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 audio books 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
That doesn't sound like a bad way to make a living! (if I wasn't so afraid of 'standing on my hind legs' and talking to people...) :-S
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