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Plus, because you don't have to worry about stuff like embarrassing covers, you can make your book as erotic or dumb or Tucker Max-ish as you damn well please, and people will buy it and read it on the bus. ePublishing is not difficult, and anyone can do it. If you're still unpublished, pick the latter. With ePublishing, you have a few choices: turn up your nose and decide it's garbage, or play along and use it to your advantage. James went for it, and as a result, people talked about it. If this was a nice, safe book that danced around all the sexy bits, it wouldn't have titillated church ladies, it wouldn't have made for splashy headlines, and it wouldn't have felt like a naughty treat. But even more true is that safety doesn't sell. "Sex sells" is the stupidest adage of all time, even if it is true.
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But instead, she's just been super-open about it, which seems to endear her to her fans, and make them more ready to defend her. Which sounds simple, but in the face of as much scrutiny as this woman has seen, it would be easy to cower and be ashamed of the fantasies and the bondage and the sex. James, she has given several interviews in which she is flat-out honest about the sexy stuff, about how she wrote it during her "midlife crisis," and how she was totally blown away by the reception. By picking a totally non-threatening, boring pen-name, the author did a pretty smart thing-she removed any way for onlookers to judge on name alone. James, however, it was suddenly way more mysterious. James (real name: Erika Leonard) published her book under the name-I am not making this up-Snowqueens Icedragon. Don't shrug off a good idea just because it comes from something not-great. Actual inspiration tends to lend itself to better (or at least, more relatable stories) than whatever you poop out because a publisher expects another novel.
![if you liked fifty shades of grey you ll like if you liked fifty shades of grey you ll like](http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/803/479/a19.png)
Either way, you are inspired, and you should roll with it. Oh, Bella and Edward inspired you to write a sexy book about sexy sex? You are either a 12-year-old girl who shop-lifts from Hot Topic and kisses a poster of Robert Pattinson at night, or you are now a millionaire named E. That it can be done, and it could be you who does it. Don't expect it to happen to you-but know that it can. Or something like that.Īnyway, here's what we can all stand to learn from Fifty Shades Of Grey:įirst and foremost, like I said, this is a unicorn. We must because if we don't learn from our mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them. And while it may burn our eyes to gaze upon it, we must. That's how I feel about Fifty Shades Of Grey. Even if it's an ugly, non-sparkly, bent-horned, club-footed unicorn, you still look. You determine what can be gained from seeing it. And here is why: when a unicorn crosses your path, you look at it. It is also a a bestseller that has managed to move over ten million units. By now you have definitely heard of, formed an opinion about, and possibly even read Fifty Shades Of Grey, the kinked-out Twilight fan-fic BDSM trilogy that has Christian panties in a twist and schoolmarms giggling behind their Kindles.