It’s not news that “word of mouth” has become a business model in the book industry. But E.L. James, a forty-nine-year-old former television executive from West London whose real name is Erika Leonard, has exceeded the sales feats of previous reader-discovered authors by such a staggering magnitude that she is in a category of her own. Last year’s breakout success, Amanda Hocking, sold merely a million copies of her self-published young-adult novels over the course of eleven months before signing a four-book deal with St. Martin’s Press.
The crucial difference may have less to do with talent, content, or luck than with a peculiarity of Leonard’s early readership: her work originated as fan fiction, a genre that operates outside the bounds of literary commerce, in online networks of enthusiasts of popular books and movies, brought together by a desire to write and read stories inspired by those works. Leonard’s excursion in the genre provided her with a captive audience of thousands of positively disposed readers, creating a market for her books before they ever carried price tags. But fan fiction is inherently collaborative and by convention resolutely anti-commercial, attributes which make its role in the evolution of her work both highly unusual and ethically fraught.
Beginning in 2009, Leonard posted, under a different title, a version of the Fifty Shades trilogy on a well-trafficked fan-fiction forum devoted to the Twilight series, the vampire-themed romance blockbusters by Stephenie Meyer. Leonard’s “TwiFic” shed Meyer’s supernatural story line and transposed the largely chaste love story of her protagonists, Edward and Bella, into a sexually explicit register. Like many fan-fiction writers, Leonard uploaded her work in serial installments, a method that enables readers to weigh in as the story progresses and allows writers to incorporate feedback as they go. Writers also read one another’s fan fictions and can infer, from the number and tenor of reader responses, what kinds of stories are popular. Leonard’s story reportedly received more than 37,000 reviews, and was read by untold thousands more who did not post reviews.
Early in 2011, after amending the work and expunging all traces of its connection to Twilight, she contracted with a small Australian press to publish it as the Fifty Shades trilogy, in ebook and print-on-demand paperback formats. By March of this year, when Vintage acquired the rights to the trilogy for more than a million dollars, all three books were at or near the top of The New York Times’ combined print and ebook bestseller list.
The vast majority of Fifty Shades’s readers are presumed to be women, as are the vast majority of fan-fiction producers and consumers, and anecdotal evidence suggests that, at least initially, there was much overlap between these groups. At Goodreads.com, a book-recommendation site with more than nine million members, readers began reviewing Fifty Shades of Grey, the first book in the trilogy, in the spring of 2011, many noting that they had first encountered the story in its fan-fiction incarnation. “I loved this story as a fanfic and the characters have stolen my heart all over again!” wrote a reader named Ashley, who, along with more than 55,000 other Goodreads members, gave Fifty Shades of Grey the site’s highest rating, five stars.
Critics, by contrast, have found much to abhor about the work. Many have lamented Leonard’s “stilted,” “cliché-ridden” prose (a typical line: “my very small inner goddess sways in a gentle victorious samba”) and decried as retrograde the sexual mores of her (now renamed) protagonists: Anastasia (Ana) Steele, a willing but inexplicably chaste college senior at Washington State University, and Christian Grey, a buff but troubled Seattle mogul who seeks to enlist her as his sexual slave. Christian is partial to BDSM—an umbrella term encompassing the erotic practices of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism—and his penthouse includes a “playroom” kitted out with chains, shackles, whips, and other kinky toys. But before Ana can experience its exquisite tortures, she must sign a contract, devised by Christian’s lawyer, consenting to become his submissive (or “sub”), ceding control over her body, diet, hygiene, sleep, and wardrobe, and stipulating her tolerance for various sexual acts and accessories (manacles, hot wax, genital clamps, etc.).
Together, the Fifty Shades books run to more than fifteen hundred pages, many if not most of them sexually explicit. (One of Leonard’s few obvious talents as a writer is maintaining variety in the frequent couplings.) What Ana, who narrates the series, refers to as Christian’s “predilection” lends to the strenuous antics a transgressive frisson. Yet critics have noted that the erotic content breaks no new ground, citing equally explicit, better-written fare, in particular The Story of O, Anne Declos’s indubitably literary portrayal of female sexual slavery, published in 1954. In a cover story for Newsweek, Katie Roiphe concluded that what’s “most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena, what gives it its true edge of desperation, and end-of-the-world ambiance, is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level.”
by Emily Eakin, New York Review of Books | Read more:
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