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

According to PublishersWeekly, there are signs the sales of FSoG are tanking slightly. Whatever. As I've said, I tried to read it and stopped a few chapters in. The writing was just too bad. Bad enough that I'm rethinking submitting *anything* to any imprint of Random House, if this indicates their current editing standards.

However, being the happy corporate hack that I am, I just pitched a series of surrealist BDSM-inspired paintings to a gallery. I've had the idea for this series for almost 7 years, but FSoG has made such a noise that the gallery owner was interested in cashing in on the frenzy. And I'm hoping that all the folks reading James' work go on to read other things. Maybe even my books, someday.

I don't think James can repeat this stunt. In a decade she'll be another piece of distant history.

Dreamer, I understand your frsutration but don't feel it myself. If anything, I feel hope. James' success means that people are reading at least. I am confident in what I'm writing right now, even though it's practically the diametrical opposite to FSOG. And you know what? I wouldn't swap it for the FSOG manuscript for the world.

Amadan said:

Yeah, kind of. I understand feeling a sense of injustice at it all, but... her success doesn't actually harm anyone else. No one's book is not going to be published because of 50SoG. No one is going to not read your book because they read 50SoG instead.

There are a lot of crappy writers out there, some of them making tons of money. I think seeing this as some sort of death knell for Art and Literature is... well, yeah, overly dramatic.

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Exactly.

lorna_w said:

But I feel very bad for authors of these terrific gems of novels I keep finding that have maybe 102 ratings on Goodreads and probably didn't earn out their advances so that I'm unlikely to see a second (and better) novel from an author who clearly studied their craft and has something insightful to say. I feel bad that the publishers didn't do a fraction as much to push those books as has been done on this series. I feel bad that the Pulitzer committee failed to nominate terrific books of the last year--it's as if they didn't bother looking and then announced all American writing was crap in 2011. I feel bad that so many readers have such poor taste and wonder, as a former educator, how we failed in teaching people what really crappy writing looks like--if it's impossible to teach what great writing is, as some of that is subjective/a matter of taste/genre preference, surely it's possible to teach people what awful writing is.

I don't feel like ranting. I feel sad about the phenomenon, as if I've run across an image of a dead kitten. I know kittens die, but I don't want to stare at pix. Being on this board, I had my attention drawn to this particular dead kitten a lot.

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I sometimes feel like this, and then my faith in humanity returns and I think that one day, all those readers of junk are going to be hungry for real food. The main thing is, they're eating!

juniper said:

She's probably in her 30s, seemed smart, and she's enjoying the book quite a bit. She picked it up because she said patients kept coming in with it. So she became curious about it.

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So, what? Now she doesn't seem smart? I'm a big fan of reading, but not being a great reader doesn't equal not being smart. Reading FSOG doesn't equal not being smart.

No, but not being much of a reader could be a baseline for that person's depth of knowledge. I know many 20 and 30-something professionals who banked all their college on business programs. They never read widely in school and never liked reading for pleasure. They're certainly smart, but in very specific ways. One of these MBA miracles thought that wolverines were 'small wolves'.

Hey, if FSoG will somehow lead them to more reading, go for it.

Terie said:

So, what? Now she doesn't seem smart? I'm a big fan of reading, but not being a great reader doesn't equal not being smart. Reading FSOG doesn't equal not being smart.

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Oh don't pick a fight. This isn't a value judgment on what she's reading.

I meant I don't know her personally, don't know what she knows/doesn't know, don't know her GPA. I've met her briefly twice at the clinic, and it's for health care, not discussing anything else.

She speaks well, is friendly, etc. If we went for coffee I'd probably have a good, interesting conversation with her.

Filigree said:

According to PublishersWeekly, there are signs the sales of FSoG are tanking slightly. Whatever. As I've said, I tried to read it and stopped a few chapters in. The writing was just too bad.

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It's understandable the sales would start going down again. Hasn't been in the top spot of the Bestsellers list for a while now? Sooner or later, it was going to have to come down. For all we know, it could just drop a few spots.

Bad enough that I'm rethinking submitting *anything* to any imprint of Random House, if this indicates their current editing standards.

However, being the happy corporate hack that I am, I just pitched a series of surrealist BDSM-inspired paintings to a gallery. I've had the idea for this series for almost 7 years, but FSoG has made such a noise that the gallery owner was interested in cashing in on the frenzy. And I'm hoping that all the folks reading James' work go on to read other things. Maybe even my books, someday.

