Move Over Fifty Shades of Grey, Another Twilight Fanfic Gets A Book Deal

Sitting alone (or with a friend) in your room, coming up with various ways your favorite characters could bump into each other and have sex, did you ever think you’d get paid for it?  Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings will wonder no more. Simon & Schuster have picked up their Twilight fanfiction, The Office, for a two-book deal. 

The original work was titled The Office (and Susana was severely disappointed to find out it wasn’t a NBC Office/Twilight crossover) but will be reworked as Beautiful Bastard for Simon & Schuster. It was written by Hobbs and Billings under the pseudonym Christina Lauren.

The Hollywood Reporter explains the premise, “The Office, which reimagined the Edward Cullen-Bella Swan relationship as a steamy love/hate romance between a boss and his assistant, was one of the pioneers of the Twilight fanfic genre, generating more than two million downloads, before being taken offline by the author in 2009…Beautiful Bastard tells the story of the whip-smart Chloe Mills, an intern at a company who is about to earn her MBA and embark on successful career, but finds her herself caught up in a steamy love/hate relationship with her ‘exacting, blunt inconsiderate’ boss Bennett Ryan.”

Beautiful Bastard will be released February 12, 2013, while the second book Beautiful Stranger will come out May 28, 2013. Simon & Schuster’s Gallery imprint paid the women what insiders are saying was a “substantial” advance. While working as a junior high counselor, Hobbs started the fanfic work in 2009 and joined with Billings, a neuroscientist, a year later. They say the new books will stay true to the original story but that only about 20% of the original work remains.

Though The Office was successful online before it, Fifty Shades of Grey was published first and has sold more than 40 million copies, and is now being adapted into a feature film. Simon & Schuster are betting they can replicate those results.

(via The Hollywood Reporter)

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Jill Pantozzi

Jill Pantozzi is a pop-culture journalist and host who writes about all things nerdy and beyond! She’s Editor in Chief of the geek girl culture site The Mary Sue (Abrams Media Network), and hosts her own blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (TheNerdyBird.com). She co-hosts the Crazy Sexy Geeks podcast along with superhero historian Alan Kistler, contributed to a book of essays titled “Chicks Read Comics,” (Mad Norwegian Press) and had her first comic book story in the IDW anthology, “Womanthology.” In 2012, she was featured on National Geographic’s "Comic Store Heroes," a documentary on the lives of comic book fans and the following year she was one of many Batman fans profiled in the documentary, "Legends of the Knight."

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