By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
Many apologies for the long delay since my last blog post
here. It was a combination of circumstances, including the inevitable Christmas
and New Year celebrations when nobody really feels like doing very much, and a
month on a cruise ship sailing down to the Caribbean and then returning to
Portsmouth just before Christmas. That, I hasten to add, wasn’t a holiday, but
work, because one of my secondary duties, if you like, is lecturing on such
vessels, which usually means I stand up on my hind legs in front of a largely
disinterested audience every other day and for about 40 minutes or so I bore
them into submission.
The talks
I give vary from the sublime – Cold War espionage in Berlin – to the ridiculous
– the secrets of the Bermuda Triangle – but my bread and butter is destination
lecturing, talking about the next port the ship will be visiting. Of course,
when I’m not standing up in the theatre or wherever my time is my own, so
although it is work it really isn’t desperately hard work and I can usually get
quite a lot of writing done, at least when the ship’s at sea. When it’s alongside
in Barbados or Tortola, it’s very difficult to think of a really good reason to
stay on board and work.
The early part of this year is going to be fairly
hectic as well, because I have to do two cruises in fairly quick succession.
For the first, they’re flying me out to Hong Kong to join the Queen Mary 2,
returning from Sydney, and a couple of weeks after I get back I’m off again,
this time to Bangkok to join the Aurora, and then flying back from
Dubai.
But that’s
enough about my troubles. What I really want to talk about this week is porn.
Mummy porn, to be precise.
The
somewhat startling news was released this week that the Fifty Shades of Grey
series has sold 35 million copies in America and a further 35 million copies in
the rest of the world. However you slice it, 70 million sales for three books
that even their staunchest fans have to admit are barely average is pretty
impressive. These books have now outsold the entire Harry Potter series
and turned the author into a multimillionaire, all in just two years. According
to one industry insider, at the height of their popularity in Britain the
trilogy was selling around 1 million copies a week in paperback and 2 million
as electronic downloads, meaning that the author was banking almost £1 million
a week.
In the
good old days of traditional publishing, novels would be released first as hard
covers then, after a decent interval, as paperbacks and, if there was
sufficient interest, the publishers might later consider audiobooks or
something of that sort. But the American publishers of the Grey series
are doing it all backwards, and the next version of the books that will appear
will be hardbacks, and on the Valentine’s Day to boot, which has to be sending
some kind of a mixed message. Romance is dead – pass me those handcuffs? Or
maybe ‘Say it with whips’?
And in
these days of spin-offs and derivatives it’s probably only a matter of time
before we see the influence of this kind of mild mummy porn on the small
screen. How about a brand-new series called Weird Sex in the City?
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
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