Day signed a seven-figure deal with Harlequin; the first ebook, Afterburn, will be released on August 15, and the second, Aftershock, on November 15. Each will be about 30,000 words long and will cost $3.99 as ebooks. They’ll also be released as a “two-in-one trade paperback” in November, according to the release. Overall, Cosmo and Harlequin plan to release two Red Hot Reads a month starting in August, and all the books will ”feature strong narratives centering on modern young women living the free-spirited and outgoing lifestyle espoused by the international magazine.”

Playing for Keeps and Perfection by R.L. Mathewson (self-published)

Romance author R.L. Mathewson has written eight paranormal and contemporary romance novels. This week, the first two books in her “Neighbors from Hell” series are on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists.

What the books are about: In both romances, the main characters discover that their neighbors aren’t so bad after all.

How the books hit the lists: Frequent readers of this column know that Amazon promotions often lead directly to ebooks becoming bestsellers, but in this case R.L. Mathewson received a boost from a different source: Apple. As digital self-publishing platform and e-bookstore Smashwords notes, Mathewson is being featured as a “breakout author” in the iBookstore’s romance section, with “promotional bricks” for her books elsewhere in the iBookstore. Playing for Keeps is #10 on Apple’s ebook bestseller list. The books is also climbing the Kindle charts, with Playing for Keeps at #123 and Perfection at #126.

What’s next: Mathewson is releasing a third book in the “Neighbors from Hell” series this fall and simultaneously launching a charity campaign for wounded soldiers, “Checkmate for Charity.”

All of Mathewson’s books are $0.99 now, but she’ll be raising her prices to $2.99 over the next couple of weeks. “I held the cost down at a dollar for as long as I could, but once things took off I started to get swamped with more responsibility,” she tells me. “I had to hire a full time PA and a part time PA to run my charity program, help with Facebook, emails, proof reading, etc. It was a hard decision and one that I discussed with some of my readers at my Facebook page. Some people suggested that $2.99 was still too low, but I’d like to keep the books as affordable as possible. For those that cannot afford the price hike we will be doing what we can on an individual basic based upon need.”

Playing for Keeps on … Amazon Kindle | Apple | Barnes & Noble Nook | Google  | Kobo | Sony

Perfection on … Amazon Kindle | Apple | Barnes & Noble Nook | Google | Kobo | Sony

New York Times bestseller list, week of 8/12/12

Here are the titles in the top 35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list (click the link to expand the chart).

USA Today bestseller list, week of 8/2/12

USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top 35 where e-books outsold print (click the link to expand the chart).

This week’s featured title: ”Bared to You” by Sylvia Day. It’s #20 on the New York Times e-book bestsellers list this week and

What it’s about: The first in a trilogy, this erotic novel tells the story of a recent college grad, Eva, who meets billionaire businessman Gideon.

How it became a bestseller: Day self-published “Bared to You” on April 3, 2012. The book immediately invited comparisons to “50 Shades of Grey,” the originally self-published erotic trilogy that Random House’s Vintage acquired for seven figures in March and that has now sold over 10 million copies. Jane Litte, who runs the romance blog “Dear Author,” writes that “if I were to recommend any book today to readers who enjoyed 50 Shades and was looking for another book like it, this would be the first one I would offer. However, Bared to You is far better written with much hotter sex scenes.”

Like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Bared to You” has now found a traditional publisher: Penguin’s Berkley imprint snapped it up this month and has already released the e-book with a new, “50 Shades of Grey”-esque cover. (That’s Day’s original cover on the left and Penguin’s cover on the right.) Penguin will release a paperback edition on June 6. (Day writes a bit more about the Penguin acquisition here, and notes that Penguin’s ability to get the paperback into bricks-and-mortar bookstores was one of the main reasons she signed up with them.)

“Bared to You” is $5.99 on … Amazon  | Barnes & Noble  | Kobo

New York Times bestseller list, week of 6/3/12

Here are the titles in the top-35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list (click the link to expand the chart).

USA Today bestseller list, week of 5/24/12

USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top-35 where e-books outsold print (click the link to expand the chart).

The authors created a website, Rock*It Reads, where they link to their self-published titles — about 40 so far. “Whenever readers see the RIR logo, they know the book they are purchasing is held to an excellent standard of quality,” the site says.

All the authors also work with traditional publishing houses. “Our clearly recognizable logo is a signal to readers that they’re getting a story that’s been tended with the same level of attention and professionalism as our New York works,” they told USA Today. “Rock*It Reads is not a publisher. All the books are 100% self-published works, done by each author on her own time. We’ve simply banded together to form Rock*It Reads to help our readers find other high-quality self-published works.”

