David Sexton - London Evening Standard - 16 April 2012
Kindles and other digital readers allow you to carry smut that you’d be embarrassed to be seen with without anybody knowing what you’re up to. In particular, it allows women to do this as never before. Thus, by dematerialising books, digital readers have freed our choice of reading from social pressure.
The ever-expanding market for e-books — one in eight of adult fiction books is now purchased digitally — has begun to change what it is that people actually read in ways the publishers hadn’t anticipated and are now falling over themselves to catch up with. They’ve revealed there’s a big appetite out there for books that are simpler and coarser, in several genres but above all in smut, or, if you prefer, erotica. Amazon now cheerfully trades in titles such as Lucy Gives It Up For the Boss.
Writing that was previously mostly shared on fan-fiction sites or otherwise posted online can now easily be converted into an e-book — and if that then proves a success, the publishers of p-books, as they are now non-prejudicially known, are increasingly eager to follow suit, grabbing some of the action after the event.
That is what has happened to the market-leader of “mommy porn”, as it has been dismally labelled, E L James. The mother of two teenage boys and a former TV producer — she worked on Noel’s House Party — James began writing her erotic trilogy as fan fiction posted online, reimagining the Twilight books with sex scenes.
A revised version of this was published by an Australian “book-loving community” called The Writers’ Coffee Shop. It then became a digital bestseller, topping the New York Times e-book list before being snapped up by Random House.
It is claimed 250,000 copies have already been sold in different formats. The first volume, Fifty Shades of Grey, was published here last week by the Random House pulp imprint Arrow and on Friday it was sitting pretty in Amazon’s print bestsellers at four, behind only the three volumes of The Hunger Games. Thus, circuitously, the new forms of publishing have changed the ways of the old. Yanked them downmarket, in fact.
To preserve Tube readers’ blushes, Fifty Shades of Grey has been chastely packaged, the cover featuring only a knotted grey tie — a dull image but erotically charged to readers of the story.
For Fifty Shades of Grey is not about vanilla sex. It is about a 21-year-old college student, Anastasia Steele, a virgin astonishingly, being inducted into a full-out BDSM — bondage domination sado-masochism — relationship by an irresistibly good-looking, vastly wealthy, overpoweringly sexy tycoon in his later twenties called Christian Grey.
Full story at The Evening Standard
The ever-expanding market for e-books — one in eight of adult fiction books is now purchased digitally — has begun to change what it is that people actually read in ways the publishers hadn’t anticipated and are now falling over themselves to catch up with. They’ve revealed there’s a big appetite out there for books that are simpler and coarser, in several genres but above all in smut, or, if you prefer, erotica. Amazon now cheerfully trades in titles such as Lucy Gives It Up For the Boss.
Writing that was previously mostly shared on fan-fiction sites or otherwise posted online can now easily be converted into an e-book — and if that then proves a success, the publishers of p-books, as they are now non-prejudicially known, are increasingly eager to follow suit, grabbing some of the action after the event.That is what has happened to the market-leader of “mommy porn”, as it has been dismally labelled, E L James. The mother of two teenage boys and a former TV producer — she worked on Noel’s House Party — James began writing her erotic trilogy as fan fiction posted online, reimagining the Twilight books with sex scenes.
A revised version of this was published by an Australian “book-loving community” called The Writers’ Coffee Shop. It then became a digital bestseller, topping the New York Times e-book list before being snapped up by Random House.
It is claimed 250,000 copies have already been sold in different formats. The first volume, Fifty Shades of Grey, was published here last week by the Random House pulp imprint Arrow and on Friday it was sitting pretty in Amazon’s print bestsellers at four, behind only the three volumes of The Hunger Games. Thus, circuitously, the new forms of publishing have changed the ways of the old. Yanked them downmarket, in fact.
To preserve Tube readers’ blushes, Fifty Shades of Grey has been chastely packaged, the cover featuring only a knotted grey tie — a dull image but erotically charged to readers of the story.
For Fifty Shades of Grey is not about vanilla sex. It is about a 21-year-old college student, Anastasia Steele, a virgin astonishingly, being inducted into a full-out BDSM — bondage domination sado-masochism — relationship by an irresistibly good-looking, vastly wealthy, overpoweringly sexy tycoon in his later twenties called Christian Grey.
Full story at The Evening Standard
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