Erotic Donald Trump novella tops Amazon charts

A new erotic e-book, Trump Temptation: The Billionaire & The Bellboy, is rapidly climbing the bestseller charts, with some commentators comparing it to Fifty Shades of Grey.

It's written by Elijah Daniel, a 22-year-old comedian from Los Angeles, and describes a fictional gay encounter between the super-rich Republican presidential candidate and a hotel bellboy, reports New York Daily News.

"I was drinking and I thought it would be funny if I write this stupid and weird story," Daniel told the newspaper. He tweeted his intentions and his 90,000-plus followers responded enthusiastically, so he got to work.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"It took me four hours and four bottles of wine," he said.

The "21-page masterpiece" "skyrocketed" to the top of Amazon's charts the day after it was written, adds the newspaper. It's available as a Kindle download for $1.99

After debuting on the site last week, the novella is now listed as number one on Amazon's chart of LGBT Erotica and Humorous Erotica.

Sales were boosted when a Twitter account run by the activist Anonymous group began tweeting about it, said Daniel.

Trump Temptation is the fictional story of how the real-estate mogul meets and seduces a young male hotel employee - and is full of titillating detail and purple prose.

"With his oily orange skin glistening in the sunlight as if he were a soggy Cheeto, his hair unkempt and messy, like a gorgeous rat's nest. He was beautiful," the first chapter reads. "His gorgeous a**e flapped behind him like a mouthwatering stack of pancakes in his pants. My hunger for pancakes had never been stronger."

The novella would be "a throwaway joke", except that it has become a huge hit, topping several Amazon categories, says Brian McManus on Vice.

Responses to it have been positive. "We have to say Trump Temptation: The Billionaire and the Bellboy is pretty inspired (although we would have gone with '50 Shades of Toupee', personally)," writes Ashitha Nagesh, at the Metro.

"We are also really loving the cover art," she adds, referring to the image of Trump in a hotel room with a man in "an a**eless leather bodysuit and red PVC thigh-high boots".

Reviewers on Amazon, where the book has a five-star rating, have also acclaimed the work. "More compelling than the Bible," writes one. Another says: "Watch out EL James, we've got a new erotic romance author in our midst". A third claims the story "will leave you as breathless as the protagonists".

This might mean more work for Daniel - when he launched the book, he said he would write a full, novel-sized trilogy if it his story reached No1.