Holy crap. I've only recently started to hear buzz about this book (I don't get out much), but I had NO IDEA how the book came about...

In a word: ugh. And it's the best-selling fiction book in Amurka right now, you say?

Le Sigh. BIG Le Sigh.

I read stories like that on the internets for free! :)
(And I would give them a better review than Paul gave this book)

Anais Nin is brilliant. I devoured her books when I was in college and have read them many times since.

Loved the excerpts, Paul. Sounds like the literary equivalent of Pia Zadora's "Lonely Lady."

I think anyone who blithely jumps from E. L. James to Henry Miller is in for a horrible surprise. People are reading Fifty Shades not just because it's erotic, but because it's specifically an erotic romance. Much of Anne Rice's work qualifies -- and she's a familiar name, which helps -- but in the rush to talk about Erica Jong and Anais Nin yet again let's not forget more recent erotic romance authors like Joey Hill, Portia da Costa, and the hundreds of authors currently writing for places like Ellora's Cave and Samhain. (Disclaimer: including me, under my pen name.)

Romance review site Dear Author also put together an expert list of recommendations for new erotica/erotic romance readers who liked Fifty Shades: http://dearauthor.com/features/beyond-th…

Can we have a rule about naming characters any form of Steele? I just can't take anything seriously after reading that.

Now I really understand why I had a hard time reading the sample I sent to my Kindle a week ago. I've read Twilight fanfiction before, and I own two books that originally started out as Twilight fanfiction (please don't judge me, I was re-reading them as "new editions" to see if they were still as good--which they weren't). And like those two books, the preview was utter crap. Besides, I couldn't get into the whole BDSM thing.

Now I really understand why I had a hard time reading the sample I sent to my Kindle a week ago. I've read Twilight fanfiction before, and I own two books that originally started out as Twilight fanfiction (please don't judge me, I was re-reading them as "new editions" to see if they were still as good--which they weren't). And like those two books, the preview was utter crap. Besides, I couldn't get into the whole BDSM thing.

At one point, I wandered into a used bookstore (actually, "book exchange") only to discover it packed to the gills with those little 6"x4" red Harlequin and Silhouette and whatnot romances. I can't imagine they're any better-written than Shades of Grey.

I've never been clear whether there's a massive audience for them, or a small audience with a massive appetite. It would appear to be the former, if this story is any indication.

I read fan fiction. I admit it. But I'm not going to pay for something that reads like fan fiction. I sent a sample to my Kindle because I was curious - a lot of women I know who would never admit to reading erotica are reading this.

Yeah...too much unnecessary description, which is the single biggest sin fan fic authors commit.

A professional porn writer friend creates vastly better SM erotica did a damned fine 50 Shades Of Sellout parody: http://ow.ly/afE2b. It's a good laugh.

Wait, people are spinning their fanfic into novels? And getting published? Regularly? And it sells?

Yowza.

For great erotic romance you can't get better than Emma Holly. Her books are keepers for me!

Thanks, Paul! I was getting curious about this phenom. You saved me the trouble of reading it. I'll stick to the (few) diamonds in the (wide) rough on Literotica for now.

I thought this was some new brand of serial senior erotica, with the shades of gray being....nevermind. Your version does not sound appealing. Are grade level tabulations for vocabulary and reading comprehension readily available for modern fiction? It could be Ann Rice, let alone Anais Nin, are off the chart for many readers of this. Movie novelizations have traditionally been horrid. A novel novelization is no better idea.

as a "woman of a certain age"... i can tell you that most middle american women have not / would not have read ANY erotica. this "best seller" has made it mainstream. seriously. the today show is hawking these books.

And don't forget that Universal has already optioned the movie rights for some $5 million.

So what's the readership overlap between this and the Twilight series?
Are the same people buying both?
Is there a significant divergence? People who love this hate Twilight?

It might just be that crappy writing appeals to a certain segment.

@19 My over-educated, romance-writing, erotica-reading guess goes like this:

Twilight was popular because it was angsty and unrestrained and passionate all while being weirdly, surprisingly chaste. The writing, yes, is bad, but people can overlook bad writing if the story is compelling enough. (This is also why people are still buying comic books and sci-fi, not every example of which is a literary gem with sparkling dialogue and elegant prose.)

Fifty Shades is popular because it allies itself with Twilight, but also goes farther into adult sexuality and correspondingly conservative anxieties. It's a grown-up, de-metaphorized version of the same question. Twilight is all about whether or not sex is dangerous, and sex is represented by vampires (historically sexually transgressive, even before Dracula and Anne Rice). Fifty Shades is all about whether or not you can 'cure' someone of dangerous sexual behaviors, where those behaviors are represented by BDSM practices that are still considered 'deviant' by the mainstream.

There is an overlap in the audience, but my impression is that Twilight was much more cross-generational, for obvious reasons.

@12, that was a scream! I love how the guy works out to be around 7 feet tall.

Hey, you want romantic erotica? Read Dan's reply to the first writer in this week's column. Half the readers were reaching for their cigarettes afterward.

I need pictures...

