Zane

Author of erotic fiction novels. She is best known for her novel Addicted. In 1997, Zane began writing erotic stories to pass the time after her children went to bed. She was living in North Carolina and working as a sales representative. The stories developed a following on the Internet and she self-published The Sex Chronicles before landing a deal with Simon & Schuster. Her work was the basis for the Cinemax program Zane's Sex Chronicles. Her latest project, Zane’s The Jump Off, premiered March 29, 2013, on Cinemax. Zane is the publisher of Strebor Books/Atria Books/Simon and Schuster where she publishes 36–60 books a year by other authors.

Zane is the New York Times Bestselling Author of ten titles: Dear G Spot: Straight Talk About Sex and Love, Afterburn, Skyscraper, Nervous, The Sisters of APF, Gettin’ Buck Wild: The Sex Chronicles 2, The Heat Seekers, Shame on it All, Addicted and The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth. She is also an editor or a contributor to several other titles including: Love is Never Painless, Caramel Flava, Chocolate Flava, Breaking the Cycle, Blackgentlemen.com, Best American Erotica 2004, Best Black Women’s Erotica, Brown Sugar 2, Twilight Moods, Dark Dreams, and the essay collection Becoming Myself: Reflections of Growing Up Female edited by Willa Shalit, the producer of the famous Vagina Monologues.

Becoming Myself features a distinguished roster of celebrity females including Maya Angelou, Patti LaBelle, Vanessa Williams, Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, Kate Winslet, and Harry Potter’s J.K. Rowling. Zane feels blessed to be included in such an illustrious lineup of accomplished females. Speaking of lineups, Zane is one of the subjects in “The Black List”-a documentary that premiered on HBO in August 2008. Journalist Elvis Mitchell interviews twenty African American leaders, ranging from athletes and academics to politicians including: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs, Lou Gossett, Jr., Vernon Jordan, Toni Morrison, Colin Powell, Al Sharpton, Russell Simmons, and Keenan Ivory Wayans. She is also the subject of a documentary being developed for Swiss Public Television.

In addition to writing, Zane is the Publisher of Strebor Books International, an imprint of ATRIA/Simon and Schuster. Under Strebor, Zane is responsible for acquiring dozens of titles per year and currently has nearly fifty authors under her imprint. In December 2005, Strebor Books became the first major publishing house to implement an independent sales representative program. Zane intends to have at least 10,000 independent sales reps by the fall of 2009. In 2007, Zane launched two new lines of books and published a record 60 titles. In 2009, she is launching another line of books called Strebor Quickiez.

Zane has set her ambitions on film-making and plans to write and produce at least six film projects yearly as well as television series and straight-to-DVD projects. Her goal is to bring cutting-edge projects to the forefront of the industry and break the monotony of current films being produced.

“Zane’s Sex Chronicles”-a series loosely based on Zane’s real life, premiered on Cinemax on October 10, 2008 and was ground-breaking and successful. The series is loosely based on Zane’s real life. Zane served as the Creator, Scriptwriter and Co-Executive Producer, along with the legendary Suzanne de Passe via their corporation Flixville, USA.

Zane will launch her cosmetics line in the spring of 2009, followed by her body product and adult toy lines in the summer of 2009. She will use her independent sales representatives to market all of her lines as well as products of other handpicked vendors. Zane also moderates PlanetZane.net, where thousands of her fans who call themselves “Zaniacs” converge on a daily basis to discuss her work, as well as love and relationships. During its first month of December 2008, Planet Zane acquired more than 5,500 members and had over 1.5 million page views. Zane has more than 35,000 MySpace friends and nearly 400,000 friends on BlackPlanet.com, all invaluable ways to promote her efforts. On Valentine’s Day 2009, Zane will launch Blackgentlemen.com, the sexiest dating web site on the Internet, based on her bestselling book of the same name.

Zane is on the Board of Directors for the Negro League Legends Hall of Fame-NLLHOF-currently being erected in Washington, D.C. and is a huge advocate for children. She is in the process of founding a non-profit organization for underprivileged women entitled MADE-Making a Difference Everywhere. She volunteers a lot of her time to other non-profit causes and also does many lectures at colleges and universities throughout the year.