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Eh. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I would reconsider submitting anything to them. Granted, based upon who/what I read, they weren't in the "top slot" in the first place but meh.

I hope your paintings sell or works out though.

I don't think James can repeat this stunt. In a decade she'll be another piece of distant history.

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Truthfully, excluding the distant history part, I've heard the same thing about J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer. That's not to say what you say isn't true. It very well could be. Just saying, that same statement has been said about many authors. Now how many of them disproved it? That's yet to be determined.

----
Honestly, I'm quite surprised that she sold more than Harry Potter. That was truly shocking to me. And while I am a HP fan, I've seen the movies but I'm working on reading the books, I'm not stark raving mad about Fifty Shades outselling it either.

Despite this happening with this book series, I still want to put out the best book(s) I can. It does take a little pressure off I suppose because it shows it really is about the characters or the story, not the prose--which is something I worry about a lot.

ETA: I guess the one thing that makes me "upset" about this is that a lot of people make it seem like erotic fiction didn't exist or was some kind of rarity before she wrote/published this series. It's as though erotica/erotic romance wasn't even a genre until this came out. That is highly untrue. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad for the boost this gave authors in that genre and out of it. Trust me, I am. But it gets kind of frustrating sometimes I guess. That's my one "pet peeve".


And I hope none of this came off as mean or anything like that. I wasn't trying to be.

juniper said:

Oh don't pick a fight.

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I'm not picking a fight. I am, however, suggesting that we ought to be careful in our choice of words we write about people. Because whether you meant it or not, your saying she 'seemed' smart (past tense) does come off as a value judgment. We're writers; how we use words matters.

Ok.

Like what happened with Twilight, there are people picking up books who haven't read in years. They are rediscovering a love of reading. That can only be a good thing if they keep it up with other books.

50 shades wasn't lucky or an overnight sucess. I remember people raving about it years ago. Heck I read it years ago. El Jamworked hard to build her ff audience, like any ff writer does. There are so many fics in the twilight genre, it's not as simple as reading and bam, massive following.

After a while the readers started promoting it in the community, as happens. The fandom is all about the drama. P2p,,rows, and a few sites set up to publically malign, out, bully certain writers were set up. This had the effect of stirring up cartain fans who then made it their business to push this littlestory down the hill its been gathering momentum on ever since.

No one expects this kind of sucess. In a way, after how a lot of the fandom treated her and treat her so despicably, I' delighted this has. Of course I'm jealous too. I've thought, why not my books getting movie deals and outselling Harry. I worked bloody hard on them. . But, that breaks in publishing.

Maybe the key to great sales, is putting it all online for free, getting a following (of anyone) taking it away from them, and then packaging it up all neatly in a bow to be sold. Hrmm...

I don't know. I still feel like there was a little bit of luck put into place there. Only because there have been some Twilight fan fictions that were taken down and redone as original fiction. However, they weren't/aren't as successful the Fifty Shades trilogy. Now, maybe those fan fictions didn't have as large as a following as Master of the Universe but still.

Channy said:

Maybe the key to great sales, is putting it all online for free, getting a following (of anyone) taking it away from them, and then packaging it up all neatly in a bow to be sold. Hrmm...

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I believe you can count on one hand -- possibly one finger -- the number of writers who have achieved mega-seller success this way. Whereas tens of thousands of writers who have posted free material and even gained a following haven't.

This is no different from people thinking all you have to do is write a kids' book and you'll be as rich as JK Rowling. And yes, thousands and thousands of people thought this.

Using a mega-outlier as a model for success is always a bad plan.

I was reading a women's mag at work yesterday (what? Was bored, we stock the mags...) and there was a letter in the problem page from a lady who has become obsessed with FSoG where it's taking over her every waking thought.

I have no idea what the quality of the writing is like, but that, that right there, is a book that did its job of getting in someone's head. Or said lady has more problems than an agony aunt can deal with.

FSoG is "taboo". There was more explicit, and better, erotica before and will be after, I suspect, but this one got out there, in the pubic, er, public eye. Like Caligula, 9 and a half weeks, Flowers in the Attic, etc., it was something sort of smutty that "decent" folk could participate in and they all thought they were badasses for it.

I've never read any of it, and this isn't any sort of judgement of the book or the readers, just saying this is a pretty common theme with things that are considered taboo--every once in awhile, one hits mainstream...usually not the steamiest or best one, just one that somehow manages to ride a wave.


