Until recently, Christine Feehan was hardly a name anyone—including the author herself—would expect to see on the cover of a bestselling manga book. But Fans of Feehan’s romances helped propel Dark Hunger, her first manga, published by Berkley Books, to the top of the Amazon graphic novels chart and the #11 slot on PW Comics Week's November comics bestseller list.

Feehan, who said she was forbidden to read comics as a child, knew nothing about manga until the idea started popping up in letters from her readers. She did a little research, decided she liked the idea and proposed it to her publisher, Berkley Books. The publisher reports that it has 85,000 copies of Dark Hunger in print. That's modest compared with the 500,000 copies Berkley typicially prints of her mass market romances, but Feehan hopes the format will bring new readers to her work.

Feehan joins a number of well-known prose writers who have recently gone graphic. Marvel publishes Stephen King’s Dark Tower and Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter comics, and in February it will debut The Lords of Avalon, based on the novels of Sherrilyn Kenyon. Manga artist Queenie Chan is working on a graphic novel based on Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas character for Del Rey. In the young adult realm, Tokyopop has partnered with HarperCollins to produce manga versions of Erin Hunter’s Warriors novels, Meg Cabot’s Avalon High series, and Ellen Schreiber’s Vampire Kisses.

It's too soon to say how successful these books will be in the long run, and whether this signals a lasting change or a fad. What is certain is that crossing over to this format presents challenges for prose publishers and authors. Berkley had never published a graphic novel. “They had no idea what to do,” Feehan said, “but like me, they thought this was an interesting challenge.” She chose a story from her Carpathian series, which is set in its own world, and her editor, Cindy Hwang, hired former DC editor Dana Kurtin to script the manga and designer Maria Cabardo, to help with art. Imaginary Friends Studios [http://www.imaginaryfs.com/], based in Singapore and Jakarta, provided the art, with artist Zid taking the lead on pencils.

While her novels often include torrid scenes, Feehan toned down the sexual content in Dark Hunger, partly because she expects it to reach younger readers and partly because she sees a real difference between depicting something in words and in pictures. “When I am reading a book, a movie unfolds in my own mind, and I get to choose what is there,” she said. “When I’m looking at a picture book, the artist gets to choose.”

In fact, some Feehan fans who bought Dark Hunger online felt cheated when they realized it was a graphic novel. “Part of the fun of reading is using your imagination to form images from the words of the author,” commented one fan reviewer on Amazon.com.

Feehan understands, but she also knows not everyone reads that way. She recalls reading a description of an old movie theater to her son. “I stopped and said, ‘Picture that in your head, the smell of it, the sight of it,’ ” she said. “And he said, ‘Mom, I see in numbers. I don’t see like you’re seeing.’ That was my first real understanding that people didn’t all see in the way I did, that when they read a book, they didn’t get the visual picture.” Both Feehan and Hwang said they're considering doing more manga, but that it takes major commitment. "Because it was such a complicated process, we want to make sure we give ourselves plenty of time," Hwang said.

To bring the book to comics readers, Berkley is advertising Dark Hunger on comics Web sites and placing it in the manga section of bookstores—not the romance section. “We ended up selling it to the manga buyers because we knew the Christine Feehan fans would find it, but we wanted to make sure it was accessible to the manga readers as well,” Hwang said.

That may prove to be a smart call. Feehan said 35% of her readers are men and many are soldiers who might never stray into the romance section. “[My books] are very action-oriented,” she said. “They are about courage and loving, but they are wrapped in fantasy. I think that appeals across the board to a wide variety of readers.”