50 Shades of Grey Author Makes Enough Money from Book Sales to Feed a Small Nation in One Day!

By Lisa Pool Content Manager | July 2, 2012 at 12:56 am | No comments | Celeb Buzz, Latest News | Tags: 50 Sades of Grey, Academy Awards, Angelina Jolie, Author EL James, celebrity, Ebooks, full figured, QG, QG WD, QGWD, Queen Grace, Weekly Dish

Yes, we know that 50 Shades of Grey is THE book of 2012. But, we had no idea how much author E.L. James was making off of her record breaking erotic tome. According to Perez Hilton, the wordsmith is raking in a whopping $200,000 a day from book sales. Gee, OK, let’s see… that adds up to $1.4 million a week! You could definitely feed a small nation on that! How exactly does such wealth from a book accumulate? It seems James is profiting mostly from eBooks, which makes us QG WD staffers guess that some folks are just a wee bit ashamed of their dirty secret passion and are hiding behind the cover-less guise of their Kindles and iPads.

If you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the past few months and don’t really know the buzz about 50 Shades of Grey well here’s some dish to fill you in from Screen Crush:

So what’s this ’50 Shades of Grey’ thing you keep seeing everywhere? Women all around you are reading it — ladies on the bus, that khaki-pantsed woman clutching her pearls in the coffee shop, your mom. And now they’re making it into a movie.

Lucky for you, I read this thing so you don’t have to.

’50 Shades of Grey,’ for the blissfully uninitiated, is a book trilogy written by E.L. James (no relation to Fudge), a woman who loved ‘Twilight‘ but was annoyed that there wasn’t enough sex in it. (Seriously.) So she wrote some fan-fiction and it became “internet popular.”

Fan-fiction is the written word equivalent of taking two naked dolls and mashing them together to make what you think sex looks like when you’re 10 years old. And it’s written at that level.

’50 Shades of Grey’ tells the story of Anastasia Steele (get it?) and Christian Grey (DO YOU GET IT?). His name is Christian because Edward was an obvious ‘Twilight’ reference, and E.L. James obviously watched ‘Secretary’ while doing her “research.” Anastasia is just like Bella Swan — a clumsy lip-biter (modern day pearl-clutcher) whose catchphrase is “Jeez” because she’s really Woody Allen. And she’s just as neurotic, if not worse. She’s a senior in college with plans to work for a publishing house, but she doesn’t own a computer or a smart phone and doesn’t know how to use them because this is fiction.

She falls in love with Christian, a guy who’s really into BDSM because he has mommy issues and anyone with kinks we don’t understand clearly has a dark history filled with abuse.
Christian is so mysterious and emotionally distant. He doesn’t like to be touched, and he’s never had a real relationship. Obviously Anastasia is special and the only person on earth who can get him to change. The book takes place over the course of a month, and by week two she’s in love with him because she was a virgin before they had sex, and it’s fun to perpetuate negative stereotypes about people who wait to lose their virginity.

The book has been called “mommy porn,” a label that denotes that grown women can’t enjoy pornography unless it’s poorly written garbage re-purposed as more poorly written garbage. But also it makes us think our mom likes fan-fic, and I respect my mom too much to believe this.

Throughout the book, Anastasia is slowly exposed to Christian’s “dark” world and his “Red Room of Pain,” which is just a room with a bunch of sex toys in it, but apparently we have to get all silly about it. I mean, we don’t call the kitchen the “White Room of Yummy” or the living room the “TV Room of Couching.” Anastasia is a cipher for purity, though, which means she’s a 14 year old girl in a 21 year old woman’s body and for a good hour after I started reading it I wondered when she’d get her first period, and then I worried that we’d get 20 pages on how much it freaked her out.

Read the full lowdown on 50 SOG –

And of course this spin wouldn’t be complete without the rumor that Angelina Jolie is smacking those puffy lips of hers to direct the movie version of this mega mondo best seller. The Oscar winner has reportedly had “a conversation or two” about stepping up to direct Fifty Shades of Grey, which Universal Pictures bought the rights to.

A close Angelina Jolie source denies these reports, saying the newly-engaged 37-year-old actress is “completely focused on her next film, Maleficent.” It’s hard to see Jolie tied to the film, but not because of her schedule – Fifty Shades is still a long ways off. It’s just a little out of her creative wheelhouse. Hm… Oscar-winning A-list actress and director takes on Twilight-inspired fan fiction turned softcore mommy read. Somehow these things don’t mesh.

Or do they? Should Angie direct the film, and if not, who should? Who do you think should star in the key roles? Tell us QGer’s in the comment section below!