On a side note, my pastor's wife really likes it. She took my wife out drinking this week and told her all about it, including the "walk with beads in ya" scene. She's going to loan it to my wife. I'll ask her later, out of curiosity....

Terie said:

I believe you can count on one hand -- possibly one finger -- the number of writers who have achieved mega-seller success this way. Whereas tens of thousands of writers who have posted free material and even gained a following haven't.

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That was basically what I was trying to say more or less.

IdiotsRUs said:

I was reading a women's mag at work yesterday (what? Was bored, we stock the mags...) and there was a letter in the problem page from a lady who has become obsessed with FSoG where it's taking over her every waking thought.

I have no idea what the quality of the writing is like, but that, that right there, is a book that did its job of getting in someone's head. Or said lady has more problems than an agony aunt can deal with.

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Wow. I really don't know what to say to that.

lorna_w said:

I don't feel like ranting. I feel sad about the phenomenon, as if I've run across an image of a dead kitten. I know kittens die, but I don't want to stare at pix. Being on this board, I had my attention drawn to this particular dead kitten a lot.

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Yeah. But getting cynical helps a lot with getting over stillborn books. Dead kittens? No. Someone who doesn't get sad about dead kittens has gone beyond cynicism into inhumanity.

Mrowr.

Filigree said:

One of these MBA miracles thought that wolverines were 'small wolves'.

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Duh. All us intellectuals know they're Hugh Jackmans.

Phaeal said:

Yeah. But getting cynical helps a lot with getting over stillborn books. Dead kittens? No. Someone who doesn't get sad about dead kittens has gone beyond cynicism into inhumanity.

Mrowr.

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or has a brand-new cookbook just begging to be cracked open.

Filigree said:

According to PublishersWeekly, there are signs the sales of FSoG are tanking slightly. Whatever. As I've said, I tried to read it and stopped a few chapters in. The writing was just too bad. Bad enough that I'm rethinking submitting *anything* to any imprint of Random House, if this indicates their current editing standards.

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Um, what?

What does FSOG have to do with their editing standards, considering all they did was write a cheque and commence to print books and money, and a lot of both?

Having nothing better to do, I counted the words in one full page of these posts (though I didn't subtract quoted material from other posts; I did edit out sigs). About 3000 words per page. Times 26 pages. together, we've written the equivalent of another 50shades novel. Though really, people, we must murmur and holy-crap a little more: get on that, would you?

fireluxlou said:

Lots of authors publish for money, some are even, yes that's right ARE even commissioned by publishers to write books, some infact *gasp* make a living of their work. I don't know why you're mad at her for making bank off something she's written and making it available to people who wanted to buy it.

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For some, I think it's the fact that it was originally fanfiction. I was involved in Harry Potter fandom several years ago, and there was a huge uproar when Cassandra Claire received money from fans of her fanfiction to reimburse a personal laptop she'd had stolen. Back then there was definite ill feeling towards anyone who derived profit from fanfiction, however indirectly, regardless of their intentions (Claire knew nothing of the laptop drive until she got the cheque.)

Fanfiction communities have an underlying moral code, and Claire (and EL James) have been perceived by some to have broken that code by capitalising on selling to a large fanbase forged through fanfiction. Having said that, I suspect that much of the ill feeling is strongly motivated by jealousy.

lorna_w said:

Having nothing better to do, I counted the words in one full page of these posts (though I didn't subtract quoted material from other posts; I did edit out sigs). About 3000 words per page. Times 26 pages. together, we've written the equivalent of another 50shades novel. Though really, people, we must murmur and holy-crap a little more: get on that, would you?

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I'm willing to volunteer to research some sex scenes.




(ideally, with a partner)

lorna_w said:

Having nothing better to do, I counted the words in one full page of these posts (though I didn't subtract quoted material from other posts; I did edit out sigs). About 3000 words per page. Times 26 pages. together, we've written the equivalent of another 50shades novel. Though really, people, we must murmur and holy-crap a little more: get on that, would you?

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Oh my! My inner goddess is talking to me.


(I couldn't resist. )

quicklime said:

I'm willing to volunteer to research some sex scenes.




(ideally, with a partner)

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AHEM. Quicklime, what have you been told about including beverage warnings?????

"okay, people who have at some point wanted to spank quicklime, get in line," she murmured, clambering out the the thread with a roll of her eyes.