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Fifty shades of sales
27.04.12 | Neill Denny
The stunning success of Fifty Shades of Grey, which tops the charts after a weekly sale of 60,000, raises two interesting questions for the book trade: can e-books spawn print success? And has erotica finally gone mainstream?
Initial sales of Fifty Shades make it by far the most successful e-book-to-print crossover title to date. It débuted in the Official UK Top 50 last week in fourth, and has now topped the chart, with sales triple those of the next-bestselling book. The e-book side is equally good, with an informed estimate of 30,000–40,000 sales.
Various factors are at play here. The author-designed jacket is iconic without being explicit; bland enough to be read in public. The media got behind the book very quickly, their interest piqued by the title’s US success; by the e-book angle; by the local angle (the author is British); and by the “mummy porn” angle. Certainly not every début author gets newspaper interviews plus appearances on “Loose Women”, “Daybreak”, and a 10-minute slot on “Newsnight”.
The coverage is as notable for its range as its intensity: from “Women’s Hour” to the Sun on Sunday and Grazia. Equally, the book is selling through indies, supermarkets and chains, indicating broad appeal. The conclusion—that a popular e-book works in print—is not surprising given many people still prefer to read print.
The book is loosely based on the massively successful Twilight series, and some fans may have switched over. More likely it has hit a sweet spot between traditional romantic fiction and erotica (Nielsen BookScan classes it as “romance”).
From Fanny Hill onwards, erotica is one of the oldest genres, and the success in the past decade of titles such as Belle de Jour’s have hinted at a mainstream breakthrough. Yet the area has remained the preserve of specialist imprints, and print sales halved to a tiny £700,000 last year. But does the success of Fifty Shades mean erotica’s time has finally come?
Certainly British society has been “pornified”—by strip clubs, the web, lads’ mags, you name it—on a level that would have been inconceivable a generation ago. Perhaps publishing has lagged behind the curve while a new mainstream market, more comfortable with explicit content, has grown up. That possibility is going to be put to the test as, in publishing terms, a bandwagon is now rolling. Everyone is scrambling to find the next Fifty Shades, or reinvent a dusty classic.
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Why so coy? Loosely based? It is 89% the same as the original Twilight fan fiction, Master of the Universe, which had the 'serial numbers filed off' by the author before being monetized by Australian publisher TWCS – a company set up by another Twilight fan fiction writer. The only reason this isn't a civil case is because Stephenie Meyer hasn't acted.
Selina Walker is a brilliant editor and publisher - easily one of the most talented and charismatic people in British publishing by a country mile. She gambled with this book and it has paid off for her in spades.
But let's not kid ourselves about what's gone on here. Master of the Universe had a massive online fan base, numbering in the tens of thousands, when it was, to use another piece of fan fiction parlance, 'pulled to publish.' Why so many rabid fans? Because these readers were a large sub-set of Stephenie Meyer's fan base, who craved what was implicit in the Twilight books being made explicit. EL James did this by taking the characters of Edward and Bella and setting them in an Alternative Universe (AU fan fiction). The success of MOTU and the rampant leveraging of Meyer's fan base by fan fiction writers explains much of the viral success. The 'filed' version of this book was already generating significant sales and revenue in the US before RH took it to the next level.
The publication of this book raises profound ethical questions for publishing, both in terms of the respect for another author's intellectual property, and also because E L James used a YA series marketed explicitly towards tween and teenage girls, set the characters in a different story universe and added BDSM porn. 50SOG now sits on supermarket shelves and next to the Hunger Games on Amazon. The content of this series, and the fact that girls thirteen and possibly younger are reading it – in large part because of the Twilight connection – raises important questions that you don't have to be Mary Whitehouse to be concerned about.
Of course with a brilliant PR campaign all of these questions have been obscured by talk of 'mommy porn', but the issues raised for all of us in publishing (authors, publishers and retailers) are serious and substantive.
The internet and digital publishing are changing this industry. There is a certain naivete among some people in publishing used to the old model. The journey of this book to publication by Random House, outlined in the short Kindle ebook A Million Shades of Green: The Real Story Behind Fifty Shades of Grey is significant, but be assured that the issues go much deeper than the resurgence of erotica as a popular genre.
Worst thing about this book is that it has encouraged a legion of people to release mediocre books onto the kindle, and as a result, they aren't buying my mediocre book on kindle!
Why so coy? Loosely based? It is 89% the same as the original Twilight fan fiction, Master of the Universe, which had the 'serial numbers filed off' by the author before being monetized by Australian publisher TWCS – a company set up by another Twilight fan fiction writer. The only reason this isn't a civil case is because Stephenie Meyer hasn't acted.
Selina Walker is a brilliant editor and publisher - easily one of the most talented and charismatic people in British publishing by a country mile. She gambled with this book and it has paid off for her in spades.
But let's not kid ourselves about what's gone on here. Master of the Universe had a massive online fan base, numbering in the tens of thousands, when it was, to use another piece of fan fiction parlance, 'pulled to publish.' Why so many rabid fans? Because these readers were a large sub-set of Stephenie Meyer's fan base, who craved what was implicit in the Twilight books being made explicit. EL James did this by taking the characters of Edward and Bella and setting them in an Alternative Universe (AU fan fiction). The success of MOTU and the rampant leveraging of Meyer's fan base by fan fiction writers explains much of the viral success. The 'filed' version of this book was already generating significant sales and revenue in the US before RH took it to the next level.
The publication of this book raises profound ethical questions for publishing, both in terms of the respect for another author's intellectual property, and also because E L James used a YA series marketed explicitly towards tween and teenage girls, set the characters in a different story universe and added BDSM porn. 50SOG now sits on supermarket shelves and next to the Hunger Games on Amazon. The content of this series, and the fact that girls thirteen and possibly younger are reading it – in large part because of the Twilight connection – raises important questions that you don't have to be Mary Whitehouse to be concerned about.
Of course with a brilliant PR campaign all of these questions have been obscured by talk of 'mommy porn', but the issues raised for all of us in publishing (authors, publishers and retailers) are serious and substantive.
The internet and digital publishing are changing this industry. There is a certain naivete among some people in publishing used to the old model. The journey of this book to publication by Random House, outlined in the short Kindle ebook A Million Shades of Green: The Real Story Behind Fifty Shades of Grey is significant, but be assured that the issues go much deeper than the resurgence of erotica as a popular genre.
Worst thing about this book is that it has encouraged a legion of people to release mediocre books onto the kindle, and as a result, they aren't buying my mediocre book on kindle!