London - Jodi Ellen Malpas remembers her first time like it was yesterday. It was on the dining room table, she was wearing ripped jeans and she recalls ‘kind of having to brace’ herself.
‘Oooh God, it was really nerve-racking,’ she says, giggling nervously like a schoolgirl. ‘But it was important that I got it right. I was just sooo scared of being rubbish at it.’
The 33-year-old is, of course, thinking back to January last year when she wrote the first sex scene for her trilogy of pornographic novels – sorry, love stories – that are taking America and Britain by storm.
The This Man series, which were originally released as ebooks (titled This Man, Beneath This Man and This Man Confessed), will shortly be published as ‘proper’ paperbacks.
Publishers, women and quite a few husbands are now claiming that this shy brunette is the new EL James, the housewife whose Fifty Shades Of Grey novels became a global bestseller. Already there is a million-strong band of women called The Ladies who form the fan base for Jodi’s trilogy.
The books centre around Jesse Ward, a muscular, tall ‘love god with dirty blonde hair, green eyes and a curiously minty odour’.
He runs a sex hotel called The Manor, but embarks on an all- consuming love affair of the Mills and Boon variety with his interior designer, Ava O’Shea.
Jodi’s works have been riding high in the Amazon erotica charts for months. Now the mother-of-two’s third book, published earlier this month, has reached the top of the New York Times ebook fiction bestseller list.
She has also signed a deal with a US publishing house and all three works will be released in paperback in the US and UK this autumn. Not bad for a girl from Northampton who left school at 17, has no formal training and, until January, was working as a health-and-safety officer for her father’s very unerotic paving slab firm.
She seems a bit overwhelmed when we meet in the garden of a pub. Jodi is shaking with nerves, forcing her many bracelets to jangle and clank. Wearing Converse trainers and a cut-off denim jacket, she looks like an ordinary school-run mother.
But when we start to talk about the explicit sex scenes which are about to make her famous, she clams up. In fact, she can hardly bring herself to even say the word ‘sex’. When she does, it comes out the side of her mouth, making it sound like ‘zex’.
Surely the woman who managed to string an erotic session on a rowing machine along for several pages and cover her heroine in peanut butter is not a prude?
‘Well, I was quite conservative growing up,’ Jodi admits. ‘I had one serious boyfriend before I met my husband, Aaron. I’ve been with him for a long, long time and we do have a very healthy relationship, thank you very much.’
But have they ever had sex on a rowing machine – one of the more traditional settings of her second novel?
‘No!’
What about peanut butter – apparently a crucial sex accessory? ‘I hate peanut butter, actually.’
Jodi also reveals that her husband of 11 years has not and will not be reading any of the This Man series. Her sons, aged 13 and nine, are kept well away from their mother’s work for obvious reasons, but Jodi is so mortified by her risque material that neither her father, Patrick, nor her mother, Lorraine – who is now her PA – have read the books.
Jodi’s characters are constantly ‘at it’ on kitchen counters, in limousines and on private jets. They also go in for disturbing beatings and the females love to be dominated.
Considering her very buttoned-up demeanour, quite where this stuff comes from is a bit of a mystery – even to Jodi. ‘The sex is purely from my imagination,’ she says, getting flustered. ‘I don’t do any research either. I’ve certainly never found myself in Ann Summers inspecting sex toys. I put myself in Ava’s position while writing so I’ve lived This Man, but only in my head.
‘Look, I’m in a loving, wonderful relationship, but like most women out there, normal life can get in the way of the passion. I was a wife and mother long before Jesse Ward came along. I worked and did the school run and I looked after the children. It was like any woman escaping into a fictional world except I was escaping into a fictional world that I had created.’
Many women would agree, which could explain why the market for erotic fiction has exploded. While it has always been available, but remained very much an under-the-duvet sort of read.
Then EL James came along and changed everything. James first published her Fifty Shades Of Grey series as an ebook, with a paperback version on demand, and the series has since sold more than 70 million copies worldwide.
