8

THE VIRAL MYTH

Fifty Shades of Grey and the Truth About Why Some Hits Get So Big

The world’s most popular erotic website for women is not what most people would consider an erotic site at all. It’s FanFiction.net, a massive online campfire where amateur writers swap adaptations of popular stories, sometimes with a bit of sexual fantasy mixed into the plot. The most popular inspiration for the site’s fan fiction includes the Harry Potter books, Naruto, a Japanese comic series about a young ninja, and the television shows Glee and Doctor Who. But perhaps the site’s most famous contribution to pop culture started with the Twilight series.

For many years, FanFiction writers played with Twilight’s romance between Bella Swan, a sullen teenage girl, and Edward Cullen, a beautiful love-struck vampire, remixing it with several genres and gradually introducing graphic sex as a key plot element. The online fanfic universe was a hallmark of this new age of hits. It was both massive, with hundreds of thousands of writers and readers, and mostly invisible to much of the outside world. It wouldn’t stay invisible forever.

One of the most popular fanfic writers in the Twilight genre was Erika Leonard, a working mother of two near Ealing, a northwest suburb of London. In November 2008, Leonard watched the movie adaptation of Twilight and was utterly entranced. She bought all four books in the series and read them in a five-day binge over the Christmas holidays. “It was one of the best vacations I ever had,” she told me.

In her early thirties, Leonard was an avid, if slightly embarrassed, devotee of romance novels. On the train to central London, she read “hundreds” of them, demurely folding back the jackets to hide the image on the cover—often a young woman, dressed in something less than Tube-appropriate attire, fainting into the arms of a comically sinewy man. More recently, she had been drawn to erotic fiction, like Macho Sluts, a 1988 collection of short stories by Pat Califa, which often featured sadomasochistic lesbian sex.

In 2009, Leonard signed up for FanFiction.net, which prompted her to select a pen name. When her first choices were unavailable, she thought of her favorite British cartoon from childhood, Noggin the Nog, and the stories’ friendly ice dragon Grolliffe. She typed in the name Snowqueens Icedragon, and it took.

The world of Twilight fanfic was a menagerie of styles and genres, recasting the protagonist Edward as a quiet dork, lame dad, dominant sex god, submissive artist, tattoo-covered ruffian, or refined Oxbridge executive. Leonard was drawn to the BDSM interpretations, particularly those with an office setting. Within a few months, it became clear that the writer FanFiction readers often called “Icy” had a golden ear for the most tantalizing and raunchy motifs. Her work, originally titled Master of the Universe, cast Edward as a CEO with a flair for bondage.

As George Lucas showed in the 1970s, the most successful storytellers are often collage artists, bringing together never-before-assembled allusions to create a story that is both surprising and familiar. Leonard’s stories were certifiable blockbusters, fetching more than fifty thousand comments on FanFiction.net and more than five million readers.

One of her biggest fans on the site was an Australian writer named Amanda Hayward. They met over Twitter in early 2010 and exchanged messages. In October of that year, Hayward launched the Writer’s Coffee Shop, a small digital publishing house based out of New South Wales, Australia, and offered to publish Leonard’s work. At first, Leonard resisted. But as Master of the Universe grew to become one of the most popular stories in the entire FanFiction network, Leonard grew anxious that somebody might steal her work and publish it as a book. She decided it would be best to publish the stories herself.

On May 22, 2011, she left FanFiction. Three days later, her work was published as an e-book and paperback with the Writers Coffee Shop under a new title and an updated pseudonym—Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James.

Hayward’s Australian imprint was tiny. Few outside the fanfic community could have heard of it. But thousands of people followed Hayward and “Icy” and bought James’s first book when it was published in May 2011. James’s longtime engagement with her fellow fanfic writers, cultivated over hours and hours of reading and responding to her fans and fellow adapters in online comment threads, had created something extraordinarily rare for a first-time author: a massive audience of readers, commenters, and fellow co-creators.

But at the end of 2011, scarcely anybody at the large publishing houses of London and New York had heard of the book or its enigmatically pseudonymous author. Few would have guessed that within six months, James’s stories would become not only one of the great publishing coups in history but also a global cultural phenomenon. By the summer of 2012, several American news organizations, including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, CNN, and CBS, all made the same claim. The book was not just a success. It had gone “viral.”

