Tina Engler's life has changed a lot in the nine years since I last wrote about her.
At that time, she was a 23-year-old single parent, community college student and political activist who dreamed of someday proving herself to all the people who judged her harshly for receiving welfare benefits while she raised her 5-year-old daughter Jasmine without help from the father.
I reported how she tried not to cry as she talked about people whispering at the grocery store when they saw her use food stamps. "I even had one cashier tell me I needed to get a job," she told me back then. She said she wished others could see welfare as an investment in people, rather than as a handout. She said she was doing her best to raise her child well and get a decent education so she and her daughter could become contributing, tax-paying citizens.
Tina was living with her stepfather and mother, who had also seen their share of hard times. They were an extended family, struggling to dig their way out of a crisis brought on by a series of strokes of bad luck that started when Tina's mother, Patty Marks, was transferred from Ohio to Tampa by the company she worked for. Tina was just entering high school when the family moved. She was shy and had a difficult time adjusting to her new school. Eventually, she dropped out, got a job and ended up having a baby at the age of 17, fathered by a man she had known for two years.
"When a young girl gets pregnant, she doesn't think, 'Oh good, a welfare check,'" Tina told me nine years ago. "She thinks she's going to get married and have a baby, and everything will be ideal and romantic. … I loved Jasmine's father. I thought he would be there for us."
Unfortunately, though he had a good job when Tina got pregnant, he developed a drug problem and ended up in prison. She doesn't bear him any ill will for his problems, and she still wishes him well. "He was a good dad when he wasn't doped up," she says. "I wish he could have gotten the help he needed instead of ending up in prison."
The Planet received a number of self-righteous letters from men in response to the story about Tina. They condemned her (and her mother) and said taxpayers should not have to bear the responsibility for supporting her child. One letter writer characterized Tina's decision to have a child she couldn't support as "criminal" and said she should be punished accordingly.
That's one reason I so enjoyed hearing that Tina Engler now pays more in income tax every year than she collected the entire time she was on welfare. Her company grossed $1.2-million last year and is expected to easily double that figure this year. She has become quite famous in her field, and she employs dozens of people who also pay taxes on what they earn from her.
It seems that our investment in Tina has paid off.
The way she made her fortune is just as surprising as everything else about Tina's life.
Detours on the Road to Success
When I last interviewed Tina, she was finishing her associate's degree in psychology at Hillsborough Community College. It had taken her four years, going part time and caring for her daughter, but she maintained a 3.95 grade point average. She was planning to complete her bachelor's degree and then attend graduate school. But even then, there were clues as to a different path she might end up pursuing: "Before I die, I want to have a book of poetry published," she told me.
Tina was finishing up her bachelor's degree at Eckerd College and had been accepted into a Ph.D. program at Florida State University with a full scholarship when something happened that changed her plans.
Despite using birth control, she got pregnant again. The father was not interested in participating in parenthood. "He thought I was a gold digger," says Tina, "so I ended up having another kid on my own."
She was faced with a choice: "I could move with two kids to a place where I had no support system or do something else." She gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Jade, two months before graduation and decided to stay in Tampa and look for a job. "I applied to be a welfare caseworker, but when they asked me what I thought of the new welfare regulations, I was honest." She told them she strongly disagreed with new time limitations and as a former recipient, she believed that requiring mothers to leave their children for minimum-wage jobs put their children at risk and kept families trapped in a cycle of poverty. She didn't get the job.
She ended up working as a reservations agent for Continental Airlines. It was depressing to work so hard to get through school and then end up at a job that didn't use her education. She started having anxiety attacks, which escalated into full-blown agoraphobia. "I didn't want to leave the house," she says.
The Great Escape
That's when she started reading romance novels — where plucky heroines found the men of their dreams to love and take care of them. "I turned into a romance junky, probably to escape from my life," she says. "I still can't stand anything without a happily ever after. There's enough depressing stuff in real life."
But she always felt there was something missing from the books she read so avidly. "I was bored by the sex in them," she says. "Sex is an important part of a relationship, and the way these books portrayed it was all flowers and euphemisms."
