The Game Changer
EXCUSE THE HYPERBOLE, but there really are moments when everything just … changes: the wheel, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, the personal computer. It would just be nice that the paradigm shift in literature and publishing would have been better written.
To be polite—at best—Fifty Shades of Grey has been called … well, let’s let Margot Sage-EL, co-owner of the Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, New Jersey, say it: “Our customers are very smart and they say it’s badly written, but they are in the middle of book three.”
As with anything hugely popular, the trilogy has received just about an equal amount of scorn to match its sales. Even Susan Donaldson James called it “a cheese-ball narrative whose heroine is incapable of using adult language. She refers to her genitals euphemistically as my sex.” But popular Fifty Shades is—to a staggering degree: in March it reached the number-one spot on the national e-book fiction bestseller list. Naturally there’s going to be a film.
Putting aside the mumbles and grumbles from the legions of hardworking, and unarguably more talented, erotica writers out there (ahem … M.Christian … ahem), Fifty Shades will, no doubt, be remembered as when everything changed.
Okay, it may not be as big as the wheel, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, or the personal computer, but it’s still a total and complete game changer. For one thing, it’s pretty much the final nail in the old-school world of print publishing. Sure, that model has been gasping and wheezing for a few years now but for a teeny-tiny—and badly written—little book to do what New York dreamt of doing shows once and for all that they need to burn down their old ways and finally begin to embrace the lean, mean, and cutting-edge world of e-books.
It’s also the final shovel of dirt on another corpse: the concept of old-school marketing. Fifty Shades of Grey didn’t succeed because of its brilliant prose, its immense advertising budget, or inspired publicity: it scored that coveted number-one spot because “mom” E. L. James jumped right in, feetfirst, to social networking and viral marketing with a dogged persistence that’s, frankly, a bit scary. The only bad side of this is—sigh—that for the next five to ten years we’re gonna be bombarded not just with Fifty Shades knock-offs but all those authors trying the same tricks James did.
Still, while a lot of them won’t succeed, Fifty Shades has proven that it’s time to bury what doesn’t work—like dead tree book printing—and try to really, completely rethink marketing and publicity.
The bottom line is that the Fifty Shades trilogy is pure, unadulterated smut.
Porn? PORN?! The mind boggles! Sure, anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see that the world of advertising and marketing was due for a major overhaul, and only people with some serious stock holdings in paper were holding onto the fantasy that print books weren’t dead, but no one could have seen that the book that would prove both would also haul our beloved pornography out of the shadows and into the mainstream—and on to the New York Times bestseller list as well.
So while Fifty Shades may have shaken things up a bit, take heart in that, while a lot of old traditions are tumbling down, its success means that authors—especially erotica writers—may finally get to remind the world that there’s no gray area when it comes to popularity … and money.
M.CHRISTIAN is an acknowledged master of erotica with more than four hundred stories in anthologies such as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, and Best Lesbian Erotica, as well as many other anthologies, magazines, and sites.
He is the editor of twenty-five anthologies, including the Best S/M Erotica series, The Mammoth Book of Future Cops, and The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi) as well as many others.
He is the author of the collections Dirty Words, The Bachelor Machine, Filthy Boys, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, and How To Write And Sell Erotica, and of the novels The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Brushes, Finger’s Breadth, and Painted Doll.