A NYT bestselling writer of erotica profiled at CNN.

More than 2.7 million copies of her books are in print, she’s a mainstay on the Essence magazine list of best sellers, and two titles, “Afterburn” and the anthology “Love Is Never Painless,” were New York Times best sellers.

The next frontier for the author: movies and television. She has approved a script for “Addicted,” an adaptation of her biggest-selling novel, about a woman who seeks counseling for sex addiction. She’s negotiating a deal to turn a collection of stories, “The Sex Chronicles,” into a cable-TV miniseries.

She’s also a publisher who runs Strebor Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster with more than 50 authors, many of whom get a sales boost from their association with Zane.

Not bad for someone who never planned to be a writer. Zane, the daughter of a theologian and an elementary school teacher, graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., with a degree in chemical engineering.

“Whenever I had creative writing assignments and stuff in school, the teachers would almost be shocked at what I turned in because it would be so far-fetched and so imaginative,” Zane says. “Most of my teachers told me I should be a writer, but I just never took it seriously until I got bored enough to do it.”

Exaaaaaactly.