So Tina started writing the kind of romance novels she wanted to read. In them, the women have a healthy sexual appetite. They're also smart, tough, independent — and reticent to be dominated by an alpha male. And yet oh so attracted to an alpha male. Tina described their sexual encounters in explicit detail, using frank language.
She sent her books to romance novel publishers. "I got tons of rejections," she says. "Some wouldn't even read the manuscript; they just told me this would never go over."
Tina was convinced they were wrong. She believed there were women like her, who wanted to read romance with more edge.
Meanwhile, she was back at Hillsborough Community College, this time taking courses in e-commerce and website creation. "I wanted to learn something functional," she says with a laugh.
Dr. Dolores (Pusins) Wells, a computer science professor at HCC who started the program and teaches in it, remembers Tina well. "She stood out from the beginning," says Wells. "She's a sharp lady — very creative and inventive."
Tina used what she learned to create a website and publish her own books online.
Apparently she struck a chord. From the first day she posted her books online, she had customers. Her very first one is now her publisher and chief operations officer.
The Birth of Clit Lit
Cris Brashear had been working in IT as a computer operator on a mid-size computer system called AS-400, "which means you have nothing to do when the system's running right," she says. Cris was often bored at work until someone told her about e-books. "You can read them online at work and no one knows what you're doing. Plus, I have carpal tunnel, so it's hard to hold a book sometimes. It's easier for me to read on computer." Cris took to scrolling through the Amazon reader reviews and read one by Tina Engler. She liked the review and started corresponding with Tina by e-mail. Tina told her she was launching a new online publishing company called Ellora's Cave in December 2000.
Cris bought the first book offered by Ellora's Cave, The Empress' New Clothes by Jaid Black. It's the tale of an accountant who is abducted by a muscular 7-foot-tall warrior king from another planet and taken back to his world to be his queen. The bad news is that the social system of the planet revolves around erotic hedonism and the sexual subjugation of women. The good news is that the men are extremely experienced and skilled lovers.
Tina's a little embarrassed by the book now. "I've learned so much about writing since then," she says. However, what the book lacks in literary craftsmanship, it makes up for in humor, sex appeal and a certain exuberance and hopefulness. The main character is spunky and likeable, a little like some of the Chick Lit heroines spawned by Bridget Jones' Diary, but with genitals. She fights for her independence, even as she succumbs to the seduction of a rich and powerful lover who is completely crazy about her.
"Oh man, I was hooked," says Cris. She started buying everything Tina published, and sending the e-books to her sister and friends. The two became e-mail pals, with Cris reading every book Ellora's Cave offered and writing to Tina about them. She didn't learn until much later that Tina was Jaid Black.
"I was writing under three different names, trying to make myself look bigger," says Tina. Meanwhile, word was spreading, and her fan base was growing. She started receiving requests for more and more books. Her site was getting hits from around the world. "I worked really hard, seven days a week, almost 24 hours a day. I was the writer, editor, everything. I was getting up several times in the middle of the night to fill orders, so people wouldn't have to wait for their books," she says.
She couldn't keep up with the growing demand and started looking for more writers. "Sometimes I thought I'd never find another author." Tina had come to know and trust Cris' opinion and in July 2001, sent her a manuscript from another author to review.
"I didn't like it and I told her what I thought was wrong with it," says Cris. "She asked me if I might like to do some editing … It kinda snowballed from there. … She'll tell you I was always telling her what to do anyway." Cris kept her job and did freelance work for Tina for about a year. "I was making good money," she says. "I didn't mind taking a small pay cut because I knew this thing was gonna pay off, but I still needed to make a living." By September 2002, she came on staff full time.
Sexy Business
Since then, they've built a staff of nine full-time staffers, including a managing editor, Web editor, art director, administrative assistant, warehouse/mail order manager, editor and CEO. "I love my job," says Cris. "I wouldn't trade it for the world."
