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Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Enough! With the Fifty Shades Already!


Now don't get me wrong I loved the 'Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy by E.L. James and had read it long before it was picked up by a major publishing house.   We know that as the books became more and more successful we were getting more and more knock off books.  All of a sudden BDSM was the thing to slide into your books to make them "sexy" Books that didn't need the BDSM in their sexy scenes suddenly had them in there.  It is kinda like Fifty had been an injection into the contemporary romance genre as authors tried to run on it's coat tails. 

zzz So if this isn't bad enough we get all these knock off books "Fifty Shades of Alice in Wonderland" by Melinda DuChamp,"Fifty Shades of Silver Hair and Socks" by Phil Torcivia, "Fifty Shades of Chicken: A Parody in a Cookbook" by F.L. Fowler, "Fifty Shades of Red Riding Hood" by R.R. Hood and "Fifty Shades of Gay" by Ryan Matthews. The list goes on and on and on.  Fifty fifty fifty getting a big tired of hearing it.  

Then marketers started to jump on board and we found ourselves being marketed to death with Fifty Shades this or that:  Share All the Shades of Romance With Air Wick® Colour Changing Candles! An interesting article from Reuters called - Wildly popular erotica trilogy "Fifty Shades of Grey" has inspired publishers, record labels, sex shops, and even crafty parents to submit - to the desire to cash in, that is located: 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/27/entertainment-us-books-50shades-idUSBRE88Q1V120120927



The outcome of all this Fifty Shade Mania is readers are sick of reading BDSM books, buys are tired of the Fifty Shade tag lines in advertising and the scariest thing of all is that the movie hasn't even been made yet.  What is going to happen with the marketing when the movie hits the market  but if those in advertising don't slow it down..no one is going to want to see the movie. 

I don't know about all of you..but I am sooooo over it to quote my niece that is so 2012.  So what is the new Fifty for 2013...ahh we have yet to find it. 


3 comments:

  1. Hi,

    In my defense my book, Fifty Shades of Gay, isn't a knock off book at all...it's really a social experiment of sorts.

    The book is actually called "Future Queens of England" - which I thought was quite a clever title...but it wasn't selling well - I guess people thought it was a history book. So, as an experiment I relaunched the exact same book but with a new title, i.e. Fifty Shades of Gay and it started flying off the shelves...I was selling 60 copies of Fifty Shades of Gay for every 1 copy of Future Queens of England. I received some criticism for this, but can you blame me? All publicity is good publicity...but at some point I'll retire Fifty Shades of Gay, and return to the original title.

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    1. HI Ryan,

      Thanks for sharing your reasons with us and no don't blame you at all. I can see why you would want to use what is popular to help sell your book. We do what we do to make a living:)

      I'm sure you see my point with this, when I saw a air freshener using the FSoG I lost it.

      I wish you well with the book even when you return to the original title:)

      t'irla

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  2. Hi

    Yes...it seems everyone is getting in on the act. The worst part is that after I relaunched the book and searched on Amazon, I saw that there were already 13 other books all called 'Fifty Shades of Gay'...and there's probably even more now :-)

    I'm going to look out for the Fifty Shades of Gray air freshener...I'm wondering what on earth it smells of????

    Cheers

    Ryan

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