 • • • 

It’s become fashionable to talk about ideas as if they were diseases. Some pop songs are infectious, and some products are contagious. Advertisers and producers have developed a theory of “viral” marketing, which assumes that simple word of mouth can easily take a small idea and turn it into a phenomenon. This has fed a popular conception of buzz that says that companies don’t need sophisticated distribution strategies for their product to go big. If they make something that is inherently infectious, they can sit back and wait for it to explode like a virus:

In epidemiology, “viral” has a specific meaning. It refers to a disease that infects more than one person before it dies or the host does. Such a disease has the potential to spread exponentially. One person infects two. Two infect four. Four infect eight. And before long, it’s a pandemic.

Do ideas ever go viral in that way? For a long time, nobody could be sure. It’s difficult to precisely track word-of-mouth buzz or the spread of a fashion (like skinny jeans) or an idea (like universal suffrage) from person to person. So, by degrees, “That thing went viral” has became a fancy way of saying, “That thing got big really quickly, and we’re not sure how.”

But there is a place where ideas leave an information trail: on the Internet. When I post an article on Twitter, it is shared and reshared, and each step of this cascade is traceable. Scientists can follow the trail of e-mails or Facebook posts as they move around the world. In the digital world, they can finally answer the question: Do ideas really go viral?

The answer appears to be a simple no. In 2012, several researchers from Yahoo studied the spread of millions of online messages on Twitter. More than 90 percent of the messages didn’t diffuse at all. A tiny percentage, about 1 percent, was shared more than seven times. But nothing really went fully viral—not even the most popular shared messages. The vast majority of the news that people see on Twitter—around 95 percent—comes directly from its original source or from one degree of separation.

If ideas and articles on the Internet essentially never go viral, then how do some things still achieve such massive popularity so quickly? Viral spread isn’t the only way that a piece of content can reach a large population, the researchers said. There is another mechanism, called “broadcast diffusion”—many people getting information from one source. They wrote:

Broadcasts can be extremely large—the Super Bowl attracts over 100 million viewers, while the front pages of the most popular news websites attract a similar number of daily visitors—and hence the mere observation that something is popular, or even that it became so rapidly, is not sufficient to establish that it spread in a manner that resembles [a virus].

On the Internet, where it seems like everything is going viral, perhaps very little or even nothing is. They concluded that popularity on the Internet is “driven by the size of the largest broadcast.” Digital blockbusters are not about a million one-to-one moments as much as they are about a few one-to-one-million moments.

Extended to the full world of hits, this new finding suggests that articles, songs, and products don’t spread like in the first picture we saw. Instead, almost all popular products and ideas have blockbuster moments where they spread from one source to many, many individuals at the same time—not like a virus, but something like this:

Imagine you go to work on a Monday and a coworker tells you about a new guacamole recipe she read in the New York Times. Several hours later, you go to lunch with another coworker, who asks if you’ve heard about the new guacamole recipe he read about in the New York Times. After work, you go home to your spouse, whose coworker evangelized a new guacamole recipe she found in the New York Times. The common observation is: “The Times article about guacamole went absolutely viral.” But the truer observation is that the article didn’t go viral in any meaningful sense of the word. It reached a lot of people who read the recipe section of a large international newspaper, and a few of them talked about it.

Disease is an infectious metaphor. We need a revised epidemiological analogy to rival the viral myth—one that explains how ideas can spread to many people at once, like a thousand people getting the flu from one source.

In fact, there is a perfect story for this purpose. It is one of the most celebrated episodes in the history of disease research, taught in several medical schools and investigated in popular nonfiction books, like Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map. It begins in the Soho district of 1850s London.

Two hundred years ago, the popular theory of disease held that people got sick because of a spectral force called “miasma”—invisible poisons lofted by the winds. Miasma theory persisted because, like vampires and virality, it was a great story with inconspicuous flaws. The spread of disease was once as difficult to track as word-of-mouth buzz, and there was little understanding of germs, bacteria, and viruses.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, London was both the greatest city in the world and a massive stinking cesspool of disease. In 1854 a cholera outbreak struck the city, killing 127 people in three days and causing 75 percent of residents to flee the working-class Soho neighborhood within a week. The city government still assumed that the disease was carried through smells and inhaled by residents.

The scientist John Snow disagreed. A doctor with the instincts of a journalist, Snow interviewed hundreds of sick and healthy families from the neighborhood. He plotted their cases on a map, where dark bars signified households with cholera.

