Sex might sell - but romance rules, Dunedin author Pepper Winters tells Shane Gilchrist.
They move as one. A lithe figure, she is clad largely in black and grey, the hues of more nocturnal habits perhaps. He is in modest jeans and a T-shirt that shows off a body not quite gym-hardened, as if the musculature has been earned via other methods.
Let's start again.
Pepper Winters and her husband walk into a cafe in Roslyn.
Pepper Winters is not her real name (obviously), but for privacy reasons, she prefers we stick with it.
And that's fine, given it's the nom de plume by which the 30-year-old Dunedin author has penned a score or more books delving into the various steamy subsets of the contemporary romance genre.
Mills and Boon this is not.
Winters roams the worlds of ''dark'' and/or ''grey'' romance, aka the themes of submission/dominance and entrapment/escape found in British author E. L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey series.
A quick list of titles: Tears of Tess, Quintessentially Q and Twisted Together (from her Monsters in the Dark series); Debt Inheritance and its sequels (from her Indebted series); Forbidden Flaws (a stand-alone erotic romance); and, more recently, Ruin & Rule.
The first of a two-book series, Ruin & Rule peeks into the world of motorcycle gangs, although the real juice has more to do with the motivations of its key characters than any interclub rivalry.
There's sex (lots of it), although Winters contends romance remains at the core of her work.
''Even though I'm on the darker side of romantic fiction, I'm all about the connection between the two main characters. I have a couple of contemporary romances coming out soon and they aren't dark at all.
''This was more of a motorcycle book, which is something I hadn't delved into before.''
Winters clearly likes to tease her readers.
Ruin & Rule offers a cliffhanger ending designed to have many of her readers begging for more.
Which is not unlike some of her characters.
For the record, the follow-up, Sin & Suffer, has been written and edited and will be released early next year.
Significantly, Ruin & Rule, the first of the Pure Corruptions MC series, has been released as a physical edition (i.e. old-fashioned book) by publisher Hachette, thus bridging Winters' established online presence with the more traditional medium of stock on shelves.
''Hachette contacted me around Easter last year and asked if I'd be interested in publishing with them. I rushed around contacting literary agents in New York and signed with Trident Media.
''We got talking about what other books I had in my catalogue, what books I had planned. We agreed I'd write two books based in this genre,'' Winters explains.
''A lot of authors are required to have completed a book and then tailor it according to what the publishing house wants. But they gave me free rein. I was very honoured.
''My story is quite different to that of many other authors. Hachette basically said they trusted my record as a self-published author, that I had an established market and knew what I was doing.''
Let's quantify that success: Winters has 10 times been placed on the USA Today bestsellers list (between 6000 and 10,000 copies sold in a week on all platforms (iBooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo etc); she has reached the New York Times list (20,000-26,000 copies in a week) four times; and has twice made the Wall Street Journal list (25,000-35,000 sales in a week).
Overall, Winters has sold more than a million copies of her books.
At this disclosure, a quick breakdown of price per book ensues.
However, given Winters asks that her profits remain off-record, I'll frame it another way: Has her success allowed her husband (who shall remain nameless) to retire?
The answer: He now works as her personal assistant.
''Yesterday, the physical version of Debt Inheritance went on sale in Italy. I've sold Italian and Turkish versions and, at the moment, my agent is dealing with German, Brazilian, French and Korean translations. You only get a foreign deal if you have the numbers of English-language sales to back you up.
''I have a business page on Facebook to which 21,000 people are signed up. I also have a public profile, which allows up to 5000 friends. And it's full.''
Later, Winters lets slip a Facebook conversation thread that reveals some of her readers wait, fingers poised, in the hope one of those 5000 friends will drop off, allowing access to this inner sanctum of fandom.
''When I'm not writing, I'm online. I get emails and messages all day long. It's a fine balance between writing the content and selling the content.''
Winters might write about obsessive types from time to time, yet her adventures in fiction have an echo of reality about them, too. In other words, she's a workaholic.
''The last two years have just been a whirlwind. I've written and published 11 books as Pepper Winters. It's just been write, write, write.
