I've sold around 3,000 books in total now.
#Second book of 50 shades of grey series
There are five books in the series and as I was publishing them, people were messaging me asking me what happened next and telling me what they wanted to happen. I had lots of ideas, so I started the second book in August 2020, and then a few months later the third. But within months of publishing the first book, I was getting messages from women thanking me, saying that I'd made them laugh or that it was the first book they'd read in a long time and they loved it so much they had started reading again, so I had to admit it was me.Īfter just 8 months I'd sold more than 1,000 copies, which is great for a self published book. Carmine, because if people thought the book was awful, I wouldn't need to admit it was me. She realizes that they are beautiful but missing something, so she starts to read erotica and decides she wants to transform herself into an erotic goddess. There's a lot of build up to the crescendo, though the sex scenes themselves are very short.Īnn is my heroine, she's always had a mundane love life and she loves Victorian romance novels. I haven't really read any erotica, so I don't know how explicit the books are. I did feel a bit embarrassed, but I knew what was going to happen at the end of the scene, so that made it easier somehow. I published the first book in June 2020 and I both cringed and laughed writing my first sex scene. So, I wrote a funny, dirty book about a woman who goes on a mission to transform herself into an erotic goddess, but everything she tries goes utterly wrong. I could either bake banana bread or write a funny, dirty book. Instead of your classic, coiffed heroine, you could have a normal, everyday woman with cellulite and frizzy hair. I'd always wanted to write and it occurred to me I could put a really different spin on an erotic novel. We snag our tights, we trip over in our heels and when you get to my age, 50, you're coping with hot flushes and a hairy chin. Then I read a few lines of Fifty Shades of Grey, I'd never read it or any erotic fiction before, and I remember thinking that women just aren't like that. I looked at my options I couldn't cook and I thought I'd dislocate something if I tried online exercise. I knew I had to do something to occupy myself, make myself laugh and relieve some anxiety. You could feel the tension in the air, nobody knew what was going to happen. I had two sons home from college, one homeschooling and the business became a no go. I was left wondering what on earth I was going to do with myself. went into lockdown and everything stopped. James managed to transform that popularity into a real-life, seven-figure publishing deal.I'm a mom of three adult sons and in early 2020, I was in the process of setting up a recruitment company that would help people over the age of 50 get back into the workplace. James had a fanbase before she was an actual author. She also collaborated with other people in the Twilight fandom and went as far as to create video trailers for her fanfiction.
Before it was removed from, the 100+ chapter fic had almost 4 thousand comments, and that was only on one of the sites where James published the fic.
Yes, she worked for the BBC, but James' true genius is actually in getting her work out there.ĥ0 Shades of Grey famously started off as a hugely popular fanfiction in the Twilightfandom called Master of the Universe. James’ husband is a successful screenwriter. Romance has dozens of sub-genres-sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian, comedy, historical, adventure. Although there are a few do’s and don'ts of romance when it comes to the plot, the rest is wide open. If you've never considered writing romance or dismissed it as a genre, it's worth giving it a second look. Still, with a reader base that's only growing, there's room for both of these popular kinds of protagonists. In recent years, the more quirky "smart-girl" and gentler "cinnamon-roll guy" sub-genres of romance have become popular as well. You'll still see plenty of these types of novels on Amazon Charts for romance, though. Since the publication of 50 Shades of Grey, these sub-genres have been heavily criticized for their portrayals of hyper-masculine, dominant heroes or of the ever popular depressive demon nightmare boy trope. 50 Shades falls squarely in the "billionaire romance" and "alpha-hero" sub-genres, following those scripts like a paint-by-number kit. Like superhero movies, coming-of-age stories, and fantasy novels, romance has a distinctive set of plot beats. The readers are voracious and loyal, happily reading book number 10, 20 or 30 in a series they enjoy. Yes, the romance novel has been mocked in the past, called fluff, bodice-rippers, and so much worse.īut guess what? This genre makes up nearly 25% of all fiction sales in the U.S, second only to general fiction.