Shoshanna Evers: Power-Exchange Romance in the Early Ebook Boom

Shana Sturtz Brodsky (April 1980 – 11 September 2021) is the writer readers know as Shoshanna Evers. She later also used the name Shoshanna Gabriel. She wrote contemporary erotic romance: novels, novellas, and stories built on power exchange. Before she wrote full time she worked as a registered nurse under her married name. Critics called her the queen of the erotic novella. The books were described as emotional and gripping. She wrote dozens of erotic romances.

Her career ran through traditional houses, digital-first imprints, and self-publishing. In 2010 she first published with Ellora’s Cave Publishing, then a major digital-first erotic imprint. She later wrote for Simon & Schuster and kept self-publishing. She co-founded SelfPubBookCovers.com, often described as the first site where an author could customize an original pre-made cover and download it at once. The nonfiction book she edited and contributed to, How To Write Hot Sex: Tips from Multi-Published Erotic Romance Authors, hit number one in Authorship, Erotica Writing Reference, and Romance Writing, and was also a Writing Skills bestseller. How We Do It (And How You Can Too) (2013) reached Amazon’s business-writing bestseller territory and Kobo’s publishing lists.

In 2013 Amazon listed her among its Most Popular Authors in Erotica. The next year she appeared among Most Popular Authors in Contemporary Romance and Most Popular Authors in Romance. In March 2014, “The Man Who Holds the Whip,” her story in the dark-desire anthology MAKE ME: Twelve Tales of Dark Desire, made her a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. The piece was number 16 on the New York Times ebook list on 23 March 2014, and number 48 on USA Today on 9 March 2014.

The longer series run on sharp power and emotion. The Enslaved Trilogy is billionaire BDSM erotic romance, published by Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Star from April through June 2013: Enslaved (April 2013), Enamored (May 2013), and Enraptured (June 2013). The Pulse Trilogy puts the same erotic intensity in a post-apocalyptic dystopia: The Pulse (November 2013), The Escape (January 2014), and The Thrust (March 2014). During the same busy stretch, a mainstream contemporary title, The Tycoon’s Convenient Bride…And Baby (Entangled/Indulgence), was circulating as not yet released.

Short stories and novellas landed in a lot of anthologies, and the BDSM furniture in them is varied. She appeared in Best Bondage Erotica 2012 and Best Bondage Erotica 2013. For Cleis she contributed “Falling Ashes” to Smokin’ Hot Firemen (July 2013), “Body Heat” to Baby Got Back (August 2013), “Forced Orgasms” to The Big Book of Orgasm (September 2013), “Blake Eats Out” to Can’t Get Enough (June 2014), and “Drop Two Tears in a Bucket” to Cowboy Heat (March 2014). Other shorts include an erotic reimagining of Beauty and the Beast (February 2014), “Plastic Wrap” in Best Bondage Erotica 2013, “Melting Ice” in Best Bondage Erotica 2012, “The Wooden Pony” in the Penguin/Berkley Heat anthology Agony/Ecstasy (2012), and “Tape” in Felt Tips (2012), a charity anthology edited by Tiffany Reisz. In 2012 she self-published a Dominatrix Fantasy set: Spanked, Denied, and Collared. The paperback reached Amazon’s erotica bestseller lists.

Earlier Ellora’s Cave and self-published titles include Overheated (2011, more than twenty thousand copies), Snowed In with the Tycoon, Bedhead, Chastity Belt, Hollywood Spank, Taste of Candy, Ginger Snap, Held Captive by the Cavemen, and a standalone expansion of The Man Who Holds the Whip. The paperback Bound to Be Naughty collected Punishing the Art Thief, Chastity Belt, and Hollywood Spank. In 2012 Ellora’s Cave published Skin Deep, which printed Bedhead together with work by Desiree Holt and Lynne Connolly.

For readers who want BDSM in fiction, the whips, chastity, punishment, wooden pony, forced orgasms, collars, and billionaire enslavement plots are an adult product line. They are not a manual for doing it. Evers was a New Yorker. She died on 11 September 2021, at forty-one. At the time she lived with her husband, their three children, and two dogs on a remote farm in northern Idaho.