In a note to readers on the dedication page of her new novel, Grey, E L James sounds a bit like the exasperated mother of whiny, demanding children. "This book is dedicated to those readers who asked ... and asked ... and asked ... and asked for this," she writes.
Grey is a 559-page retelling of James's blockbuster erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, this time from the perspective of the moody billionaire Christian Grey. Readers who tore through Fifty Shades of Grey and the other books in the best-selling trilogy have been badgering James for this version since she published the books in 2011.
For many fans, the wait ended Thursday with the publication of Grey, which rehashes Christian's seduction of the demure college student Anastasia Steele as he draws her into a dominant-submissive sadomasochistic relationship.
But others refused to wait for James to write more. Instead, they created versions of Christian Grey's story and posted them online, where they are drawing huge audiences of their own.
Gillian Griffin, a married, 58-year-old mother of three who lives in Surrey, England, was so smitten with the enigmatic, controlling character that she rewrote all three Fifty Shades novels from his point of view, and posted them on her blog, Meet Fifty Shades, under the pen name Christian Grey. It was mostly for her own amusement, she said, but others noticed. The novels, which took her a year to complete, have been viewed 8.8 million times. Griffin said she was eager to see what James has done with the same material.
"I'm very curious to see how her story is different from mine," Griffin, who has also written Downton Abbeyfan fiction, said in a phone interview. "It's a little bit weird, because it's her story, her work, her characters. I was just borrowing them for a bit of fun." Fan fiction usually follows in the wake of a popular franchise, as readers take ownership of the characters and create their own stories. But in an unusual twist, James's followers got out ahead of her, recasting Fifty Shades from the smoldering billionaire's point of view well before she announced plans to do so herself.
"Every girl that read that book fell in love with him," said a Fifty Shades fan in Glasgow who publishes fan fiction about Christian Grey under the pen name Scarlette Drake on the website Wattpad, a popular site for fan fiction and original stories. (She spoke on condition her real name not be used to avoid scandalising her co-workers at a housing charity.)
That fans would run amok with the story was probably inevitable. Readers today often behave more like corporate shareholders than consumers, demanding a say in the direction a story takes and adding their own flourishes and twists. There are 2,400 fan-fiction stories based on Fifty Shades published on fanfiction.net, and many more on Tumblr and Fifty Shades-centric sites.
These writers are just following in the footsteps of James herself, who started writing Fifty Shades as free fan fiction, based on the characters Edward and Bella from Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. She changed their names to Christian and Anastasia, deleted her original fan fiction, and published the books with a small press in Australia.
After Vintage acquired paperback rights to the trilogy and published it in 2012, the books went on to sell 125 million copies in 52 languages. A feature film released in February generated nearly $570 million in global ticket sales. The series even spawned an unlikely line of merchandise, from Fifty Shades branded wine and handcuffs to lube and massage oil, vibrators, bondage rope and something called After Spanking cream. Forbes named James the highest-earning author of 2013, with an estimated income of $95 million.
Grey is already the most preordered digital book of 2015 on Amazon. But some fans are not impressed. On Thursday morning, just hours after the book's release, a sprinkling of negative reviews on Amazon and Goodreads took aim at Grey as a lazy and unimaginative follow up with little in the way of an original plot.
For many, though, more of the same is exactly what they want. "We fell in love with the story of Christian and Anna," said Penny Brueggemann, 56, who lives in Illinois and works for Purina. "We all wanted more."
She found it online, in the writing of Emine Fougner. About four years ago, Fougner and a few friends were dissecting the plot and characters in Fifty Shades. They agreed that Christian was the darker, more interesting character. Fougner's friends urged her to write her own version of the story from his point of view, so she started a blog. "They said, 'We don't really care about Ana; we want to hear what he thinks,'" she said.
© 2015 The New York Times
