeted by an intense, operatic hum: hundreds of female voices. All around, clutches of women have plunked themselves down on the loudly patterned carpet to count autographs and swap stories with the amped-up afterglow of tweens after a Taylor Swift concert. The few males on the premises—clearly brought along strictly for child-care purposes—jostle fussy infants, attempting not to look as out of place as they must feel, knowing that their wives and girlfriends have come here to meet the people—the women—who turn them on.
Four hundred worshippers have gathered here today at the altar of "erotic romance." Fueled by the advent of the e-reader, the dawn of self-publishing at scale (self-publishing has been around for awhile), and the 100-million-sold phenomenon known as Fifty Shades, this genre of fiction has become both cultlike and too big to qualify as a cult. Judging by the women here who confess to devouring some 50, 80, 150 of these books per year, it might best be described as a sort of mass infatuation. The stuff they're reading is not the Fabio-fronted bodice rippers of yore. These are unapologetically adult-rated tales in which the love story—still an essential ingredient—serves mostly as string on which to collect the real pearls: raunchy, graphic, exceedingly adventurous sex scenes.
Inside the hotel ballroom, 77 star writers are holding court, autographing Kindle cases, embracing the women who keep them in business, and handing out self-branded party favors: author-labeled condoms, key chains, shot glasses, multicolor Lance Armstrong–style rubber bracelets that say things like, I like it rough, I like it hot, I like it romantic. "Mommy porn" is not a popular term in this crowd; one insider told me "it degrades not only a whole type of book, but an entire class of readers." But you see why it tends to stick. Give or take the odd tattoo or adventurous dye job, fans and authors alike fit the stereotype of grade-school teachers and stay-at-home moms. With one notable exception. Seated in front of a black banner that reads SEX IS MY BUSINESS, wearing an airy striped Vince blouse, the diamonds on her finger glinting casually, Alessandra Torre is not showy, but she stands out. There's something aspirational about her. This is the kind of girl that most of these women write about: Young, slim, glossy haired, clean faced. Like Kate Middleton in leather leggings—an effect that is underscored when she stands up in her sky-high studded Louboutins and has to bend over slightly to give fans a hug. You can see why her table is front and center at this conference: Torre, 29, makes an ideal poster girl for the movement. In less time than it takes literary aspirants to slog through an MFA, she has self-pubbed eight books on Amazon (with a ninth coming soon), pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars, and perfected the art of writing lines like this doozy: "I feasted on Brant with an urgency that surprised us both, dropping to my knees in the plane, his mouth dropping when I yanked at his zipper. 'Here?' he whispered."
In 2002, the novelist Joseph Epstein wrote in The New York Times about a survey stating that 81 percent of Americans believe they have a good book in them—and that they should write it. In an effort to dissuade the hordes from such a foolhardy endeavor, he wrote, "To be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt, and mental imprisonment, with an accompanying intense wish that one worked instead at bricklaying."
Evidently, Epstein failed to quash America's artistic longing: Torre says readers constantly confess to her their desire to write. "Which is funny," she says. "Because I never wanted to write a book. It wasn't even, like, a thought process in my head." At a burger joint downstairs from the conference, she delicately picks at a Caesar salad and describes how, 18 months earlier, she decided to become a writer. "I knew nothing," she says. "The only reason I did it is because E.L. James was making a gazillion dollars, and I was like, 'Well, shoot, if I get one percent of the sales she did, I'll make $10 million a year, so that's cool!' "
This is how she prepared: She read about half of Stephen King's On Writing. Then she sat down and got to work. Six weeks later, having suffered little in the way of "mental imprisonment," she polished off Blindfolded Innocence, the story of a coed seduced—and initiated to the secret world of high-end swinging—by an incorrigible (older) charmer named Brad De Luca, "the premier divorce attorney in town." That done, "I searched online: 'how to take a book from a word document to Kindle,' " she says. She uploaded the thing, pressed PUBLISH, and "then I just sat there." At first, she sold five books a day. For a couple of weeks, it was 15, then 30 or 40. Gaining savvy, she tweaked the language used to promote the book on Amazon; that inched it onto the site's Top 100 list. "And then overnight, something changed," she says, still sounding a bit startled. "Sales started doubling every day." Blindfolded became the twentieth best-seller on all of Amazon, and Torre was suddenly selling 2,000 books a day at $3.99 apiece, banking 70 percent—and raking in $60,000 per monthThese days, she laments that she can't write even faster to keep her voracious fan base satisfied. Running Alessandra, Inc.—guest blogging, Facebooking with fans, promotional appearances, photo shoots, and promoting, promoting, promoting—takes up most of her time. As she's listing her many new responsibilities, a waitress taps her shoulder. "I don't mean to interrupt, but your shoes are gorgeous," the woman says, breathless with admiration.
