Zane, Inc.: she has much more on her mind than black erotica. Behind the best-selling author's pseudonym is a shrewd businesswoman, astute publishing entrepreneur and—oh, yes—a wife and mother of four

Black Issues Book Review, Sept-Oct, 2004 by Kalyn Johnson

Though she plans to keep key details about her true identity under wraps--like her real name, for one thing--Zane embarked on her first ever book tour this summer. (The tour preceded her ninth book, Afterburn, forthcoming this fall.) Beginning in 2000 with Addicted, which she self published on her own imprint, Strebor Books International, Zane's erotic novels have attracted swarms of readers and are dominating African American best-seller lists. [See BIBR's FLYING OFF THE SHELVES, page 64.] Since 2001, at any given time she has had multiple titles on best-seller lists and on the shelves of major retail bookstores.

Now Zane is to urban erotica what J.K. Rowling is to children's fiction. She is known for racy novels and short stories about what she sees as the secret sexual peccadilloes of regular women--housewives, businesswomen, sorority sisters. She says she depicts what these women really want between the sheets.

Less than four years after her self-published debut, Zane now also publishes 28 other authors on her Strebor roster through a distribution deal she signed with the major mainstream publisher Simon & Schuster. Furthermore, this spring Zane celebrated with 1,500 friends, fans and family the opening of her latest venture, Endeavors Bookstore in Fells Point, in downtown Baltimore, and she continues to generate even more ideas for expanding her ever growing publishing empire. Certainly, this is an amazing track record for anyone, let alone Zane, an ex-paper industry sales executive with a chemical engineering degree from Howard University.

The name Zane is a pseudonym its creator wields like a shield to keep her professional and personal lives separate. At 37, she is also a wife and mother of four children, ranging in age from one to 21. While Zane cherishes her private life and anonymity, she says the higher public profile she has begun to take is for the sake of Strebor Books, her Bowie, Maryland-based publishing company. "These other authors I publish are putting their trust in me, so I must be effective. My main purpose is not to promote my books but to promote Strebor," she explains.

She also has a film production company in the works to turn her books, along with those of Strebor's other authors, into movie features. She's in talks with Forrest Whitaker (director of the 1995 hit film Waiting to Exhale, adapted from Terry McMillan's best-selling novel) to direct the film version of Addicted. Also on the drawing boards are her ideas for a lingerie line, an October cruise for writers and book clubs and a mini-tour (featuring well-known black male authors) called Not Only Do Men Read and Write, They Do It in Their Boxers. Zane also has plans to write a series for teens, and she recently signed with literary agent Sarah Camilli for a legal thriller to be published under yet another pseudonym.

The Bookish Preacher's Kid

Clearly, there is an astute businesswoman behind all these successes--past, present and projected. Zane began life as the youngest daughter of a retired Howard University professor-minister and a retired schoolteacher in suburban D.C. "My parents raised me to believe anything is possible," she told BIBR in a telephone interview. "I have always been very determined." The family had a basement library with more than 1,000 books, which fed the future best-selling author's curiosity and love of reading. "I used to joke with my family that if I ever wrote a book, I'd put it out under another name," Zane said. In fact, she waited until she had three top-selling books before Idling her parents about her new vocation.

To date, Zane's own husband has not read The Sex Chronicles, one of her steamiest novels, she said, because he, like many men, has a hard time accepting his wife's sexual fantasies. "There's more to me than sex," Zane added. "Sex is easy to write. My story lines grab women's attention. Ideal with topics that people can relate to. Women everywhere like the fact that my characters are sexually liberated.

"Initially, I wanted to write children's books," she said. "I think erotica kind of chose me. I had never read erotica, but I love to write and I have an imagination, so I would come up with wild crazy stories, and then add sex."

A Foothold in Cyberspace

The first enthusiastic reader responses to Zane's writing came from the Internet. "I wrote an erotic story called 'First Night,' e-mailed it to three friends, and they for warded it to other people. Then, I started getting e-mails from random people asking if I had more stories. One reader told me that my work was 'hotter than Playboy,'" she recalled. She posted her next two stories on free Web sites set up through AOL and Yahoo and says that within three weeks she had over 8,000 hits. But because of the sexual content of her stories, she says, the Web masters kept shutting down the sites. So she established an independent Web site, eroticanoir.com.

Readers then began to send her e-mails complaining that they could not find her work in bookstores, and one fan even submitted Zane's short stories to a variety of publishers. Zane said she spoke to publishers who were interested in her writing, but that they wanted her to write "traditional" romance novels.