It was born self-published. It grew quick into a hit. A major mama publisher paid $1million for it. And it keeps on owning the street. Promoters/marketers: What's going on around here?
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It seems to me that someone could write a successful book simply doing the forensics on how this book became a self-sustaining franchise. Though by the time everyone knows the strategy it will probably be less potent.
Jeff, you're right about the strategies becoming less potent. A while ago, Amazon bestseller book campaigns were all the rage, and the early ones worked very well. But now that everybody and his/her dog has figured out the Amazon bestseller strategy, the campaigns are bombing because celebrities are more reluctant to keep endorsing books and readers are tired of receiving constant emails cajoling them into buying a book in exchange for a bunch of useless online "gifts."
The same will no doubt happen with those who emulate 50 Shades. I can just hear the stampede of authors rushing to implement the formula:
1) Make sure the book on which you're basing your fan fiction is itself a bestselling book, so that you'll have a large audience of fans enthusiastic about the book you're improvising on.
2) Introduce an archetypal theme--the lascivious Greek gods and goddesses are fertile ground--in order to hook the subconscious desires of females
3) Add in some mildly kinky sex, enough to make it different from run of the mill soft porn.
4) Alert the media to the presence of kink in what is intended to be a mainstream book.
5) Start massive social media discussions.
6) Talk some producer into optioning the book for a movie.
7) Behold the bestseller.
This worked beautifully for E.L. James. More power to her for anticipating this spin on a formula. But it won't work much down the line with other books, especially as the number of copy-cat attempts increases.
ha ha, yea... still curious as to the forensics, though; probably follows some formula but with a different media through which it manifested as a phenomena...
I'm not seeing anything in these posts that tells me an answer to Jeff's question exactly.
Does the answer lie somewhere in her fan base? Facebook, for example, for middle and high school-level "friends" moves as rapidly as a rumor. My stepson, who's 16 now, has over 700 friends and he's not even the most popular kid in school, (he's not unpopular by any means either I just mean the popular kids have twice that amount). So if you multiply that number by friends of friends, a steamy soft porn teen novel could spread like mad.
The fact that the eBook sales are super high - I think I read over 250K? That is an indication of the buying consumer of this book, also.
I'm interested to know at what point did this content gain traditional media attention? Where did it spark and how did that fan the flames? What is the trail of that parallel to the social media attention?
Over on another forum that sometimes has discussions about books, there's a rather overwrought discussion going on about 50 Shades, with some readers saying that the books should be censored or branded as pornography. There are actually people who think children are going to read those books! My, my...the author has certainly hit a nerve if she now has people calling for censorship regarding 50 Shades. I cringed when I read that discussion. Whatever happened to freedom of expression? Sure, some books depict rather unpleasant things--for example, all the "action fiction" out there that involves violence and bloodshed. But it seems that descriptions of sex really get people into a tizzy. (I can just imagine Freud chuckling from his grave). Unless a book is actually hate literature, I think we still have to uphold freedom of expression. Personally I didn't see anything in 50 Shades in terms of sexual descriptions that have not been written before. That other forum's discussion made me think of all the furore over D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, which got charged with obscenity so many years ago. I thought we had moved beyond all that, but evidently not in some quarters.
I am just so glad that here on WAE, the discussion of 50 Shades has had a much saner tone. As writers, editors, publishers, and agents, we are far more likely to see a "red flag" when someone says "censorship." And thank heaven for that! Honestly, in the discussion on the other forum which I read, I thought I was at a convention of right-wing fundamentalists!
As usual, I agree with you 100%, Sharon. What few moderns realize is that, until 1959, it was illegal to transport or sell books in the United States by such authors as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Anais Nin, and many others who are now staples of the typical English dept syllabus in college and even in high schools. It took a major Supreme Court decision at the time to overturn these laws, perhaps in response to the national nightmare of McCarthyism recently concluded back then.
If you were traveling into the US, whether citizen or not, Federal customs inspectors searched your baggage for contraband at airports and seaports. Contraband included novels by those authors. These would be confiscated, and you could be fined or even arrested. Bookstore owners could be jailed or fined up to $5000 (a huge sum back then), in other words, put out of business for selling a copy of Ulysses or Lady Chatterley's Lover.
