Kinky sex puts author EL James at top of the money pile
The first ‘Fifty Shades’ film, which has not even been cast yet, has already netted the author $5-million
FIFTY Shades of Grey has proven once again that sex sells — breaking another record in the process.
Its author, EL James, has topped the Forbes list of writers’ earnings for 2013, making $95-million (R950-million) from her steamy trilogy. This made her the highest-paid author in the world in the past year.
Forbes based its estimates on sales data between June 2012 and June 2013, published figures and information from industry sources.
The 50-year-old British novelist, whose real name is Erika Leonard and who gave up her job as a TV producer last year, has beaten even mega-author James Patterson, who has a record-breaking 29 titles on the current ebooks bestseller list.
He comes in at number two (and not so far behind, banking $91-million for the year), thanks mostly to his two young-adult series, Maximum Ride and Witch and Wizard.
Patterson still reigns supreme when it comes to churning out hits at a furious pace, according to Variety. He published 13 titles in 2012 and is set to hit the same number by this year’s end.
Suzanne Collins completes the first three, raking in $55-million for her Hunger Games series.
Even though her Harry Potter years are far behind her, JK Rowling demonstrated her staying power by cracking the top 20 on the list, coming in at 15, thanks in part to her novels The Casual Vacancy, which was published to a lukewarm reception, and The Cuckoo’s Calling, the first in a planned detective series that she wrote under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith and which received critical acclaim.
Like Collins and Rowling, James earned her cash both by selling a record number of books and attracting record fees for movie rights. The first Fifty Shades film, which has not even been cast yet, has already netted the author $5-million.
James is working on a new book. It is unlikely to mirror the success of Fifty Shades but, given her new-found stature in popular fiction, its publication is unlikely to hurt her spankingly attractive bottom line.
James published the erotic novel as an ebook in May 2011, and it quickly went viral online owing to its racy plot about an affair between student Anastasia Steele and 27-year-old Christian Grey, a dominating billionaire.
James wrote two sequels to Fifty Shades of Grey — Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed — and sales of all three books have topped 32 million copies worldwide, including 11 million in the UK and 16 million in the US.
It is thought that Random House, the book’s publisher in the UK, has generated £50-million in sales from the trilogy in that country.
The books have been credited with spurring an increased interest in erotic fiction in the UK. So many people bought copies of Fifty Shades of Grey in Doncaster, south Yorkshire, last year on Amazon that the town beat any other in Britain for book sales.
Near the top of the Forbes authors list are Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln and the followup, Killing Kennedy. This gave him fourth spot with $28-million in earnings in the past year.
O’Reilly, a host on Fox News TV, is busy with the third in the trilogy, Killing Jesus, which is likely to be the most popular in the series.
The Forbes list includes several faces familiar to Hollywood. There is Diary of a Wimpy Kid writer Jeff Kinney at number six, Dan Brown at number nine and, in the 10th spot, Stephen King, who is also behind US television’s latest sensation, Under the Dome. — Jennifer Platt and © The Daily Telegraph, London