Snow’s investigation uncovered several critical clues:

1. The infected houses clustered within a few blocks.
2. Outside of that cluster, there were practically no incidents of cholera.
3. In the heart of the cluster was a brewery whose workers were remarkably healthy.

Imagine yourself as a detective with these clues and this map. Given the pattern of the disease, you might rule out the miasma theory. But you’d still wonder if this disease was spreading between houses—like a virus—or spreading from one source to many houses. And why would beer offer immunity to workers in the midst of an urban epidemic?

Snow added more details to the map—restaurants, parks, water pumps—and he noticed something. On blocks where the Broad Street water pump was the nearest source of water, cholera cases were numerous. On blocks where the residents were more likely to retrieve water from another pump, cholera was rare. The families with cholera had one thing in common: They were drawing water from the same source.

“There were only ten deaths in houses situated decidedly nearer to another street-pump,” Snow wrote in a letter to the editor of the Medical Times and Gazette. “In five of these cases the families of the deceased persons informed me that they always sent to the pump in Broad Street, as they preferred the water to that of the pumps which were nearer. In three other cases, the deceased were children who went to school near the pump in Broad Street.” And what about the healthy brewers in the heart of the hot zone? They were lucky lushes. For their labor, the brewers received malt liquor, whose fermentation process required boiling the water and removing the toxic particulates.

The disease wasn’t spreading through the air. It wasn’t spreading between households. Many infections were coming from a single source: an infectious water pump. The disease was a broadcast.

 • • • 

People are social creatures—they talk, they share, they pass things along. But unlike with an actual virus, a person chooses to be infected by an idea, and most people who confront any given thing don’t pass it along. Viral diseases tend to spread slowly, steadily, across many generations of infection. But information cascades are the opposite: They tend to spread in short bursts and die quickly. The gospel of virality has convinced some marketers that the only way that things become popular these days is by buzz and viral spread. But these marketers vastly overestimate the reliable power of word of mouth.

Much of what outsiders call virality is really a function of what one might call “dark broadcasters”—people or companies distributing information to many viewers at once, but whose influence isn’t always visible to people outside of the network. For example, somebody looking at cholera statistics in 1854 London might have thought that a virus was spreading from house to house. Only by studying the scene would he or she see how the disease was really spreading—that it was mostly coming from a single source.

Mistaking dark broadcasts for viral spread is common. In 2012, a thirty-minute documentary about the Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony became the “most viral video in history,” with one hundred million views on YouTube in just six days. It is unquestionably an amazing feat for a documentary to reach all-time Hollywood blockbuster distribution in less than a week. But was this really a case of pure viral spread, powered by millions of ordinary individuals sharing it with one or two people? Not really. The video was shared by pop stars like Rihanna and Taylor Swift, television stars like Oprah Winfrey and Ryan Seacrest, and some of Twitter’s largest broadcasters, including Kim Kardashian, with thirteen million followers at the time, and Justin Bieber, with eighteen million followers. These weren’t ordinary individuals passing the information to two or three other people like a virus. They were dark broadcasters sending the video to millions of people instantly within a densely connected network, even though many people who ultimately saw the video never knew that these celebrities were responsible for its distribution.

Here’s another example: On April 24, 2012, on World Malaria Day, Tracy Zamot, a media-relations executive for a music label, published a tweet with an embedded video about the disease. The background music was provided by the Kin, a rock band. The video exploded online, tallying up more than fifteen thousand total retweets. But Tracy Zamot’s original message was shared exactly once—by the Twitter account for the band. So, how did the video become a phenomenon? The brief answer is that several celebrities, each with followings as large as a national newspaper’s subscriber base, shared the video.

Getting the full story requires a bit of Internet spelunking. The comment section of YouTube is best known for hosting some of the grossest opinions and worst spelling on the Internet. But in this case, reading the comments under the malaria video offers a rare glimpse inside the information cascade. Of the ninety-six comments, more than half make reference to how users found the video: forty-one thank or mention the pop star Justin Bieber, thirteen reference the country singer Greyson Chance, and five mention the actor Ashton Kutcher. All three celebrities tweeted the video to more than a million followers. “Thumbs up if Ashton Kutcher, Justin Bieber, Greyson Chance or any1 else sent you here!! lol” posted the user Riham RT. 