The club, Discover a New Love, lets members choose one DRM-free e-book from a selection of four each month. (Right now, a 6-month prepaid membership is available for $9.99.) Those who want to buy additional e-books can do so at a discount. Jane Litte at romance blog Dear Author notes authors are paid their regular e-book royalty each time a member chooses one of their books.

The initiative also aims to build community: Sourcebooks will hold parties for members at the major romance conferences, and is also offering

• Member-only blog chats with our authors, editors, cover artists and more.
• Special “Romance Insider” events for you to help events shape the future of romance publishing including focus groups, panel discussions, surveys and more.
• A forum for discussing your favorite authors, books, heroes, heroines, and sex scenes with other members of the community
• Member-only content from about our authors and upcoming titles.
• Access to member-only special offers, contests, and give-aways

Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah tells the WSJ “she will make the site available to other publishers, [but] it is unclear whether other houses would allow their titles to be sold without [DRM].”

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that a membership is $9.99 per month for six months. The cost is $9.99 total for six months. I apologize for the error.

Vintage paid seven figures to republish E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey trilogy, which was first published in book form last year by a small Australian publisher. Before that, the trilogy appeared in a slightly different form, under the title Master of the Universe, on fan fiction site FF.net.

Sarah Weinman at Publishers Marketplace reported yesterday (subscription required) that Vintage publisher Anne Messitte called 50 Shades of Grey and Master of the Universe “two distinctly separate pieces of work.”

Today Jane Litte, who runs the popular romance blog “Dear Author,” compares 50 Shades of Grey to Master of the Universe using a variety of Internet tools, and finds that the works are quite similar — 89 percent the same, according to plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn.

“With the success of Alternate Universe fan fiction and the successful leveraging of that fandom into seven-figure economic rewards, the influx of fan fiction into professional publishing is likely to begin at greater levels than previous,” Litte writes. She says it’s important to state a book’s provenance: “It’s an indicator to readers that they may have encountered this before and it gives the fandom that propelled the author to success a nod. At the very least it’s courteous. At the most, it’s truthful advertising.” She’ll be running a series of posts on fan fiction and copyright, and I’m looking forward to reading them.

The fact that 50 Shades of Grey is extremely similar to Master of the Universe, a work that was previously free online, is not the only issue here. To me, the fact that Master of the Universe was once free and available isn’t that problematic: Many people who are reading the book now would never have encountered it in its previous form online; there’s value in packaging something into a print or e-book (people still pay for print copies of Pride and Prejudice even though that’s a public-domain work free in its entirety on the Internet); and honestly, if a publisher can get readers to pay, more power to ‘em.

For me, one question is: How similar is 50 Shades of Grey to Twilight (not very unless Twilight contains a major bondage and sadomasochism element that I missed)? All sorts of works take inspiration from other works — everything from the movie Clueless (based on Jane Austen’s Emma) to books like Wide Sargasso Sea and The Hours. (Twilight is a lot more recent than Jane Eyre and Mrs. Dalloway, of course — its author is still alive and writing — and that makes things a little more complicated.)

More importantly, as more fan fiction gets monetized in book form, will other copyright issues arise? At “Dear Author,” commenter Merrian writes, “What we risk missing is considering and building some consensus about what is fair use and what is the ethical way of going about using fan fiction outside the realms of creating and making it because work that arises in fandom’s often has a collaborative and shared conception.”

50 Shades of Grey is the first title in a trilogy by British author E. L. James. This morning, the NYT reports (in what is currently the most-emailed article on the site) that the book has “electrified women across the country, who have spread the word like gospel on Facebook pages, at school functions and in spin classes…conversation about the book online has fed many of the sales.” Over 250,000 copies have been sold.

Though the NYT mentions the “word-of-mouth excitement” the trilogy has generated and says James “began the trilogy by posting fan fiction online,” the article doesn’t explain its origins in detail. Well-known romance blogs like “Dear Author” and “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books” have been covering 50 Shades of Grey since last year. 50 Shades of Grey is hugely popular on social reading site GoodReads, where it was a finalist for “Best Romance” in the 2011 GoodReads Choice Awards. There, it has been rated 6,821 times (with an average star rating of 4.34) and reviewed 1,347 times.

