And This is Precisely My Point

To comment on my wonderful husband's blog, yes, men & women are different, and we get very different things from what we read.

The Fifty Shades series has certainly gotten the continent talking.  With plenty of "romance" novels and erotic books, why has this series made it into the hands of so many women (and men, although they are talked about less)?  Most of the discussion centers around the large amount of sex in the books and that the sex goes past "vanilla."  I am a huge fan of romance novels.  I even have some where the character and relationship development have touched me so much that I keep them, and read them over and over, whenever I need a pick me up.  I go through many when Sean is away.  Most I can read in a day or two.  This is not fine literature, but if the writing is good, the story will touch you.  I am unlikely to reread Shades of Grey.

Yes, there is a lot of sex in the text.  But as I posted previously, the books are not wonderfully written.  The author shows promise.  Her development of the main characters has been good.  Although, even there, readers know much more about the character of Christian Grey than Anastasia Steele, his significant other.   Unfortunately, the peripheral characters barely see any development.  They are background, window dressing on her story.  Nevertheless, E.L. James has created a good story.  The story itself is a good one, beyond the sex.  It is a story of Grey, a damaged and abused individual caught in his past, barely coping, and how he moves beyond his past to be free of it.  Even while recognizing the flaws in the writing, you care about the character of Grey, and want to know what happens next.  James does not do the expected, and there are bursts of very promising creative writing.

Really the story is not the books, but the wildfire, public spread into the hands of so many.  Why this book?  Why now?  Better and more well-known writers have written erotica.  Anne Rice, of the original vampire craze, wrote a series.  Why E.L. James and not Anne Rice?

At first I thought it might have been the timing.  When the are barely dressed models selling sex cars, food, and even cleaning supplies, the shock factor slips away.  Still, Fifty Shades is often downloaded because people do not want others to see them holding the book.  We clearly are still embarrassed on some level.  There have been periods of time when erotica, and even porn, was mainstream.  Crowds publicly flocked to see Caligula and Deep Throat.  Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Story of O have had their day in the sun.  There were obscenity trials, but that just made more people want to read them.    And that is the key to the Grey series- PUBLICITY!

In sales the key is often location, location, location.  Location provides you with traffic and noticeably.  In the publishing world location is all about publicity.  Where can you publicize?  How do you publicize?  Shades of Grey won the world series of publicity.  t became a news story.  Whether intentionally or not, like the news of obscenity trials spurred sales of Lady Chatterley, and feminist critism the sales of "O", the news that... oh my God! SOCCER MOMS ARE READING ABOUT SEX... spurred others to buy the book, which in turn created more news, which created more sales.  Brilliant.

By the way, soccer moms, and other types of moms, know about sex.  We have children.  And... there's a good chance not all the sex was, as Grey puts it, vanilla.