Microsoft Research scientists who studied the phenomenon saw the same thing. The video’s popularity did not bloom like a virus, spreading far and wide across many generations. The information cascade looks more like a bomb fuse—a quiet string of solitary shares followed by several explosions, in the form of celebrity tweets. Did the malaria video go “viral”? You might say that. But it became a hit not because of fifteen thousand one-to-one shares, but in large part because three celebrities had the power to share the video with a million people at once. The hit was a dark broadcast—and the darkness was illuminated, in this rare instance, by YouTube comments.

As we saw in the book’s first chapter, an individual broadcast is more powerful in an age with fewer channels of exposure. When there were only three television channels, for example, it was easier to get high ratings. But the future looks to be an age of abundance, with hundreds of channels, national media sites, podcasts, newsletters, Twitter profiles, Facebook pages, and media apps. Each of these media sources can reach thousands or millions of people a day. These publishers are broadcasters. Their work isn’t viral at all. To say that an idea “went viral” after it appeared on the New York Times front page is nearly as silly as saying a commercial “went viral” after appearing in the Super Bowl, or saying E. coli “goes viral” when many people get sick eating at the same restaurant. Words have meanings, and even the most elastic definition of virality has nothing to do with such one-to-one-thousand (or one-to-one-hundred-million) events.

The spread of a viral video is not mostly viral, but neither is it all broadcast. Rather, the studies of social networks suggest that the majority of viral hits involves one or several mass contamination events that look like this . . .

. . . where one Facebook post, one favorable spot on the Drudge Report, or one well-watched segment on Fox News reaches thousands and thousands of people instantaneously, and then a small fraction of that infected group passes it along again.

Almost nothing really goes viral, but some ideas and products really are more infectious than others. They are shared and discussed at higher-than-average rates. But to go big, they need that broadcast—the Walmart book stand, the Kardashian tweet, the proverbial water pump—to push them into the mainstream, where people will find them and share them.

That was Fifty Shades of Grey at the end of 2011. It was a dark hit, a product whose large audience was invisible to the most prominent measures of popularity. It wasn’t on any bestseller list. Nobody read about it in the newspaper. But Fifty Shades was already infectious. It just needed a bigger pump.

 • • • 

On January 6, 2012, Anne Messitte, then the publisher of the Vintage Books imprint at Random House, received an on-demand paperback copy of Fifty Shades of Grey that had been passing around the publicity and editorial departments of another imprint at her company. It was a Friday. On Saturday, she read the book in a single sitting.

Messitte knew little about the novel beyond the fact that Fifty Shades was generating buzz among mothers of the Upper East Side and Westchester, a solidly upper-middle-class county just north of New York City. “I went to dinner with some friends that night, and they asked what I did all day,” she told me. “I told them that I read the first Fifty Shades book. Immediately, somebody at dinner said her friend in Westchester had read it and loved it.” The following week, Messitte read the second installment, Fifty Shades Darker, and felt determined to meet with James. There was just one problem: “E. L. James” was a pseudonym and first-time writer. Messitte didn’t know how to find her.

Meanwhile, another influential New York City mother was making a simultaneous discovery. Lyss Stern, the founder of Diva Moms, a social group for well-heeled mothers with an Upper East Side élan, visited the large Barnes and Noble in Union Square to find Fifty Shades, at a friend’s suggestion. But the author name “E. L. James” wasn’t even in the Barnes and Noble system in January 2012. “The woman at the counter looked at me like I was crazy,” Stern told me.

So Stern went online and bought the e-book. Like Messitte, she finished it in a day. Suddenly obsessed, she evangelized Fifty Shades in her DivaMoms newsletters and invited E. L. James to New York to attend a book party in her honor at a large Chelsea penthouse apartment.

One of the subscribers to the Diva Moms newsletters was Messitte. She e-mailed Stern to attend the event, identifying herself as both a reader and a publisher. Stern responded by e-mail that the event had sold out and forwarded Messitte’s inquiry to Valerie Hoskins, a film agent who was helping James navigate her growing fame.

On January 24, 2012, the three women—Messitte, Hoskins, and E. L. James—met at the Vintage offices in Manhattan to discuss the possibility of relaunching Fifty Shades with a paperback publication. James was hearing directly from readers, booksellers, and librarians about their difficulty sourcing the book, and she was eager to make it more available.

