[kennyc]

From The Atlantic:

After 'Fifty Shades of Grey,' What's Next for Self-Publishing?
By Sarah Fay
Apr 2 2012, 12:33 PM ET 14
The erotic novel became a New York Times bestseller without a traditional publisher, thanks to word of mouth. Can we expect more hits from nowhere?
First-time author E.L. James was offered $5 million dollars last month for the movie rights to her self-published novel, Fifty Shades of Grey. James, a former TV executive based in London, published the first installment of the Fifty Shades trilogy as an e-book. Without traditional distribution by a big-name publisher in the United States, the series caught on via word-of-mouth and Facebook. James then signed a seven-figure book deal with Vintage. Soon, Fifty Shades of Grey landed on the New York Times e-book and print bestseller lists. Of course, the hoopla surrounding Fifty Shades—and James—is unwarranted, at least from a literary perspective. The run-of-the-mill romance novel recounts the sexual relationship between ingénue Anastasia Steele and billionaire Christian Grey. It relies on a close first-person narrator (Anastasia Steele) and embarrassingly contrived descriptions, such as "My inner goddess is doing the dance of the seven veils."
Why, then, is there so much hype? Some ascribe it to the fact that the James's novel is essentially soft porn, which can sell anything from women's underwear to Fiats. And it's an e-book, which means that readers who might otherwise feel self-conscious about being seen buying or reading a trashy novel can do so relatively incognito. Others attribute it to the Ya-Ya phenomenon. Like Rebecca Wells's Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Fifty Shades of Grey became a popular success because women told other women to read it. In email correspondence and in conversations at nail salons, women talked about the book that everyone was reading.
But the novel's success may also have something to do with our collective love of the underdog. The publishing history of Fifty Shades of Grey is a rags-to-riches story. James was an amateur who started the Fifty Shades trilogy as fan fiction, an online ritual in which avid readers rewrite their favorite novels with slight variations. James wrote the first book as an homage to Stephanie Meyers's young adult vampire series Twilight. There's little remarkable about one mega-selling series spawning another, but James was a self-published writer who became a monetary success seemingly by beating the American publishing system at its own game
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Full article here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertain...ishing/255338/