The trilogy was published last year by a small Australian company, Writer’s Coffee Shop Publishing House. Random House’s Vintage announced today that it paid seven figures for the print and digital rights to the trilogy at auction. The Random House e-book will be available Monday, and a 750,000-copy print run of a redesigned paperback edition will follow. (You can buy the e-book on Kindle and Nook for $9.99 now, but it is still the Writer’s Coffee Shop edition, though the publisher is listed on Amazon as Random House.)

“Dear Author” founder Jane Litte explains the trilogy’s origins:

It was originally published along with the two sequels, Fifty Shades of Darker and Fifty Shades of Freed, in its entirety, as Master of the Universe on ff.net, a site that hosts what is known as fan fiction. Master of the Universe reimagined the Bella and Edward love affair set in contemporary Seattle, Washington with Bella as the young college graduate virgin and Edward as the masterful billionaire with secret sexual predilections. This collection of submissions has since been deleted.

She also notes “During the height of its popularity, an auction for the series raised $30,000. The author appeared on a fan fiction panel at the 2010 ComicCon and attended a three day conference in DC thrown by her fans.”

And at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Sarah Wendell explains why she thinks the book became so popular:

It has a secrecy element, for example, similar to some paranormal romances and their avid fanbases. It’s also not at all surprising that 50 Shades and Twilight share a few plot themes, specifically that secrecy and the temptation inherent in the world of both narratives, and the alpha male who is opulently, ridiculously wealthy, Volvos optional. Plus, Edward, as I wrote a few years ago, and in many similar ways (again, surprise surprise) Christian are both very much old-skool-style romance heroes. 50 Shades (and Twilight, obviously) are also told from the heroine’s POV, a very deep, first person, detail-heavy point of view, and the narrative is also akin to reading a diary, adding to that sense of illicit secrecy.

But the point of divergence between them is that secret — and this is not to say that at this point 50 Shades become a wholly original piece of fiction. It is not, considering how much of the character types are based on Stephenie Meyer’s work….

Ultimately, I think 50 Shades is popular because of the combination of elements and the foundation it “borrows” from Twilight, among them the very mysterious and barely glimpsed alpha-male point of view, and the presence of a very innocent heroine being inducted into a secret, sexually charged environment. Moreover, the scarcity of paper copies and the absorbing qualities some readers find in the story, as well as their own reactions and desire to share the recommendation with others in an exclusive environment, contribute to the increasing coverage.

Several publishers have even launched “digital-first” romance imprints, which publish only e-book originals. Harlequin, the largest romance publisher in the world, started Carina Press in 2009, while HarperCollins announced “Avon Impulse” in March 2011.

But at libraries, romance ebooks are underrepresented relative to size of their popularity among readers–that is in part because the major publishers are still figuring out their e-book lending strategies.

A new partnership aims to help libraries build their romance e-book collections by giving greater exposure to more titles from smaller, ebook-only publishers. Starting today, Library Journal, which has long helped librarians decide which books to purchase, will begin reviewing romance e-book originals. The advance review copies will come through NetGalley, which provides digital galleys to “professional readers” (critics, bloggers, booksellers, librarians and teachers).

The expansion of e-book offerings is the most complicated issue libraries are dealing with now, says Heather McCormack, Book Review Editor of the 135-year-old Library Journal. Some 72 percent of libraries now offer e-books, but licensing them from publishers can be difficult. In general, publishers work with e-book vendor OverDrive to broker contracts with libraries; the end result tends to be that libraries have limited access to publishers’ e-books, and restrictions on lending (an ebook can’t be checked out simultaneously to more than one person, for instance). Currently, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster (NYSE: CBS) do not make any of their ebook titles available to libraries. HarperCollins has generated controversy by allowing its e-books to be checked out only 26 times before they expire, forcing libraries to buy them again.

As a result of these restrictions by big publishers, McCormack says librarians are turning to smaller presses, which are generally less restrictive about offering access to their ebooks. Library Journal‘s arrangement with NetGalley will introduce librarians to new titles from many of these smaller e-book-only romance publishers. Angela James, Executive Editor of Harlequin’s Carina Press, estimates that over half of digital-first content is in the romance genre.

James predicts that romance e-book originals will be a hit for libraries. “Romance readers are such voracious readers and they can’t afford to buy all that content,” she says. They also tend to be very loyal to specific authors, so checking out e-books in libraries gives them a chance to try out authors they’re unfamiliar with, she says.

Although Library Journal is only accepting romance e-originals now, it plans to expand to other genres. “All signs are pointing to sci-fi and mystery,” says McCormack–two other genres that are fast-growing segments of the e-book market. She says that shorter nonfiction works, such as those offered by Byliner and through the Kindle Singles program, are a prime target for libraries as well.