Fifty shades of Jaid: How erotica novelist who found the internet’s G-spot lost her crown
THINK Fifty Shades is hardcore? Meet the brash first lady of online erotica, who brought sex writing into the digital age, and isn’t going down without a fight.
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MEET Jaid Black, the woman who brought erotica to the masses when Fifty Shades wasn’t even a twinkle in the eye of EL James.
The brash, chain-smoking 43-year-old with a penchant for brightly coloured nail varnish and blingy jewellery doesn’t seem the most obvious candidate for the title Queen of Steam.
But she is credited with catapulting raunchy writing for women into the digital age.
Black (real name Tina Engler) started writing raunchy novels in 2000, when she noticed that most books for women shied away from sexually explicit content. She wasn’t interested in innuendo and the power of suggestion. She was interested in oral sex.
After her ideas were knocked back by publisher after publisher, the airline reservations worker decided on a DIY approach to masturbatory aids.
“I was like, either I’m a sexual deviant, which is always a possibility, or they’re wrong,” Black told New York Magazine. “Turned out they were wrong.”
She created a website called Ellora’s Cave, publishing her novels as e-books for $4 or $5 each, collecting money through PayPal. She established an email list of devoted fans and sent them the novels as digital files, as well as selling her books through Amazon on CD-ROM.
Before long, she was a USA Today bestselling author, Tampa’s answer to JK Rowling, living the erotic dream.
Black began publishing other erotic writers’ work through her website, books with titles like Wicked Indiscretions and Siren’s Abduction, offering authors 40 to 45 per cent of revenue (much higher than the industry standard of 25 per cent.) She began running sex writing boot camps, set up a sex-talk radio station called Cave Chaos and hired a team including editors, cover writers and her mother as accountant.
She made $US40,000 after the first year, and by 2003, she was earning $US1 million. In 2012, Ellora’s Cave made more than $US10 million. Black’s mother, Patty Marks, said most of that was coming through Amazon, around $500,000 or $600,000 per month.
That was when the fantasy turned sour.
In 2013, Ellora’s Cave sales on Amazon plummeted by 60 per cent, or $US2 million, and the trend continued in 2014. Last August, the company was forced to downsize, letting 15 contractors go.
The rapid growth of the Kindle and iPad meant increasingly stiff competition in the e-book sector, and many of her authors abandoned her site to self-publish.
She claims Amazon started offering customers similar works by other authors, many of whom self-publish via the site’s Kindle Direct, at free or discounted rates — even when they searched specifically for an Ellora’s Cave novel.
“Without them, I never could’ve risen to the heights that I did,” Black said of the online retailer. “It’s feels like we’re going through a painful divorce.”
She suffers from panic attacks and agoraphobia, which she says has contributed to a bad case of writer’s block because she is unable to “separate arousal from anxiety.”
She is currently suing popular blogger Jane Litte for defamation, after Litte questioned her business operations, accusing Black of not paying her authors or communicating with them.
Black says she may leave day-to-day operations to her mother, who is now CEO of the company. She did not attend the most recent RomantiCon, an annual Ohio convention for employees and fans of Ellora’s Cave.
Her radio station has been out of action since March 2014, its promised Mass Debate YouTube channel lies dormant and her latest entry on her blog, posted after she was profiled in this month’s New York Magazine, is titled I’m Done With the Media.
Romance is big business in the digital world, with some estimating that around half of all romance novels are now published as e-books. Indeed, erotic mega-hit Fifty Shades of Grey was originally a self-published e-book, and adapted from a Twilight fan fiction series at that.
Can the Queen of Steam survive, or has she had her money shot?
Originally published as Fifty shades of Jaid: How erotica novelist who found the internet’s G-spot lost her crown