50 Shades of Gray Times 20 Million Equals ... What?

Ah, wealth porn and porn pron, a traditional fantasy combination! Image source: me.
My flying monkeys have informed me from sources worldwide that sales of the 50 Shades of Gray erotic trilogy have passed 20 million copies sold worldwide, as reported in a previous post. Well as Anna would say, "Oh my!" As I noted when sales passed 10 million, this is a huge, huge number. It basically means that 20 million women are enjoying BDSM fantasies. And I want to put this a little more in perspective by describing how it affects something I know well, rather than dealing with it just as a publishing phenomenon, as I did in my previous post.

I'm a player in Second Life Gor, which has tens of thousands of players. The best number we have is 50,000 players, but that was from several years ago. The widespread use of alts (alternative avatars) could have inflated the number, or not (IIRC the 50,000 number was leaked by a Linden based on credit card numbers, which would not be bamboozled by alts. The source also said, based on the gender of names, that the ratio of female to male players in Second Life Gor is about 60/40, which roughly jibes with my personal experience. (I use Ventrillo, an internet voice service, to raid, and with voice it's easy to tell who's male and who's female.) So the number has some cred with me, though it remains guesswork and not exactly reliably sourced, as the Linden who revealed the numbers has not come forward. But it's the best estimate we have.

Now let us suppose that some tiny fraction of the women who read 50 Shades of Gray decide they want to enjoy some bondage and dominance fantasy in a more direct way, and find their way to Second Life Gor. Suppose that number was just one tenth of one percent, i.e., one in a thousand. That would lead to 200,000 new players joining Second Life Gor. Four times the number of current players.

Unfortunately, given that the readership of 50 Shades of Gray is almost completely female, the odds are that the overwhelming majority of 50 Shades of Gray readers who come to Gor will want to play slavegirls. Sexy slavegirls, who want a master all their own. And with just 40 percent of Gorean players being male, and only 50,000 Gorean players total ... there's gonna be a LOT of unhappy slavegirls!

Ah well. You win some, you lose some!


The importance of the fact that 20 million women are enjoying fantasies like this cannot be overstated. It's the sort of thing that the term "game changer" was invented to describe. Image source: Sex and Submission.

50 Shades of Gray Update: 20 Million Sold Worldwide

Picture this, times 20 million, in the minds of women worldwide. Oh, the times they are a-changing. Image source: Hogtied.com.
To a certain extent, writing about anything other than 50 Shades of Gray feels almost futile, it's that big a phenomenon. New sales figures show the book has sold 20 million copies worldwide.

I think by now the explanation for its success is in part its success: it now has "plausible deniability" going for it. The fact that everyone else is reading it makes it OK to read. You can enjoy the dirty, dirty scenes in the book knowing that you are not an extraordinary freak, or even out of the ordinary, while doing so. Like Slave Leia, it's entered the popular culture. It's "OK" to enjoy it.

But here's the thing. It's being described as a new "tentpole" book by traditional publishers. Such publishers have pretty much neglected their midlist books ... once the staple of the publishing industry ... in hopes that sales of one or two bestsellers will compensate for the lack of the lower-profit books.

Here's the thing, though. 50 Shades of Gray owes NONE of its success to the big publishers. It was a runaway bestseller as an e-book, long before Vintage Books moved in and made E.L. James a multimillion dollar offer she would not refuse. All the Vintage Books people did was add traditional sales to the success of 50 Shades of Gray as an e-book.

So, there is no guarantee that publishers can generate such sales in the future. They did not create the book's success in the first place. All they can do is jump on the bandwagon and hope that fan writers or erotic romance writers sends a new tentpole their way. It's no way to run an industry. In fact, it's down right stupid. Then again, we've seen bankers and politicians behave like idiots for years. Why shouldn't traditional publishers do the same? Personally, I hope the lot of them go out of business, if they can't do better than they have done.