@13- I think most fantasy novels are Tolkien fanfics or D&D campaign novelizations (which is almost the same thing).

Remember, "best seller" doesn't mean the book has been actually purchased by more humans than any other book.
Best seller just means the publisher has printed and sent a ton of the books to bookstores, hoping to sell them.

Harlequin romances aren't nearly as bad as this book and for good reason, they have editors, something EL James and Stephanie Meyer both lacked (James at least self-published originally, I don't know what excuse Meyer's publisher has).

There really isn't a whole lot of difference between Harlequin romances, which are perfectly mainstream and widely read by women including fairly conservative grandmothers in their 80s (like mine, she's addicted to them), and erotica. About the only real difference is the level of detail describing the sex so I'm not surprised an erotic novel is selling so well. What surprises me is that it's a novel about BDSM that is doing so well and I don't know if that is a good thing or not. Getting people to accept that it's sexy and fairly normal is good but I'm dreading all the innocent housewives who start showing up at events or find Fetlife and have heart attacks when they see some of the play people do (though my sadistic streak also wants to see the looks on their faces).

"I scowl... with myself in the mirror."
Hmm. Nope. It's no better.

@28

How about "I scowl in the mirror"? Whom else would the narrator see but herself?

@ Paul,
You're a better man than I am. I could never do more than get 300 pages into the first book in the Twilight series. In that 300 pages, precisely two things had happened: Edward had saved Bella from a skidding van, and Edward had saved Bella from an assault/robbery/potential rape. The other 298 pages were nothing more than meditations on how good-looking Edward was. I have nothing against good-looking guys (I'm married to one), but I just wanted the story to move on already.

I did manage to watch the second twilight movie, at the end of which Edward proposes to Bella. At the end of that movie, the question in my mind wasn't whether I was "Team Edward" or "Team Jacob." It was why either Edward or Jacob wanted to spend eternity with Bella; I could barely stand to spend two hours with her! She struck me as a whiny, angsty, self-absorbed boring little twit.

O boy, let me find that Tom Bergeron fanfic I was writing -- book contract, here I come!

Seriously, I'm not surprised. Middle America seems to need to read their weakly transgressive books of titillation and feel a little warmer. Anybody remember "The Sheik"? Big book sensation of 1919. The big thrill there was a proper Englishwoman being captured, "ravished", and then falling in love with a desert bandit -- who, at the end of the book turned out to be a Englishman in mufti, for some reason -- I read it once and the writing is not smooth or able.

I think it's really laughable that such a low-brow novel has made the viral mutation from internet fanfic to ebook/paper. Sure, there has been (historically speaking) categorically bad writing--tons of early smut and pulp was like that--but the idea of it becoming so rampantly popular is a little depressing to those of us who read. Is it a Book For The People? Does this simply emphasize that literature is not confined to the educated and degree-holding masses? I don't know. But you'll have to pry Geek Love and Lolita out of my cold, dead hands.

Okay, first let me say for the 2,348th time. "Twilight" is a teen book. FOR TEENAGERS. It doesn't have to be great literature. And frankly, as teen novels go, the writing is not as bad as Paul implies (sorry, Paul, we have to disagree about something). So, cut it some slack if you read it.

[Except book 4, which is really two books squashed together and it shows--the editor and publisher dropped the ball on this one.]

Second, people, you can criticize Romance novels, Harlequin or not, but most of them are at least written to an acceptable level. It comes as a shock for all the people who scorn them that most romance novels are written very well. If you don't like romance, don't read them. I don't care for mysteries, myself, but I don't make fun of the entire genre.

Lastly, Paul is so right: "Fifty Shades of Gray" is pretty awful. At the bookstore where I work, I tried reading it on my lunch break and was unimpressed. The sex scenes aren't even that good.

I cringe every five minutes when I have to hand one to a customer. I have to resist the urge to say, wait, I can show you much better sex writing than this. Alas, I'm in the business to sell books, and they are selling, so I keep quiet.

Speaking of Stranger real-life erotica, whatever happened to SmartMouth from a few years back? Her black-and-white Lustlab photo alone was hotter than this crap James pulled out of her ass.
"when you sell a million records/just means a million people are dumb as fuck". Immortal Technique.

As someone who has read fanfic for well over a decade (with friends who trace their fannish history two or three times farther back), this is frustrating. There is good fanfic out there. There's good fanfic that is so good you wish it was pro so you could recommend it to your mother's bookclub. There is good "fanfic with the serial numbers filed off" and repackaged as pro writing. Don't judge an entire group by one crappy author. Or should I start listing the names of hacks who somehow got published but who have never written fanfic?

An example of a fanfic author who successfully transitioned to pro writing is Naomi Novik and her Temeraire series.

@32
I'm not dissing Twilight (and, by extension, Fifty Shades of Grey) because they're written for teenagers. Ever heard of Judy Blume? She writes for teens and does it well. I loved all the Harry Potter books; the last one had me up reading until 3:00 a.m. because I couldn't put it down.

But Meyers? Bleh. And I'll take Paul Constant's word that E.L. James is worse; I'm not subjecting myself to a pale imitation of books I already can't stand.