My favorite true story was told by a family friend, a Yale Classics professor who was a CIA official in Rome for many years. This man was no slouch, believe me, on so many levels. He told the story of how, after WW2, he had a special copy of James Joyce's Ulysses printed by an Italian printer (ironically, same venue taken by Joyce when UK printer/publishers were terrified of censors and refused to publish him). The Italian edition was a beautiful dark green with gilded title: Father of Telemachus. The brainless US enforcers of puritanical jihadism were too dumb to get the implication, and he succeeded in smuggling the book into the US.
It's a funny story, but speaks volumes (no pun intended) to the extent, and the recent nature, of censorship in our society. And how easily we could slip backwards into that sort of Kafkaesque fire and brimstone jihad. For whatever harm may be caused by a kid getting a hold of a salacious book, the other side of the coin seems far more frightening.
I remember as a teenager, in the 1960s, reading newspaper columns by Ann Landers, in which she proposed the radical new idea, frightening to many, that it's okay to speak about words like "breast" or "pregnant," which were considered unspeakable until then.
And it reminds me of one of the most stupid episodes in censorship history--in the 1990s. At one point, swayed by a noisy minority, AOL banned any use of certain words on any blogs, websites, or other fora that they controlled. Among other things, all websites and discussions containing the word "breast" disappeared from tens of millions of customers' AOL space overnight.
The problem, never thought of by the flatliners in gray hats and hugging turkeys, was that now all those women terrified and suffering with breast cancer no longer had a voice or a forum. That is how censorship destroys sanity, decency, and civilization. AOL was shamed into restoring "breast" and the other "dirty words." What a sick society for this to even happen in.
As an adult, supposedly living in a free society, I demand the freedom to read anything I want, without some (literally) moron coming to arrest me.
John, the examples you give about censorship are a stark reminder, as you say, that it was not all that long ago that censorship was very much present. We tend to think that freedom of expression and free speech are timeless concepts, but they are not. They are rights fought hard for. It is frightening to hear people talking about censorship for a book series as silly as 50 Shades.
Your story about AOL's banning of the word "breast" reminds me of a situation at the time of the last summer Olympics. Some up-tight right-wing American family values coalition programmed its computer to automatically replace the word "gay" with "homosexual". This family values coalition wanted people to realize that being gay was about SEX and to remind everyone that it's a sin to be homosexual. So the newsletter ended up featuring headlines such as "Homosexual competes in Olympics", "Homosexual qualifies in the 100 yard sprint." This was in reference to Olympic athlete Tyson Gay, who in this organization's newsletter was reported as Tyson Homosexual. There was a further report in the same newsletter about basketball in which pro basketball player Rudy Gay was reported as "Rudy Homosexual" with the line "The team was led to victory by Rudy Homosexual." This led to the mainstream press having a field day with this. The mainstream press unleashed a torrent of ridicule on the family values organization (which in my opinion deserved to be ridiculed). TV announcers and newspapers began quoting from songs, books, news articles, etc. For example, in Deck the Halls, the line "don we now our gay apparel" became "don we now our homosexual apparel" and the song "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story became "I feel pretty, oh so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and homosexual (to replace the word "gay". It was absolutely hilarious, and the stupid family values coalition had to apologize to both athletes and to the readership and to the media in general that they had made "an editing mistake." It was funny, yes, but also a not so funny reminder that moronic flatliners in gray hats, to borrow from your images, will go to great lengths to try to control what the public sees and reads.
Sharon, it has been my fate not to be a dark god, as I now realize--which explains a lot of things I may have pondered during long, dark nights of the soul. I was a wild and crazy guy in my youth, but it got old. I've spent the rest of my life trying to be polite and reasonable.
My wife seems to be okay with that, though, so we'll survive. Our 26th w.a. is coming up soon, so something must be working. She doesn't like dark god fiction (unless she is reading under the blankets with a flashlight after I drift off to sleep).
She generally prefers those elevatedly sentimental books with elephants, cups of tea, and dogs running through rain. Those we could call Weepers...always a big draw..
My bookstore, in an alternate universe, would have sections for Jeepers, Creepers, and Weepers. I write Creepers, but she buys Weepers.
John, dark gods are powerful aphrodisiacs.
Jeff, women like reading about bad-ass men...and one thing about mythology is that it is full of bad-asses, making mythology a fertile ground on which to build a contemporary story.
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