"Oh, thank you," Torre replies. "They're a little uncomfortable, but I'm glad you agree."
"The more uncomfortable they are, the prettier. Those are gorgeous."
While she declines to state specifics about her bottom line, the shoes are a clue. At first, Torre told herself that if she could make as much money writing as she did as an executive assistant, she could quit her job. She hasn't quite hit millionaire territory, but she has gone from earning $35,000 a year to making "as much as my husband," a successful real estate developer. Since then, they bought a beach condo and renovated their house. She bought herself a secondhand Louis Vuitton bag. But mostly, she's been relatively frugal. Except for the footwear: "I can spend $1,000 on a pair of shoes, but I'm not buying a new convertible or something like that."
Torre laughs at her greenhorn naïveté back when Blindfoldedhit it big. Now she toggles back and forth between self- and traditional publishing with the alacrity of a day trader, juggling multiple deals for each book. To wit: Harlequin, which like many traditional publishers now uses self-publishing as a form of market testing, snapping up some of the biggest sellers to rerelease under its imprints, paid Torre $150,000 each for the first two books in the Blindfoldedtrilogy—and that's for books she'd already made money on through self-pubbing. For her latest, a sex thriller called The Girl in 6E, she sold both e-book and print rights to Hachette, receiving individual lump sums for each country in which it's distributed. (Eight so far; for Germany alone, she got six figures.) Should Hachette's sales exceed the advance, she gets a percentage of every edition sold beyond that.
She's come around to an increasingly popular view: The best long game in self-publishing is maximum inventory. When I bring up Andrew Grey, a sweetly giddy silver-haired writer of gay erotic romance I met at the conference (his party favor: packets of Kleenex featuring a shirtless dude wearing whipped-cream shorts), Torre (a) was not surprised to learn that 70 percent of his male-on-male inventory is consumed by straight women—As Grey put it: "If one guy is good, two are better!"—and (b) was able to make quick work of his economics. Of the 80 books he's produced since 2007, "even if each book sells just 100 copies a month, which is nothing, then he's selling 8,000 copies a month. He's making 16 to 25 grand a month. Off of minimal sales." That's a lot of shoes.
Since Amazon introduced Kindle Direct Publishing in 2007, the behemoth has birthed hundreds of thousands of books across every conceivable genre. Today, KDP makes up about a third of the site's overall downloads. KDP is totally free to the author, and it gives her complete control over text, cover, title, and, of course, price. If a book is priced between $2.99 and $9.99, the author keeps 70 percent of every sale; if it's priced above or below that range, authors pocket 35 percent. Compare that with traditional publishing, in which authors get an initial book advance, and no royalties—typically 25 percent of digital sales and 7 to 12 percent of bound books—until after the advance is recouped in sales.
Is this the pot of gold that writers have been waiting for? Angela James, the editorial director of Harlequin's racier imprint, Carina Press, chuckles at the suggestion. "I'd liken it more to the gold rush," James says. "A lot of people went to California to get rich. Did some of them get rich? Yes. But not all." She sees Torre as someone who happened to do the right thing at the right time. "There was a window of about a year when traditional publishers were picking up new writers," she says. That's since slowed down. "We're looking for an author who's sold 10,000-plus copies at $3.99 or more."
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