Like all good jokes, there's a neat twist to it. Big W claims to be the country's No. 1 bookseller, albeit with a wry nod to the literati. Duggan writes "new adult" novels, a genre that has also received more than its fair share of raised eyebrows.

But the 33-year-old isn't fazed by it all, indeed she's embraced every chance she's had since she self-published her first e-novel in 2012 and soon found herself listed as an iBooks book of the week.

The Boys of Summer became the first in the Summer series, with three more books and a novella following. All up the series sold more than 300,000 e-books internationally, putting Duggan on the reading list of many romance fans. It also got her noticed by traditional publishers Hachette, who signed her up for a new series, with Paradise City and Paradise Road hitting the shelves in 2015.

Duggan is happy to champion the new adult genre.

"New adult gets portrayed as being nothing more than sexed-up young adult," she says.

"But it's so much more than that. It captures a time a lot of us can relate to, that bridge between the teenage years and adulthood."

The genre is aimed at readers between 18 and 25, coming-of-age stories in which characters are dealing with leaving school, moving out of home, starting careers, and yes, serious sexual relationships.

In the Paradise series, the main character is Lexie Atkinson, a quiet country girl sent for her final year of school in the big city. She meets bad boy Luke and is suddenly thrust into a world that's alien to her. By the second book they've all left school, but the challenges remain.

And yes, there's a liberal helping of sex. Duggan is happy to admit that. She says she doesn't feel obliged to write it, that it's not a prerequisite, but given that the books are about people in their late teenage years to mid 20s, you're writing about what is happening in their lives. And sex is one of those things.

She acknowledges that Fifty Shades of Grey changed the market. Perhaps for the level of sex readers became comfortable with, but also for the way in which it was published. E.L. James had her origins in self-published fan-fiction, on the back of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. The rest, as they say, is publishing history, with sales of Fifty Shades now more than 125 million worldwide. Whether you like it or not.

Duggan, who lives in a 100-year-old homestead in a small town just outside of Echuca on the NSW/Victoria border, has always been a writer, always been a reader. The inspiration for the Summer series came from a story she had scribbled down in an old scrapbook when she was 11 years old. She stumbled across the book around the time of National Novel Writing Month in 2011 and decided to give it a go.

Soon after she made contact with Ednah Walters, a self-published author based in the United States, via Goodreads, the world's largest site for readers and book recommendations, and Walters told her she needed to own her own writing, she needed to believe in herself.

"It would be a friendship that would change me forever. Inspiration comes in all forms and Ednah opened the floodgates to an online world that I never knew existed. A platform to pursue my passion," Duggan says.

In a market saturated with American new adult stories, Duggan is proud that her stories are quintessentially Australian.

"For about two seconds I thought that I should be writing for the American market but I thought why should I," she says.

"We have so many stories to tell here in Australia."

Whether you buy your books at Big W, or believe that "new adult" is all about the sex, perhaps the important thing is that Australian stories are being told by Australian authors.

Paradise Road
CJ Duggan
Hachette, $17.99