One Direction Fan fiction Autor skyrockets to success 

Since publishing her stories about Harry Styles online, Anna Todd has sealed a major book deal and sold the film rights to one of her stories.

Anna Todd recently sold the film rights to After, a story she authored about a college girl who falls in love with a character modelled after One Direction’s Harry Styles.

By: Tara Deschamps Staff Reporter, Published on Tue Oct 28 2014

When the family of One Direction fan fiction writer Anna Todd found out the 25-year-old Texan had authored a steamy online book series captivating millions of readers, they were shocked.

“I didn’t tell my husband until I was halfway through the second book. He thought I had a phone addiction,” Todd says, giggling. “I was always on my phone, but he didn’t know what I was doing.”

The surprise for Todd’s army husband came in 2013, months after she used online writing platform Wattpad to incrementally release her first book After — a story about a college girl who falls in love with a character modelled after One Direction’s Harry Styles.

Since then, Todd has been catapulted to stardom. She’s written two more Wattpad stories, scored a major book deal with Simon and Schuster, sold the film rights to

After to Paramount Pictures and launched a jewelry line.

Todd will also appear Thursday at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, participating in a round table discussion about writing in the digital age.

The success, she says, has made it hard for her to even go shopping without being recognized.

She recalls once strolling the aisles of a local Target clad in sweatpants, when a fan kept staring at her, but never approached her.

Moments later, her phone was pinging with tweets from the admirer alerting others that Todd had been spotted.

“People were asking her what I was wearing and what I bought and I bought toothpaste and then people were asking what kind,” Todd says. “That was my first time being recognized and that was pretty intense.”

It’s a strange experience for someone who never imagined making a career out of writing from the backseats of cabs, the waiting room at her doctor’s office or the aisles of grocery stores.

“I had no idea what to expect when I first started writing,” she says. “I never expected it to turn into this.”

She admits she’s caught “a little bit” of flack for the sexual nature and risqué scenes described in her books, which some compare to erotic romance series Fifty Shades of Grey.

“My intention wasn’t for anyone who wasn’t mature enough to read it,” she says. “The characters are 18 and 20, so I was reflecting their age range and I wasn’t intending for this to be a One Direction fan-based thing.”

She’s also faced the scorn of avid One Direction followers, who believe Todd has wrongfully portrayed Styles as a bad boy with a predilection for emotionally abusing women and stirring up trouble. In an outpouring of social media postings with hashtags like #StopAnnaTodd and #SuspendAnnaTodd, former fans have called on readers to boycott Todd’s work.

“Everyone has an opinion and it seems that the negative voices can be the loudest, but I chose to focus on the positive comments from readers,” she says. “They make this whole process worthwhile and so much fun.”

The instant support, she says, is the power of the online community and the Toronto-based Wattpad platform she uses, which allows users to read and write their own stories through an online portal or mobile app.

The company says 9 billion minutes are spent on their platform every month by users reading 75 million free stories ranging in length and genre.

According to Wattpad general manager Candice Faktor, the most popular areas are romance, science fiction and mystery, but Todd has led a burgeoning wave of millennials gravitating toward fan fiction and building a mobile readership.

“We are seeing a lot of techniques Anna used to develop a fan base and write an amazing story in other writers,” Faktor says. “It has been amazing to watch a woman who started off as a reader and then put herself out there, wrote a very authentic and compelling story and saw this amazing success.”

Though Todd is not sure what’s next for her career, she vows to keep writing on Wattpad and will be crossing her fingers for more book and movie deals.

The Star will be hosting a live chat with Todd and Doeneseya, a Justin Bieber fan fiction author, on Thursday at noon.

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