Tina's mom, Patty Marks, an adept administrator with a degree in business, had been helping Tina from the beginning. "I set up spreadsheets for her to track sales and pay authors," says Patty. She came on staff as chief executive officer for Ellora's Cave in October 2003. "It's such a fantastic group of people," says Patty. They're all so dedicated. People have moved here from Cincinnati, Georgia and Oregon to work for Ellora's Cave."
Ellora's Cave currently publishes print-on-demand books and recently closed a deal with Waldenbooks and Borders to carry books in all their stores across the nation. However, the company intends to remain largely an e-book publisher. "We have over 100 authors, and we pay them well," says Patty. Ellora's Cave pays 37.5 percent of the cover price on e-books that sell for $2.95 to $9.99 and print books priced from $8.99 to $15.99 each. "Some sell 1,000 copies the first week." Last year, Ellora's Cave paid authors almost half a million dollars in royalties. Some authors now make enough money to quit their jobs and live on their writing. "Some write one or two books a year," says Patty; "some write one or two a month."
Ellora's Cave has a broad audience base, selling most of its books to customers in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Germany. "We're hot in Tokyo; I don't know why," says Tina, who spends three to four hours a day answering reader mail. "We get a ton of mail from Tokyo and Germany. The English buy a lot of books, but they don't write us much." The company is considering translating the books into Spanish next.
Though most of Ellora's Cave's readers are women, men do buy and read the books too. "I get mail from men saying 'you saved my marriage.' They talk about their wife reading the books and becoming aroused and jumping their husbands' bones," says Tina. "Sometimes the husband and wife read the books together. They give me credit for pepping up a 20-year-old marriage."
Tina has essentially created a new sub-genre of the romance novel. She calls it "Romantica," a combination of romance and erotica.
"I provided something that wasn't out there at the time," she says. "It's kind of heady when I think about it."
She insists that, like romance novels, all romantica books end happily and have a strong plot line. "We found that women like the romances, but they don't want the bedroom door closed when the good stuff starts." She admits that the alpha men in her books are not the kind of men she or other independent women would want to marry in real life, but she says, women like to fantasize about being dominated by them. "I think it's a very common female fantasy. Let's face it. When you masturbate, you fantasize about a lot of stuff you wouldn't want to do in real life."
Ellora's Cave books come in five different lengths, from "Quickies" (7,000-14,999 words) to "Plus Novels" (more than 80,000 words), and each is rated S, E or X for sexual content. S is for Sensuous books, in which, according to the website, "love scenes are explicit and leave nothing to the imagination." E stands for Erotic titles, which have a higher volume of explicit sex scenes, frank slang language and "fantasy material that some readers find objectionable, such as bondage, submission, same-sex encounters … ." Books with an X rating "tend to contain controversial subject matter not for the faint of heart."
Fasten Your Seatbelts, Ladies
But Tina has done more than carve out a new, very popular and lucrative niche in a very popular and lucrative genre. She has created a successful electronic publishing company at the very dawn of e-publishing.
"E-books are the future, and we're on the ground floor," says Cris. "We're setting the standard." There's little doubt that electronic publishing is poised to become a huge industry. That's not to say e-books will replace physical books, but more and more books will be purchased in electronic form. For one thing, it's much cheaper to publish an e-book than a paper book. So e-book publishers can pass on the savings to customers. Ellora's Cave sells e-books for 40 percent to 75 percent less than a paperback. Plus, if your vision is bad, you can make the print in an e-book as large as you need it to read comfortably. And e-books don't take up space in your house, they're easily transportable, and you can download them instantly, any time of the day or night in the privacy and comfort of your home.
E-publishers don't have to pay for, store or ship books, which greatly reduces overhead costs and increases the number of transactions a small staff can execute immediately. Ellora's Cave has more than 400 titles and releases four to six new ones every week. The company sells nearly 8,000 books per week, with some readers buying every new book as soon as it's available. "Some people buy a hundred dollars' worth of books at a time," says Patty.
