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E.L. James: Fifty Shades of Grey

The Fifty Shades of Grey biography that wasn't | UK news | guardian.co.uk

The publishing world erupted in a frenzy when a small West Yorkshire publishing company promised to deliver the "unauthorised biography" of Fifty Shades of Grey's controversial heartthrob Christian Grey.

Within an hour of the Bookseller revealing details of the forthcoming book, the Hebden Bridge-based independent publishers Bluemoose Books were inundated with requests, including from 20 different European and north American publishers asking to buy the rights to the "biography". They even had Hollywood on the phone - Universal Studios wanted to buy the film rights.

The book was to offer a psychological insight into Grey before he became famous, his "childhood, educational background, rapid rise in business, years of international travel and his string of relationships and select sexual proclivities," as written by a fictional former classmate of Grey's, Dominic Cutmore, and was due to be published last October.

The only problem was Bluemoose Books did not actually own the rights to such a book – nor did it have the funds to print such a book – nor, in fact, did it have the book itself. None of its in-house authors had ever read EL James's erotic novel, let alone written fan fiction purporting to tell the tale of how a troubled young chap grew up to be the tall, dark and handsome man of every woman's dreams. (Every woman willing to submit to his darkest and kinkiest sexual desires, at least.)

So what happens when a tiny publishing house takes on a project on this scale and effectively takes on one of the most powerful publishers in the world? Kevin Duffy, owner of Bluemoose Books, was under a bit of pressure to make good on his opportunistic stunt and produce a novel which, he had boasted, would "pull no punches and leaves no stone unturned".

He instructed his wife to buy a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and desperately leaf through it on the train down to London while texting a plot summary to one of the company's authors, who fired off the first three chapters of The Secret Life of Christian Grey in an afternoon. Meanwhile, Duffy started trying to cobble together enough cash to print the hundreds of thousands of copies needed to quench the world's desire for Grey-related fiction.

And, he said: "For a week I nearly became famous." But alas, Bluemoose Books soon fell off the "erotica" bandwagon they had only just jumped on to, after a terse phone call from James's New York and London-based publishers, Random House, whose corporate lawyers were bandying about the term "copyright infringement". They quickly dropped the idea.
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Why doesn't he just change the names on his fanfiction and put it out as an original work, then? I hear it's been known to work.
 
50 Shades just opened my eyes to the other reading genres out there like erotica and so called soft porn. For a book like 50 shades to be so popular there must be an awful lot of lonely women out there, and I was one of them, and I don't mind saying so. I don't need to justify my opinions to anyone but myself, but I liked the book - sure the writing was a little slow and repetitive, but overall a good starter read when you're getting into the genre.

People say Christian is kinky, or is abusive. Have those who read the book and thought ill of the BDSM lifestyle ever experienced it? I don't think so, otherwise they would know that it's empowering for women. A show of trust in a partner and an overall honesty that comes from that type of relationship.

That's my ten bucks worth :)

Don't knock it til you've tried it.
 
My opinion is that if it gets her in the mood to be experimental, I won't be the one to complain.
 
This book had mixed reviews.

I'm one of those who did not like the book. By the way I could not even read it after the initial pages.

That's because the book seem to be written exclusively for female audiences. I'm a guy. The book takes so much lines for describing how perfect Gray is that the plot seems to go in the background sometimes.

Maybe that's because the narrative is from the perspective of a girl.

But its writing shows an obsession so great regarding Gray that for me it was impossible to read any further than the part after Kate wakes up in a hungover and thinks how turning on even Gray's sweat is.
 
People say Christian is kinky, or is abusive. Have those who read the book and thought ill of the BDSM lifestyle ever experienced it? I don't think so, otherwise they would know that it's empowering for women. A show of trust in a partner and an overall honesty that comes from that type of relationship.
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The trust is illusory, the relationship is unequal and based on forcing that intimacy through breaking the will or subverting the will of the submissive to the dominant. In true trust you come together as equals not as a dominant and submissive. In true trust there is equal submission and no dominance ie both submit equally to the other while neither attempts to dominate.

Why does one person feel the need to dominate? And why does one feel the need to be submissive to the point of giving up all free will? These character traits indicate underlying psychological issues that, if resolved, will end the desire to meet their unmet needs through such behaviour.
 
I'm pretty much a bored housewife and this is one of my favorite books of all time. I know I fit the target demographic to a tee and honestly I think it's cool that more books are being targeted at us lonely middle aged wives.
 
I've watched many interviews with E.L James and the way she described the book was for a way for women to express their sensuality without being seen in a bad way. But it was a bit intense. However there is a lot of authors who write like that only not so much sex scenes, such as Gena Showalter and Lynsday Sands. They are good authors but most of their books are paranormal romance.
 
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