50 Shades of Grey trilogy goes from fan fiction to Random House

HoneyBadger said:

This is fantastic:

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The comments, few that there are, have me laughing.

Thanks for that, Honeybadger.

Since I've not read Shades, and don't plan to, I've no idea how close it is to Twilight - which I thought was some of the worst writing, and thus educational, that I'd come across.

That said, I agree with posters who have a problem with fan fiction for profit - if that's what this was. Just changing character names doesn't make it okay. If it was only Twilight inspired, with different characters having nothing in common with Edward and Bellatrix, then fine.

I'm wondering if any writers would have a problem with a fan fic writer changing their original character who was not into BDSM as someone who participates. Or vice versa. For example, if I were to write a Harry Potter story where Ron Weasley is suddenly from L.A.- do you think JK Rowling would be right to possibly have a problem with Ron's sudden American accent? Or not because it's fan fic? I'm just curious.

Edward and Bellatrix!!! Now I'm imagining that sparkly-poo pseudo-vampire with the magnificent Bellatrix LeStrange (played by the even more magnificent Helena Bonham-Carter!) Thanks for the imagery!

I tried reading the free chapters online but they were just sooooo awkward (and I have to admit, this is not my genre at all so I'm a bit biased against it to begin with) but the good news is, from what I've heard, it's nothing like Twilight. The guy isn't a vampire or anything. And honestly, from the first three chapters I read, none of the characters seemed at all like their Twilight counterparts personality-wise.

bearilou said:

The comments, few that there are, have me laughing.

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I completely lost it when I got to the praying mantis line. *still chuckling a bit*

I have just shared some of the controversy around 50Shades with another online community I'm a part of. Some of the people there have read 50 Shades, and don't see why it's a big deal that it started as fanfic. Others had no idea it started as fanfic, and wonder how close to the original Twilight the story is.

I think it's sad when a writer who seemed to have a lot of fans is taking the lazy way out and publishes something that doesn't really belong to her instead of proving her fans that she can really do it - and make her own characters and environment from scratch.

Bellatrix would have Edward whimpering within five minutes. Oh, but Eddie, don't it hurt so good?

SafetyDance said:

1) Your work has been on a high-traffic fan fiction site for a reasonable amount of time, where it has gained enough readers for you to think it worth pulling to publish. In some cases, the numbers can be in their mid thousands.

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You're way off-scale here. I write fanfic (not for books, not for anything still under production - the newest show I write for was cancelled in 1978). My fandoms are considered tiny. I have numbers of readers in the mid thousands.

Popular Twilight fanfic has reviews in the tens of thousands. Assuming that they get reviews at about the same ratio to hits that most of the people I know do (which is 1:40), that's readers in the hundreds of thousands, pushing the millions. I don't know any big name Twilight fanfic writers, but I know a couple of decent-ish ones well enough to ask them how many hits they get. It's about a thousand a day.

Not sure if anyone's said this yet, but much of the "All Human" fanfic for Twilight is unidentifiable as being Twilight related except for the protagonists' names. File those off and you've got completely generic "drippy female finds Super Hot One True Love to hide behind" romance for the sake of five minutes search-and-replace.

lolchemist said:

Edward and Bellatrix!!! Now I'm imagining that sparkly-poo pseudo-vampire with the magnificent Bellatrix LeStrange (played by the even more magnificent Helena Bonham-Carter!) Thanks for the imagery!

I tried reading the free chapters online but they were just sooooo awkward (and I have to admit, this is not my genre at all so I'm a bit biased against it to begin with) but the good news is, from what I've heard, it's nothing like Twilight. The guy isn't a vampire or anything. And honestly, from the first three chapters I read, none of the characters seemed at all like their Twilight counterparts personality-wise.

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Been hearing about 50 Shades of Grey for a couple of months now. Yeah, not my typical genre or category either. But I've read a BDSM erotica (is it?) before so I feel like if I've read one, I've read them all -- in the general sense when it comes to elements and all. Maybe even story. Of course I could be very wrong.

I'm not inclined to read 50 Shades also because of the hype. But I read the first couple of chapters online and luckily got through most of it. Okay, I skipped some stuff cuz it dragged for me, but still. I got a little feel of Bella from Anastasia, from what I read and I can see some Edward-esque qualities about Christian, like the instant attraction of everyone.

gothicangel said:

I picked up a copy while in Asda [Walmart] and read the first paragraph. All I thought was "seriously? Is this what the fuss is about?" The writing was that awful.