The company has established a tremendous brand identity, says Cris. "Usually, people look for an author's name and buy everything by that person," she says. "They don't even know who the publisher is most of the time. But our customers know Ellora's Cave … for our high standards in style, depth of character and plot."
Ellora's Cave has become famous in the romance industry as well. Romantic Times featured a story about the company on its February cover and made Jaid Black the Ace of Spades in the deck of sexy playing cards it's releasing soon.
Ellora's Cave's website at www.ellorascave.com offers books in several different formats, depending on whether customers want to read directly on their computer screen, print the books, or download to handheld computers or e-book readers.
Tina's partial to e-book readers because they are portable, have easy-to-read screens and can store hundreds of books. But she doesn't think the perfect one has been designed yet. "I've had this conversation with Microsoft," she says. "They need to make e-books with fewer bells and whistles. It should look like a book and feel like a book."
You can hear the wheels turning in her head as she talks. Those who know Tina would probably not be surprised to see her invent the perfect e-reader and make another fortune.
The company will launch two new publishing lines with their own websites this summer: Cerridwen Press will offer mainstream, horror, mystery and suspense novels, with no erotic content. Ghede Books will be the new erotic line. "These won't be romance," says Cris. "They'll still be well-written and have some kind of plot. But it doesn't have to be a happily ever after ending," she says. She's confident the association with Ellora's Cave will help.
Happily Ever After
Tina Engler has more than proven herself to those who judged her nine years ago. She has paid everything back and then some. And she employs dozens of people at fair wages. "She doesn't believe in contributing to the masses of working poor," says Cris. "She wants everyone to make a decent living."
Not one to pull up the ladder after she climbs it, Tina's also working on funding a scholarship at Eckerd College for single parents. (The school has yet to respond to her offer.) And she's returning to her political activist roots. "I got burned out on it for a long time, but I always come back," she says. She's working on a series of nonfiction books, one of which is about prisoners' rights. "That's something I have a lot of experience with," she says.
She also just had a new Jaid Black book, One Dark Night, published by Berkley Sensation, a division of Penquin. It's a romantic/erotic thriller about a successful surgeon whose fantasies of being sexually dominated take her online to find a dom lover. What she finds instead is a serial killer.
Tina knows there's no such thing as a happily ever after in real life, but she's pretty content with her life. She still has her share of problems, especially with her health. She does have a man in her life, whom she loves and expects to marry one day, but she's in no rush. She has her own home and vacations in Europe with her daughters. Customers at the grocery store don't smirk at her when she buys exactly what she wants these days, and cashiers don't tell her she needs to get a job.
She left Florida as soon as she could afford to and moved back to Monroe Falls, Ohio, where her family is originally from. "It's a great place to raise kids," she says. "It's a small town, everybody knows everybody, we have family and a change of seasons."
She doesn't have many fond memories of Tampa, where she lived for 15 years. "I always hated the heat and bugs," she says, but it goes much deeper than that for her. "I mentally associate it with bad things. I'll always connect it to failure and being on welfare." She mentions a racist incident that happened to her bi-racial daughter in Tampa and talks about how angry and humiliated she felt when she read the letters published in response to my article about her. "Those hate letters — I still don't understand that thinking. … You don't question your tax dollars going to the Pentagon to kill people, but you don't want to spend money to feed, clothe, and give tools to people to survive successfully. … Being on welfare is a horrible experience. I don't know anyone who likes staying on it."
One particularly unctuous letter writer stated, "Tina is far from typical, and you know it." It's true that Tina is far from typical. She's a distinct original, and people will probably still judge her for the way she has made her money. But what this letter writer meant was that she didn't fit his stereotype of a welfare mother. Which was exactly why I chose her — to challenge the stereotype. The reason Tina allowed me to write about her, the reason she opened herself up to the shitstorm of disapproval she knew would come, is that she wanted people to understand that there is no typical welfare mother. She wanted people to think of welfare as an investment in people, rather than as a handout.
And she has proven her point.
Contributing Editor Susan F. Edwards can be reached at susan.edwards @weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jul 1-7, 2004.