Hot and Heavy for the Next 'Fifty Shades'

Call it the Fifty Shades effect. The hottest genre in the book world is self-published fan fiction -- original stories based on existing characters, typically traded online for free. Thanks to the steamy E.L. James trilogy, which began as Twilight fanfic before becoming a successful e-book and now a 20 million-selling worldwide sensation, publishers are racing to secure the next hot titles. Berkley Books in July paid a "substantial seven-figure" sum to acquire Gabriel's Inferno, a Twilight fanfic novel by an anonymous author with the pen name Sylvain Reynard. Originally released on Twilighted.net, a fan site, a reworked version was published in April 2011 by Omnific, a small e-book publisher started by Twilighted founder Elizabeth Harper. (Early editions of Fifty Shades thanked "S.R. … for going first.") Inferno sold only 4,000 copies before Fifty Shades exploded in March. Sales jumped to 10,000 that month and 60,000 in July.