''When I first started I didn't have time to watch TV,'' Winters says, adding she ignored her husband for a year. If she wasn't on her computer, she was attached to her phone.
''I didn't like what I was becoming; I didn't like missing out on life, so I have made a conscious choice to take time away from my phone. I am pulling back a bit from online groups and Facebook parties and being available 24/7.
''I've probably bitten off a bit too much, but this reader market is voracious. They are loyal to an extent, but if you don't give them what they want quickly, they move on. It's a matter of keeping pace.''
She might talk about slowing down but Winter's rev-count remains relatively high.
Last weekend she was in Melbourne, her five-day promotional visit preceded by a furious, sustained burst of writing.
And she has only recently returned from the United States, where she spent several weeks promoting her books at various book fairs.
Some people waited hours to meet her, she says of the sometimes humbling experience. Some even had tattoos related to her writing.
That level of buy-in brings to mind another work of fiction: Stephen King's 1987 novel Misery, in which a writer's decision to kill off a character prompts a die-hard fan to act rather irrationally.
Thankfully, Winters hasn't experienced anything ''too crazy''.
Still, she's sometimes left a little uneasy.
''Some people just don't have those filters about privacy any more.
''I got emails from someone saying how they had read the Indebted series and loved it, kiss, kiss, kiss ... then the same person writes they'll never read me again, that they are blacklisting me on social media because I did something to a character.''
• Winters' path to writing has not been without its detours.
Of English origins, she arrived in Christchurch as a teenager in the late '90s.
Home-schooled for a time, she used to complete creative writing assignments, but failed in English at high school.
''I violently hated school. I tried to apply myself but it just didn't work.''
So she left, completed a polytechnic course in tourism and worked as an air hostess for several years before deciding to take a gamble.
''I woke up one day and thought, `I want to write a book','' recalls Winters, who was living in Sydney at the time.
''I went out and bought a laptop and, from then on, I was addicted. It wasn't a hobby; it was what I wanted to do.
''I ended up writing a few books that were self-published under another name and I learned a lot doing that.''
She clearly had one eye on the E. L. James' publishing phenomenon.
''If Fifty Shades of Grey hadn't come along, me and a lot of other self-published authors wouldn't exist,'' Winters admits.
''People would still be bound up (she could have chosen a better turn of phrase, surely) in that mind-set of 'ooh, I don't read that sort of stuff'.''
First published in 2011 by an Australian firm that printed only a small run and released it as an e-book, Fifty Shades of Grey quickly became a literary sensation among women in New York and went on to top the New York Times bestseller list.
Then Universal acquired the screen rights and, lo and behold, a film of the same name was released in February.
In a nod to its popularity, the slogan ''mummy porn'' has also been used in connection with the story of student Anastasia Steele's relationship with entrepreneur Christian Grey, who requires her to sign a contract stipulating she is the ''submissive'' and he the ''dominant''.
Some commentators have criticised the Fifty Shades series - and others in which the boundaries of sexual consent are fuzzy - for eroticising power and violence, for reinforcing misogyny.
Winters: ''It definitely comes across that the male is the dominant person; they are in charge and will get their way. But at the end of the day, the female characters that I write are actually stronger than the men.
''In my Monsters in the Dark series, which is the trilogy that started with Tears of Tess, a lot of readers have said they look up to the character of Tess because of her strength.
''I do research to find out how far to push boundaries, but in terms of the actual relationships, I try to stay grounded in reality.''
As for writing sex scenes, well, it gets easier over time, Winters says.
''Sitting down and writing the darker stuff and the very explicit stuff ... I just blocked out family.
''My father is the most supportive guy you can imagine. He has bumper stickers on his car; he's a huge advocate. My mother, on the other hand, doesn't appreciate what I write. She's embarrassed, although she is happy about what I have achieved.
''At the end of the day, this is my business, my career. I'm proud of my achievements and if I write stuff that some people don't enjoy, then fine; I'm not writing for them.
''I think if people are reading and enjoying my books, well ... end of story.''