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I wish I'd done what you had...

I read it and thoroughly disliked it. I've read erotica before so figured I could handle it but there were parts that were past my 'ick' threshold. I don't really have an issue with the fact it was fanfiction though, I just didn't like it in general.

lolchemist said:

Edward and Bellatrix!!!... Thanks for the imagery!

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Several close friends couldn't believe I hadn't read it, so I read Twilight, and Bella quickly was Bellatrix in my head. Well, the shoe fit in my view.

I saw two more articles on Shades today. The viewpoints on authoring works from fanfic makes for interesting discourse, but I'll pass on reading it as it doesn't sound like my thing. But she is getting a lot of press... not sure if that's good or not. Yes, it turns into money upfront but will it lead into a career from here on out? Not sure.

Amazon's copy-cat ebooks:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/16/amazon-knock-off-bestsellers/?iid=HP_Highlight&hpt=us_c2

Oh, gosh.

"As you're writing this, are you thinking, 'Oh, man, this is good. People are going to love this'?" NBC's Michelle Kosinski asked EL James, author of Fifty Shades Of Grey, this morning on Today. "No," James replied. Later, she described the book as "kind of raw," and conceded, "I'm not a great writer."

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gothicangel said:

Amazon's copy-cat ebooks:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/16/amazon-knock-off-bestsellers/?iid=HP_Highlight&hpt=us_c2

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Sadly, not limited to Amazon.

I have to wonder how Dale Brown fares selling books when his books are shelved right next to Dan's. At least Dale is a prolific writer with a pretty good selection of books out there under his name.

Convenient that their names are so similar. Accidental? I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Not in this day and age of pen names. Savvy marketing move? Oh yeah.

The only catch to that is Dale's been writing since the late 1980s. Dan's books came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Still...makes me wonder how much of Dale's book sales might be attributed to someone thinking they were picking up a Dan Brown book.

HoneyBadger said:

Oh, gosh.

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Dare I say, I actually like her? She seem's pretty down to earth and not under any illusions.
I'm still not going to read the books though, it's just not my thing.

My patron saint Geiyas Baltar will not let me rest until I remark that shit going into a shit factory remains shit.

HoneyBadger said:

Oh, gosh.

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So this is what I've been doing wrong in all my query letters-

"Dear Agent,
I admit it, I am not a very good writer..."

Here I was wasting my time trying to hone my craft - show don't tell, don't rehash, make the dialogue realistic, plot-plot-plot, use proper grammar, blah blah blah. What a moron I am.

eh, what's a few million dollars anyway? At least I have my prid-, I mean at least I can pay the bills.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/amyodell/50-shades-of-grey-author-says-talking-about-the

redwriter99 said:

So this is what I've been doing wrong in all my query letters-

"Dear Agent,
I admit it, I am not a very good writer..."

Here I was wasting my time trying to hone my craft - show don't tell, don't rehash, make the dialogue realistic, plot-plot-plot, use proper grammar, blah blah blah. What a moron I am.

eh, what's a few million dollars anyway? At least I have my prid-, I mean at least I can pay the bills.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/amyodell/50-shades-of-grey-author-says-talking-about-the

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Yeah, you don't really need to do anything well except write stuff that people really enjoy reading. Mind you that's always been true.

Torgo said:

Yeah, you don't really need to do anything well except write stuff that people really enjoy reading. Mind you that's always been true.

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I know.
I was thinking about writing a SS about sparkly vampire/human love and posting it as fanfic under 50SoG. You know, bring everything full circle. I can always change it later to Credward and Alla.

Paradise Lost is basically a rewrite of certain parts of the Bible. Culture borrows from itself all the time, it always has. Our current concept of copyright is a very modern invention. I'm not one of those that thinks of a piece of work as sacrosanct. What does bother me is the trend in popularity of stories centred around the sexualized control, domination, and violence against women.

Please do this. Please.

You can invent an "all vampire" genre specially for it.

Edit: I was trying to reply to redwriter, but my internet went kersplooey.

Honestly, my biggest concern coming out of this whole mess is that fanfic writers, even more so than before, are going to be seen as obnoxious parasites that are trying to monetarily profit from the works of others.

I've never met a fanfic writer that ever wanted to publish their fanfics, and certainly the thought of myself even considering it makes me cringe. There's one thing about being inspired by a fandom loosely, but it's quite another to put up a fanfic and then later openly go and publish it for profit with minimal changes. I think for 99% of fandom in general it's just part of the code of the culture that you just don't do that regardless of whether or not it's possible to get away with it. There's a murky area there, and most of the people involved in fandom don't want to cross it.