James had strong and specific opinions about how she wanted her book to be presented—in ways, such as packaging, that were unexpected for the romance genre. She had designed her own covers—the now iconic silver necktie, a winking allusion to both the corporate setting and the bondage theme. “I thought it was brilliant,” Messitte said. “People thinking conventionally had told Erika that it should look more like a romance. Erika wanted it to be different. I think the covers’ distinction opened the books up to a much broader audience.”

At the time, Messitte was a publisher of neither romance nor erotica, free from preconditioned notions of the genre’s conventions. The three women spoke about publishing the book not as a category romance novel, but as a front-of-store bestseller—hoping there might be a chance to launch a book that would transcend genre, trying to position it as a cultural phenomenon.

I met Messitte at her office in 2016. I wanted to learn more about the story of the Fifty Shades blockbuster, but I also wanted to know more about its publisher. In January 2012, the book was a blip on the publishing radar. In a few months, it would be the pop culture sensation of the world. What did Messitte see in the book before the world did?

She certainly didn’t see hard evidence of sales. According to the best available public data, Fifty Shades hadn’t sold more than a few thousand paperback copies in the entire United States in early 2012.

But Messitte was closely monitoring the conversation building online. She knew that uncommon excitement precedes uncommon sales, and the reaction to Fifty Shades was deeply uncommon. Across New York City and its suburbs, a certain demographic of women—smart and well-read women with broad social connections—were clamoring for the book. “So much of this business comes down to gut and informed risk, and we could see that something was happening,” she said. Google searches for the book spiked first in states with large urban populations, like New York, New Jersey, and Florida.

On February 10, after two weeks of e-mails and calls, Messitte sent Hoskins an offer for Vintage to publish the Fifty Shades trilogy, and after a month of negotiation between the author, the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and the Writer’s Coffee Shop, a deal was signed on March 7, 2012, to move the publishing rights to Vintage. Two weeks later, on March 18, Fifty Shades of Grey debuted at the number one spot on the New York Times combined print and e-book fiction bestseller list. On March 25, Fifty Shades Darker joined, taking the number two spot. The following day, Universal Pictures and Focus Features announced that the companies would partner in the development of a film based on the first installment of the Fifty Shades trilogy. On April 1, Fifty Shades Freed appeared on the bestseller list in the third-place spot.

If a book sells one million copies total, it is a historic bestseller. In the spring and summer of 2012, Random House was printing one million copies of the Fifty Shades trilogy every week. Now with more than 150 million sold copies, Fifty Shades of Grey is the bestselling book in the history of Random House.

 • • • 

The Fifty Shades story is a paradox. How could a book go viral in a world where “nothing really goes viral”?

Imagine for a moment that we are sitting in lab, watching the information cascade of Fifty Shades blooming from a single point in 2011. Does that picture look like this, a series of one-to-one and one-to-two shares over thousands of generations, like a cold virus?

Or does it look like this, a traditional broadcast with social sharing tendrils, as several recipients pass the information along to their friends?

The nondigital world does not provide researchers or journalists with a clear map of influence and social spread. We have to make some inferences. But after corresponding with Anne Messitte, Lyss Stern, Amanda Hayward, and E. L. James herself, I’ve come to think that although Fifty Shades has become a poster child of virality, it was really the beneficiary of three distinct one-to-one-million broadcasts.

First, it benefited from a prototypical dark broadcast, which practically nobody reporting on the Fifty Shades phenomenon seems to have paid much attention to—except for James, herself. “When I published the books with the Writer’s Coffee Shop, several fans of the story gave the book five stars on [the reader review site] Goodreads,” she told me. Goodreads has readers choice awards every year, and because Fifty Shades of Grey had so many five star reviews, it was nominated in the Best Romance category in November 2011.

In the final tally, Fifty Shades of Grey received 3,815 votes—more than any other romance novel except for Lover Unleashed, by the bestselling author J. R. Ward. This second-place finish brought the novel to the attention of not just other romance readers, but also Hollywood executives. By December, James recalled, she was fetching inquiries from movie studios seeking rights to the novel. “Goodreads had a great deal to do with bringing [Fifty Shades] to readers’ attention,” she said. Like a celebrity tweeting a video to other celebrities, the Goodreads awards vote broadcast the novel to thousands of readers and entertainment executives.

This is a small but critical detail in the mystery of how Fifty Shades got so big so quickly. Several months before almost any casual, non-fanfic readers in the United States or Europe had heard of the book or its author, it had already attracted so many readers that it received the second-most online votes of any romance novel published that year.

