"People say it isn't good quality but you have to remember Fifty Shades started as fan fiction and as fan fiction you have to have action" ... publisher Amanda Hayward. Photo: Ben Rushton

There was a time, not so long ago, that Amanda Hayward was close to quitting publishing. Selling the e-book and print rights of Fifty Shades of Grey to Random House for more than $1 million had made the founder of The Writer's Coffee Shop and the book's author wealthy women, and here the big publishing houses were waving dollars at Hayward again, offering to buy her out.

Caught in the blinding arc lights of a publishing phenomenon, Hayward was spent. The publicity was intrusive and bruising, the fun of the original enterprise curdled by lawyers and confidentiality agreements.

Sitting on a panel at the Southern Highlands Writers' Festival in July, Hayward was representative of the new force of social media and niche publishing. The passion of that audience of book lovers reminded her that the real purpose of publishing was to tell stories, a dawning that rekindled her flagging enthusiasm.

Hayward's eyes flash steel and mischief when she tells me rival publishers have since been trying to poach her authors. ''You have to laugh,'' she scoffs, ''because it's not going to work. It's not the way to do it, it's not the way it works, but they will learn. It's now, 'what's the next thing?', it doesn't have to be some book, it's what else captures people's imagination.''

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Three different authors in her stable are tracking the same early popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey in the fan fiction and original fiction community of her online forums. ''Same volumes,'' nods Hayward. ''It will take another four or five months from here to know.'' If, that is, she can boast a second bestseller.

With no experience to her name, the one-time quantity surveyor outwitted New York's publishing houses to bring the fan fiction story in from the sidelines to mainstream publishing. With global English-language sales approaching 40 million, the erotic trilogy has outsold Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and the seven Harry Potter books across several continents including Australia. Hayward wants to prove lightning can strike twice. And, next time, there's no way she's going to sell to any of the big publishing houses. She wants to do it all herself. ''Just once more would be lovely,'' she says, ''not to be known as a one-hit wonder.''

Our lunch venue, Crinitis at Castle Hill, is all masculine leather and polished wood, a restaurant in which Christian Grey, Fifty Shades of Grey's tycoon dominator, might have felt comfortable. ''But it doesn't have a red playroom,'' Hayward smirks, referring to the Red Room of Pain in Grey's penthouse suite where he beds his willing sexual slaves.

Hayward discovered the restaurant three months ago and has wined and dined some of ''the girls'' responsible for moderating the publishing house's 100,000-member fan fiction community, from which the publishing arm nurtures emerging authors. Until Fifty Shades came along, they were middle-aged housewives, with kids and husbands and tedious jobs they hated who led online lives as writers or reviewers of risque stories set in their favourite fictional universes.

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Fifty shades of success