On top of that, this is probably going to make a ton of authors go and put bans for fan works. This is terribly disappointing as a few bad apples are making the whole bunch look bad. I write fanfiction solely because I want more from the story/world that I enjoyed so much.

rynthewin said:

On top of that, this is probably going to make a ton of authors go and put bans for fan works. This is terribly disappointing as a few bad apples are making the whole bunch look bad.

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But why? It's not taking business away from the Twilight books, in fact if anything any fans of Grey that haven't read Twilight are more likely to do so. Nobody's going to not read Twilight just because they read Grey.

So what if she made money? People wanted her book. She didn't take any of Meyer's profits.

Discord said:

But why? It's not taking business away from the Twilight books, in fact if anything any fans of Grey that haven't read Twilight are more likely to do so. Nobody's going to not read Twilight just because they read Grey.

So what if she made money? People wanted her book. She didn't take any of Meyer's profits.

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I understand what rynthewin was saying. It's setting a bad precedent.

The thing is, with 50Shades, the author wrote an AU. So it wasn't like she wrote in the Twilight universe. She lifted the Twilight characters (their names) out, gave them different jobs/careers, changed up a few things like making Edward mortal and wrote a story.

But she still originally put it out there as fanfiction.

Considering there are fanfic writers occasionally making the news by taking their closer-to-canon fanfics and trying to publish, only to have the copyright holders come down like a two-ton weight makes fanfic writers nervous. It causes authors of the original source to declare no more writing fanfic and they send their lawyers after fans with their notices and just makes everyone in the fandom cranky.

The argument that seems to hold the most is that it's so far removed from the original canon it was based off of that there is no copyright violation. I guess that's true, I've not read it, I'm not going to.

But it's the precedent that's set. It was fanfiction to start off with, AU or canon-compliant doesn't matter. And then the author took her fanfiction, scrubbed the names off and republished as original. Fine. AUs can usually get away with that.

Many fans of fanfiction don't understand the distinction and we get the Star Wars and the Russet Moons debacles where the authors don't understand that they can't write in those universes without licensing permission and use those characters, even if they play a minor role in their story.

That's where it makes many fans in a fandom headdesk. Because some fanfic authors are saying the same thing. "I'll just scrub names and some canon facts and I'll republish MY fanfiction!" Which may be an easy thing to do and not get discovered. It may not.

I just recently bought an m/m book from an epress and there was something off about it that I couldn't put my finger on. I could tell you it read like an AU fanfic but, of course, the names and places weren't anything I was familiar with so I just shrugged and went on.

I got to one passage, a character description actually, and knew right away what fandom it came from. Left a very bad taste in my mouth. Am I going to try to out the author? No. Am I going to try to verify if I was right? No. But I've gotten independent verification that I wasn't the only one who saw the similarities so my decision is to avoid that author. I'm not interested in reading her repurposed fanfiction. If others want to, fine more power to them. I'd rather read something that was original from beginning to end that didn't depend on even just name connections to fandom to get their start.

There is evidence that she did use the Twilight fans for her book: http://gentleblaze.livejournal.com/. E.g. Things she's said: “it’s like the old groucho marx joke which I cant remember about not wanting to belong to a club that you’re a member of…” “I have to say I do not feel as passionately as you do about the fandom” [negativity exists everywhere, even on Amazon] “true… but I’m sure it’s easier to take with a big fat paycheck LOL”.

There's more likeness to Twilight I mean the characters are lifted straight out from the book. Carrick/Carlisle and so forth, she only changed their names, she didn't change their traits, their characters.