Perhaps I was spoiled by Jennifer Crusie. I enjoy her books and she seems to understand the cheesiness of sex scenes and I think she handles them well, though without any real kink.

I bought a couple of books by Lexi Harper and cringe every time I try to read one of her short stories. If I could laugh about how bad they are, maybe I wouldn't resent the ten bucks I spent on them.

Re: literotica - so much crap to weed through, but the good stories are usually rated highly.

Also, concerning not criticizing teen-lit: teens deserve well-written books. Being intended for teens means that it might not be too heavy or very complex, but it should still be written well. As someone mentioned above, look at the Harry Potter books. Those were great teen novels and they were great reads and they didn’t make you cringe with poorly-framed plots and lousy sentence structures.

Excellent points #34.

I hope the readers who are shelling out money for this book are able to evolve and find some truly worthwhile erotica to read.

I would never read this, but Forever Young Adult's review of it is pretty great, and they have no problems saying what constitutes sexy:
http://www.foreveryoungadult.com/2012/04…

"Y’all. Y’ALL. Look, I knew this book was not going to be good, OBVIOUSLY, but I thought AT LEAST the sex scenes would be good! Or at least so shocking that I was a little bit prudishly appalled by them. BUT NO. THEY WERE SO FUCKING LAME, YOU GUYS. I literally mean that, as in, the fucking in this book is partially immobile! Ugh, I actually turned to my boyfriend this weekend...and told him that the sex in this book was turning me off sex entirely. It’s just so awful. First of all, James falls victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous of which is “never enter into a land war in Asia,” but only slightly less-well-known is this: Never write erotica if your main character can’t say the word ‘vagina!’”

Seriously. I made it though half this book. The main character only uses the words “down there.” It’s fucking pathetic."

other irritating thing is in this book/story-other than the ones people already said. One day Ana is completely virgin an innocent (only did kissing before), has never had a proper boyfriend. Within hours she is having sex & pleasuring a man better than a porn star who is been in the porn industry for over 10 yrs...and Ana always have orgasms in every single way possible. Congratulations to Ana!

"by a magnification of ten"... the word you're looking for is "magnitude". if you're going to rip an author for her writing skills, at least use the right words to do it.

I started reading the first book (after stupidly purchasing the entire trilogy for my ipad) and I absolutely cannot get through it. I hate the writing, hate the characters, hate the dominant and submissive bullcrap, hate the inner goddess, hate the moronic email banter between the characters.....simply put, I hate this book. This is the most infuriating missive I have come across in a long time, and what makes it infuriating is that so many women are eating this up with a spoon. I don't know what is more offensive, the subject matter or the poor writing.

I recall an exchange from "Broadcast News" :

Aaron Altman: I know you care about him. I've never seen you like this about anyone, so please don't take it wrong when I tell you that I believe that Tom, while a very nice guy, is the Devil.
Jane Craig: This isn't friendship.
Aaron Altman: What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing... he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance... Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he'll get all the great women.

This book, and all the dung out there like it, lowering our standards...you got it - The Devil

I truly like the Fifty Shades trilogy. Yes, the 'sex' scenes are poorly written and I'm catching myself reading past most of them but it's the overall storyline that has me captured. It's a sexy version of Beauty and the Beast. I can't talk about the rest of the woman out there but for me it's more the storyline than it is the sex parts. I've read hotter, more detailed, slip off my bed from excitement novels than this...but then again...on THOSE...the storyline wasn't as exciting to me as this one. My opinion.

Susie Bright, people. Find her. Read the volumes she has edited. You won't be sorry.

Also, the feminist in me wants to know - what is up with Ana's eating disorder?

The WHOLE time I was reading this trilogy, the only thing I could think of was wow they stole all of their ideas from twilight, I had no idea it started as fan fiction, which now pulls it all together. I loved the story in fifty shades, but it was written poorly. It could have been so much better had it been written properly, but it is still a great story. It is however a little over the top, with all of the plot twists and things that you just couldn't imagine happening in real life. That is why we read though, isn't it? To escape real life and submerge yourself into a story that you wish you could be in. It is just a little hard to picture yourself in this situation, parts of it maybe, but the whole story? No. All in all though, I did like it, couldn't put it down, and would continue to read more if given the choice.

Can I just say something? I have read Fifty Shades, and I am actually disgusted with the sex scenes. First of all, this book doesn't describe an acceptable S&m relationship AT ALL. First of all, where's the safeword? Why does Anastasia not have an acceptable level of communication with her partner? Her partner has allowed her no control in the relationship, which makes him a shitty Dom and a shitty person overall. Aftercare? Nonexistent. A submissive in this kind of relationship is supposed to be reminded, even in small ways, that they are loved and appreciated, regardless of what takes place inside the bedroom. That is the mark of a good Dom.

Also, I'm a seventeen year old virgin who writes fanfiction lemons better than the sex scenes in this shit. A good amount of writers on Fanfiction.net write better S&m/BDSM sex scenes, and describe the relationships behind them as healthy, or if they aren't healthy, they make that fact obvious. And most of us are teenagers. Just saying.