If Fifty Shades hadn’t gone viral by November 2011, how did so many people already know about it?

This brings us to the second subtle broadcast—the world of Fan Fiction.net itself. James was already a fanfic celebrity with more than five million readers before Random House found her. Long before she was “E. L. James,” Erika Leonard was Snowqueens Icedragon, a dark broadcaster writing for an absurdly large audience of readers that traditional New York publishers could not see or measure. They bought her e-book, gave it five stars on Goodreads, and voted for it as the romance novel of the year, all before the publishing world picked up on the budding phenomenon. When James published her book in 2011, she didn’t need a viral cascade to reach hundreds of thousands of devoted readers. She already had them.

Third, to reach a truly global audience and become one of the bestselling authors of all time, James needed the distribution and marketing power of a large publisher like Random House. The vast majority of the book’s publicity and success happened after Messitte and James agreed to the deal on March 2, 2012. One week later, on March 9, the New York Times trumpeted the Random House acquisition in a page-one story that went out to millions of people in print and online. In early April, an interview with James was the splashy cover story of the magazine Entertainment Weekly, with a circulation of around two million. On April 17, she appeared in interviews on both ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today show, two morning programs with a combined audience of about ten million viewers. The following day, Time magazine, the most read newsweekly in the country, with more than ten million combined print and digital readers, named her one of the world’s one hundred most influential people in its cover story package.

There is no question that a good deal of the success of Fifty Shades was due to ordinary word of mouth. Indeed, Messitte was initially drawn to James’s work in part because so many people had seemed desperate to talk about it.

But there is also no question that Fifty Shades reached historic levels of success because of several one-to-one-million moments. The initial publication of the e-book reached many fanfic readers with a single strike, like a bowling ball knocking over a group of prearranged pins. The book’s popularity was distributed via many traditional media outlets, who evangelized the books to tens of millions of newspaper readers and television viewers; then other media outlets, like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, further evangelized the book by praising its success to an audience of millions more.

That is the difference between virality in epidemiology and culture. A real virus spreads only between people. But a “viral” idea can spread between broadcasts. For most so-called viral ideas or products to become massive hits, they almost always depend on several moments where they spread to many, many people from one source. Not like a flu, but rather like a Broad Street water pump.

 • • • 

The fan fiction petri dish that spawned Fifty Shades is, like so much of modern culture, a new technology serving an old purpose. Broadly defined, fan fiction might be as ancient as literature and the basis of some of the most famous stories ever written. Shakespeare’s most popular plays, including Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night, used old tales as scaffolding for new poetry. The Divine Comedy by Dante is fathoms deep in allusions to the Bible and ancient classics. Dante was such a fanboy that he meets his idols Virgil and Homer in the text and blushingly describes how they and other poets “made me of their tribe.”

Although they have not always called themselves “fans” or their work “fic,” novelists are never free of influence. Fifty Shades’ source material, Twilight, was an adaptation, too, loosely based on the plot of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but with Mr. Darcy’s sangfroid updated to make him literally coldblooded. Jane Austen’s classic is both an original species and a classic of its genus—the power-inversion metamyth. Many romances follow the same dramatic arc: A powerful man desires the less powerful woman and, by falling in love, loses his dominion, making their union possible. It’s Beauty and the Beast, where the small woman tames the great monster. It’s Jane Eyre, where the rich aloof nobleman melts for the working-class nanny. “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex,” Oscar Wilde said. “Sex is about power.” Fifty Shades is a power struggle, too, one in which sex is the setting for the central inversion of power. 

Classic literature is despotic, in a way; there is one author of the text, and millions of readers whose only choice is to dutifully follow along. Those authors could seem like distant deities and, as John Updike wrote, “gods do not answer letters.” But in the direct democracy of fan fiction, the readers are writers, the writers are also readers, and they all answer letters. In this peaceful revolution against the sovereignty of authorship, an audience of readers comes together to become each other’s audience—and, once in a while, produces a piece of art that eclipses its influence.

Above all, a popular fan fiction writer is a talented reader—of the source material, of her peers’ interpretations, and of her audience’s reception. It’s clear that, even if nobody outside of FanFiction.net ever bought a copy of her books, James was a keen reader of all three groups. On the site, she would spend hours in the comment threads on her stories, absorbing praise, noting suggestions, and welcoming feedback. By her own account, James was exhaustively devoted to staying in touch with her fans.