Zane is the only author to hold three out of five of the bestselling titles for fiction in Essence magazine and has dominated the list since her first published book in May 2000. She has won the Black Expressions Book of the Year for three years, which is voted on by the 400,000+ members of the Doubleday Book Club; first for her book Addicted, then for her book Nervous and most recently for Afterburn. The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth and Skyscraper were also on the list, making her the only author to ever have three out of ten of the titles on the Book of the Year list. She is the number one bestselling author in the history of the Black Expressions Book Club and was honored with a luncheon at the Doubleday headquarters in New York City. Zane is also the recipient of the Blackboard Fiction Book of the Year for Nervous in 2004 and the Blackboard Erotic Fiction Book of the Year for Skyscraper in 2005; voted on by African-American Booksellers. Zane is also the only author to hold seven of the top fifteen slots for African-American books for Waldenbooks Nationwide. In November 2003, Zane was honored as one of the Architects of Contemporary Culture by the B & B Society at an embassy celebration in Washington, D.C. Zane has won numerous other awards and honors. Recently, Zane won the NAACP 2006 Image Award for Outstanding Fiction for her anthology Breaking the Cycle which deals with domestic abuse and the lasting effect it has on children raised in violent homes.

Zane has been featured in numerous local and national publications including: The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, The Washington Informer, The Washington Post, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, People, Jet, Ebony, Essence, Vibe, Honey, Newsweek, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Los Angeles Times, Canadian Press, The Clarion Ledger, The Orange-County Register, The Halifax Daily News, Nova Scotia, Canada, The Chronicle Journal, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, CNN.com, Nashua Telegraph, AOL Black Voices, Yahoo TV, YouTube, The Washington Post Express, The Houston Chronicle, The Waukegan News Sun, Centre Daily Times, The Central Daily Times, BlackNews.com, The Ottawa Citizen, Rolling Out, Upscale, and numerous others. She has been the topic of several television programs including a lengthy segment on the CBS Early Show and a documentary on TV-One. Most recently, Swiss Public Television did a full-length documentary on Zane that has been viewed in various countries and translated into several languages, including Italian.

Zane’s next several books are slated for publication including: Solitaire: Afterburn 2, Addicted with a Twist, Vengeance; It Is What It Is: Shame on it All Again, There’s a Pitbull in My Bed and Another Time, Another Place. Zane is published in several different languages including Danish, Japanese, and most recently Thai; signifying the fact that she has massive cross-cultural appeal. She is the most successful African-American erotica writer of all-time and her web site, Eroticanoir.com, averages a quarter million hits monthly. Having started building a massive readership via the Internet in late-1997, by the time Zane published her first books in 2000, the books immediately sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Zane is the daughter of two former educators: an elementary school teacher and a world-renowned theologian who is also the author of nearly two dozen books. The foreword of his latest book was penned by Desmond Tutu. She was born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area where she still resides with her three children. Out of all of her accomplishments, Zane is most proud of the remarkable job she has done raising her children.

Zane has taken a taboo topic and turned it into a conversation piece and a way for couples to open up to each other. She recognizes that intimacy is the topic women feel most uncomfortable about and believes that if she can liberate women sexually, it will trickle over into all other aspects of their lives. Non-readers classify her books as “pure sex” but Zane tackles many topics plaguing today’s society including unplanned pregnancy, sexual addiction, multiple personality disorder, and organ donation; just to name a few. Her greatest satisfaction comes from the thousands of weekly emails she receives from readers who feel her writing has changed their lives in positive ways. Zane also gets hundreds of advice emails a month and moderates numerous discussion groups online.

Even with all of her current irons in the fire, Zane insists that her journey has just begun. Zane intends to turn her multi-million dollar corporation into a billion dollar empire within the next five years. Will she do it? Zane never views failure as an option and believes that anything humanly possible is within her reach. Zane can be contacted via email.