I subscribe to Publishers Weekly (the bible of the U.S. publishing industry) and get a news feed every morning. Today there was some gobsmackin’ news to wake up to: E.L. James has been named Publishing Person of the Year.
Within the confines of the book industry, it’s a very big deal.
Let me refresh your memory. E.L. James is the penname of Erika Leonard. She wrote an erotic trilogy, the titles of which are Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed.
They are selling like shovels in a snowstorm, like handguns when the aliens invade, like toilet paper at a diarrhea festival. It is the fastest-selling adult (as against the categories of juvenile, or young adult) series ever. There’s going to be a movie.
The body of work started life online, as Twilight fan fiction, under the title Master of the Universe, and became a massive viral success. Then it was acquired by Random House (I hunted around the internet and could find no word at all on whether Random did any editing on it). Random distributed it in print and digital formats.
Sales so far: 35 million copies in the U.S. alone. Earnings to the publisher: $200 million. Foreign language translations: 45.
Given the (somewhat) standard 10% author royalty, that means $20 million to the author. Although I’d bet the farm that she has an escalating royalty agreement. Probably something along the lines of 10% for the first million copies sold, 15% for the next million, and 20 or even 25% for all sales after that.
This is PW’s statement as to why they made this controversial choice: “Because the success of the series continues to reverberate throughout the industry in a number of ways–among other things, the money it’s brought in helped boost print sales in bookstores and turned erotic fiction into a hot category–we have selected James as the most notable player on the publishing stage this year.”
Whadaya think of this?
Image: Wiki