But quite why erotic fiction has taken off as such a successful genre is something that Liz Thomson, founding editor of BookBrunch.co.uk, a newsletter for the international publishing industry, cannot fathom.
‘It’s a mystery. I’d say these women have dull lives,’ she says. ‘It seems sad in this supposedly post-feminist age that all this badly written erotica is being read. There’s nothing wrong with escapist fiction and fantasy, but after you’ve read it once, how much time do you want to invest in it?’
Naturally, Jodi disagrees. ‘Erotic fiction is very empowering,’ she says, despite barely being able to mention The Act. ‘They have widely improved the sex lives of many women – I have the thank-you letters from husbands to prove it.’
Then there’s the serious money. EL James has reportedly made £6.5 million with her Fifty Shades of Grey series, while fellow erotica author Sylvia Day has signed an eight-figure deal with Penguin USA and a seven-figure deal with Penguin UK – one of the biggest advances ever.
Jodi signed a major six-figure deal with US publisher Grand Central Publishing – part of the Hachette group – in June. Even before that, she had sold 250,000 ebooks in the US and UK – an astonishing figure for a self-published novel and a feat that has earned her a small fortune so far.
Jodi claims the This Man story ‘just kind of landed in my brain’ in 2010. She had never written before and never particularly enjoyed English at school.
‘I tried to ignore this sudden urge to write my story, but it was so vivid I just felt compelled.’
She was planning to be a nurse before joining the family business when she was 20.
Jodi wrote her first story in secret after work and at weekends in November 2011, finishing the first two books by May last year. Her best friend, Kate, convinced her to send the finished work to UK agents, but after being rejected by all of them, she decided to self-publish with Amazon.
‘I sold my first book in the US in November last year,’ Jodi recalls. ‘I thought, “Oh my God, someone in America has bought my book, how nice.”
‘The next day ten more people from the States bought it and by the end of the month it had spiralled to a thousand people. Then women started emailing me demanding to know when the next book was coming out. It was mad.’
US publishing agents were soon falling over themselves to sign Jodi. But Liz Thomson insists she is simply one of the very few lucky ones.
‘Most self-published stuff dies a death,’ she says. ‘The idea that it’s a quick way to make money is nonsensical. Sadly, the few successes have fuelled agents and traditional publishers to spend a huge amount of time combing self-publishers instead of reading their slush pile.
‘Random House would never have published Fifty Shades Of Grey had it come into them.’
Jodi also admits she has been fortunate. ‘My agent told me that out of 1,000 submitted manuscripts only one makes it. Your chances are tiny, but self-publishing an ebook is incredible. It means anyone can write a book.
‘That said, there are millions of self-published authors on Amazon. To be recognised out of those millions is just incredible.’
‘What does a woman want?’
Sigmund Freud regarded this as one of the great questions, writes Sam Leith.
Jodi Malpas has the answer. Her This Man trilogy is an inspired marriage of the new market in women-oriented soft-porn with the cosy world of what her twentysomething heroine calls ‘Bridgette [sic] Jones’.
Here is a proud, independent woman with an impressive career, yet a fatal weakness for the ‘family-sized bar of chocolate’.
How does Malpas compare to the genre’s current queenpin E.L. James? The prose is every bit as good; the filth a bit less filthy. But they have in common the fantasy of being utterly dominated by a man.
As exemplified by her male protagonist Jesse Ward, the ideal man has a ‘dribble-worthy gait and bag loads of sex appeal’. His body? A ‘mountain of lean tallness’. His breath? Both hot and minty. His gaze? ‘Punching holes into me’ etc.
His ‘arousal’? As ‘hard as lead’. Oh, the personality. Jolly domineering, but a prude. When she swears he exclaims: ‘Watch your mouth!’
Yet all Jesse has to do is touch a lady’s thigh for ‘yet another orgasmic orgasm’ to approach. Lordy. - Mail On Sunday