From http://jamigold.com/2012/03/when-does-fan-fiction-cross-an-ethical-line/

- both Edward and Christian were adopted.
- both Edward and Christian have a deep, dark, dangerous secret that no one is privy to, except for the heroine and by extension us
- both Edward and Christian are rich and more sophisticated than the heroine
- Although their personalities do have differences, both Christian and Edward have stalker tendencies and are domineering
- Both Edward and Christian have reddish/bronze tinted hair
- Both Edward and Christian give the heroine a car
- Both Edward and Christian are piano-players
- Both Edward and Christian have a loving supportive adoptive family comprised of Carrick/Carlisle (the father), Grace/Esme (the mother), Elliot/Emmet (the brother), Mia/Alice (the sister).
-Jasper and Rosalie/ Ethan and Kate in FSoG. Rosalie and Kate are both blonde, beautiful and a high contrast to Bella/Ana. Kate and Elliot end up together as a couple which is reminiscent of them also being a couple in Twilight (Rose and Emmet).
- Jasper and Alice are a couple in Twilight, Ethan from FSoG ends up setting his sights on the proto-Alice character in FSoG, Mia. BOOM! there you go, your whole Twilight Cullen cast/ensemble, reloaded.
- Both Twilight and FSoG have the couple following the arc of initial attraction, hero attempting to separate himself from heroine by stating he’s not right for her, heroine pursuing relationship, heroine finding out dark secret, heroine still pursuing relationship, couple briefly parts/breaks up and then reunites, couple marries, goes off to exotic/romantic honeymoon, heroine gets preggers prematurely, hero reacts extremely negatively, heroine still has kid. Hero eventually comes around about kid.
- Both stories are set in Washington state.
- Jacob/José (Twilight/FSoG) both dislike the hero because they want to be with the heroine. The heroine is not interested in Jacob/José but Jacob/José continues to pursue her until he gives up and realizes that the heroine chose the “bad guy” over them.
- Anastasia is essentially, Bella (more so than Christian being Edward, where there are more differences). She has pretty much all of Bella’s mannerisms. She talks like Bella, she acts like Bella, she says the same things Bella would. She is highly clumsy and uncoordinated, she is quiet, reserved, not popular, odd one out, like Bella. She bites her bottom lip like Bella. She feels a bit like a fish out of water in the presence of the Greys just like Bella feels in the presence of the Cullens. At most she is a proto-Bella but essentially the same character at the core.
- Both Bella and Ana have a bit of an eccentric mother that lives somewhere else and has remarried several times (at least twice from what I remember).
- Both Bella and Ana have a father that they love, that lives by himself (is a bit of a loner), that has a great relationship with them, even if slightly distanced. The main difference is that Ray (FSoG) is a stepfather to Ana, while Charlie (Twilight) is blood father to Bella.
- Both Charlie and Ray have a love of fishing.
- Both stories feature a stalker (Victoria/Leila) who stalks Bella/Ana and wants to hurt/kill her.
- Jasper and Rose pretend to be twins in Twilight. Ethan and Kate (their parallels) are twins in FSoG.

and

MOTU’s/FSoG’s Edward/Christian:
Very handsome and wealthy, mesmerises people
Has bronze unruly hair
Is harbouring a secret (he’s a Domme)
Plays the piano proficiently, with eclectic tastes
Was adopted by his parents
Self-loathing is a massive character trait
Rebelled against his parents in his teenage years
Claims he is tired of trying to stay away from Ana/Bella, to which she responds “Then don’t”
Worries about touching Bella
Saves her from an accident
Is aghast at the idea of having a unexpected baby, which Ana/Bella refers to as “Blip”

Twilight’s Edward:
Very handsome and wealthy, mesmerises people
Has copper coloured unruly hair
Is harbouring a secret (he’s a Vampire)
Plays the piano proficiently, with eclectic tastes
Was adopted by Carlisle as a companion
Self-loathing is a massive character trait
Rebelled against his family in his early vampire years
Claims he is tired of staying away from Bella, to which she responds “Then don’t”
Worries about Bella/Ana touching him
Saves her from being attacked
Is aghast at the idea of having a unexpected baby, which Bella refers to as “Nudger”

Let’s look at Bella now, shall we?

MOTU’s/FSoG’s Ana/Bella:
Shy and inexperienced, with low self esteem
Brunette, blushes and bites her lip constantly
She’s clumsy
When Edward/Christian touches her “as our fingers touch, I feel an odd exhilarating shiver run through me. I withdraw my hand hastily, embarrassed. Must be static”.
Is enamoured by the enigmatic Christian/Edward
Has a love for the Classics
Has a cop for a father
Has an absent, wandering mother
Her Hispanic best friend wants more from her
Is fiercely protective of her little Blip

Twilight’s Bella:
Shy and inexperienced, with low self esteem
Brunette, blushes and bites her lip constantly
She’s clumsy
When Edward touches her, it “stung my hand as if an electric current had passed through us”.
Is enamoured by the enigmatic Edward
Has a love for the Classics
Has a cop for a father
Has an absent, wandering mother
Her Native American best friend wants more from her
Is fiercely protective of her little Nudger

http://dearauthor.com/features/indu...hades-by-e-l-james-comparison/#comment-357215