From the beginning, Fifty Shades was a conversation—between Erika Leonard and other fanfic authors, between Snowqueens Icedragon and her tens of thousands of devoted online readers, between E. L. James and her global legion of fans, and finally between the fans themselves. “Conversation is the most powerful thing for selling books, and this book touched off a conversation that women wanted to have with other women,” Messitte said. “Mothers and daughters discussed it. People who hadn’t read a book in fifteen years discussed it.”

Many people wanted to read Fifty Shades because it was already popular. For all of Random House’s carefully planned marketing strategy, the book’s best advertisement was its own notoriety. Many readers with little former interest in bondage, romance novels, or even books in general bought copies of the Fifty Shades trilogy because they were curious about participating in a cultural phenomenon. They wanted entry into a crowded club simply because it was crowded.

 • • • 

How does popularity beget more popularity? Several years after his work with global cascades, Duncan Watts and two researchers at Columbia University, Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds, designed a study to research the phenomenon of hits in music.

They created several music sites, or “worlds,” with the same forty-eight songs and asked visitors to download their favorites. This way, the researchers could watch the same songs’ popularity evolve, as if in parallel universes.

There was a clever wrinkle. Some websites showed viewers a ranking of the most popular tracks, but other sites had no such rankings. Although each world started with zero downloads, they evolved to be quite different. In Music World 1, the top song was “She Said” by the band Parker Theory. In Music World 4, however, that song was in tenth place.

Most important, the rankings were like steroids for hits: People who could see them were more likely to download songs that were already popular. The mere existence of rankings—the simple signal of popularity—made the biggest hits even bigger.

In a follow-up experiment, Watts and his fellow scientists got a little cheeky: They inverted the rankings. Some visitors went to music sites where the least popular song was falsely listed as number one. You can probably guess what happened. Previously ignored songs initially soared in popularity. Previously popular songs were ignored. Simply believing, even wrongly, that a song was popular made many participants more likely to download it. Rankings created superstars, even when they lied.

Some consumers buy products not because they are “ better” in any way, but simply because they are popular. What they’re buying is not just a product, but also a piece of popularity itself.

Today’s cultural marketplace is a pop-culture Panopticon, where everybody can see what the world is watching, playing, and reading. In such a world, historically large audiences will inevitably cluster around a handful of mega-blockbusters, such as Fifty Shades, or, more recently, the augmented-reality game Pokémon GO. That is the lesson of Salganik, Dodds, and Watts: Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.

In the final analysis, this was perhaps the key mechanism in the Fifty Shades phenomenon. Like a viral video, it was propelled by a combination of traditional broadcasters (the Today show and the New York Times), dark broadcasters (the massive fanfic cluster and Facebook groups), and ordinary sharing (readers talking to readers). Millions of people were exhilarated, maddened, and puzzled by the book, but there are thousands of books that exhilarate, madden, and puzzle. None of them sell one hundred million copies. What separated Fifty Shades is that its notoriety became a distinct product; people who didn’t even enjoy reading still wanted to avoid being the last person to have read it.

In this way, E. L. James’s saga is both extraordinary and typical. For many cultural achievements, the art itself is not the only thing worth consuming; the experience of having seen, read, or heard the art for the purpose of being able to talk about it is its own reward. Such consumers are not just buying a product; what they’re really buying is entry into a popular conversation. Popularity is the product.

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Since Fifty Shades has conquered the world, there have been several pop sociological attempts to explain its success. Some have pointed out that romance sales always rise during economic downturns, as women seek the comfort of a bodice ripper. Others argued that the advent of e-books meant that even urbane women could read erotica without feeling judged in public.

It would be satisfying if Fifty Shades offered an easy lesson for how to create the most popular product in the history of the world. Unfortunately, its very outlier status makes it both a target for theorizing and an extraordinary exception. There is no doubt that the book benefited from traditional media broadcasts. But if the broadcast power of a publisher were enough to ensure a global sensation, then thousands of books would sell more than one hundred million copies every year. Instead, Fifty Shades calls for a sample of humility—from publishers, from writers, and, yes, from people like me trying to explain its success.

To understand why some hits get so big, one cannot look exclusively at characteristics like familiarity or at marketing strategies like one-to-one-million moments. The broadcasts come first, but they are not enough. A handful of products will inevitably become massively popular each year for the simple reason that, once they are pushed into the national consciousness, people just can’t stop talking about them.

So how do you get people to talk?