Fifty shades of marketing · 3:09am Oct 19th, 2014
My question about "story views" reminded me...
The story about "Fifty Shades of Grey" is that it was a spectacularly popular Twilight fan-fiction, with over two million reads online. The publishing giant Vintage Press saw that number and realized they had a hit on their hands. They filed off the Twilight serial numbers, put it in print, marketed it like hell, and now it's sold 60 million copies, satisfying a huge but previously unrealized market for bad BDSM chick-lit-porn.
Part of that is true.
Though the Twilight fandom was very large, it was still too small, I thought, for one story to have two million reads. A little searching and I found the original quote was "over two million hits". It was reported by Anne Jamison, author of "fic: Why Fan-Fiction is Taking Over the World". I emailed her and asked where that number came from. She replied,
The "millions" numbers I had were not public; I had them from screenshots from various writers. The counts were from fanfiction.net which, for the Twilight fandom, remained the biggest hub--most if not all stories that were also posted at Twilighted.net and TWCS were also posted on ff.net. Ff.net tallies reads but doesn't--unlike Wattpad or AO3--make them public.
But for all the sites, read or hit counts are for every time someone clicks on the story--so if they click through the front page to get to chapter 37, that's 2 reads.
Fan-fiction is published one chapter at a time. "Fifty Shades of Grey" has 26 chapters, but when it was originally published on fanfiction.net as "Master of the Universe", it had over 100 chapters. More digging by gwern showed that the story had over 40,000 reviews when it was on chapter 70. It had 37,000 reviews when it reached 2 million hits. So let's say it had 65 chapters when it reached 2 million hits on fanfiction.net.
fanfiction.net adds 1 hit every time any page of the story is reloaded. If you go to chapter 1 and read all the way through to chapter 120 in one sitting, that's 120 hits. If you log in, see it updated, go to chapter 1, and then go from there to the new chapter, that's at least 239 hits to read the book. If you refresh the page, that's another hit. (I verified this myself by refreshing one chapter of one story of mine 3 times on fanfiction.net, checking the stats before and after.) If you read half of one chapter one day, and log in again and finish it the next, that's at least 2 hits. If you leave it in an open tab on your computer, that's 1 hit every time you open your browser. If you reread the story, the hits double. If you click on the story each day to see if it's updated, hits go way up.
Two million hits on a 65-chapter story means a theoretical maximum of 2,000,000 / 65 = 30,769 readers had read it on fanfiction.net when that "two million" figure was reported. More likely, given re-readings, users who always go in through chapter 1, users who quit halfway through, browser refreshes, etc., perhaps 10,000 readers finished it on fanfiction.net, and let's say another 10,000 on other sites. That's about as many readers as finished My Roommate is a Vampire.
What actually happened was that a fanfiction that had been read by at most a few tens of thousands of people was reported on in a way that misled publishers into thinking that it had millions of readers, when really, it just had a lot of chapters. So they put a major marketing campaign behind it, and sold tens of millions of copies.
But was Fifty Shades of Grey really what people wanted? Or would the same thing have happened with almost any book they'd marketed as heavily?
I think Fifty Shades had a lot of things going for it. The marketing was one of them, but on its own it was a perfect storm of "stuff people actually buy"-- it had the Twilight connection, tapping into that fanbase; it's also a typical romance novel, which always have a steady fanbase; and it was sensational both for being a mainstream book about kinky sex, and for being elevated fanfiction. That equates to a lot of people checking it out. The marketing folks were just smart enough to make a big deal of all of those things being there.
Now, I don't know that those are all things people wanted. The last two in particular aren't really a waiting audience so much as an audience created for one specific book-- another similar book trying to pick up the same audience would fail because they're out there waiting for the next "what do people see in this" thing.
2542411 What's the paper? Gonna post it on your fimfic blog?
Well, it can't all be marketing. If it was just the heavy amount of marketing they would be able to do that with any book on at least a semi-regular basis. The marketing helps, but I'm of the opinion that most of it is just right place and right time. Of course I'm heavily cynical about that sort of thing. The whole 'this book is amazingly popular and the books I enjoy are not' kind of thing. Plus I can't write that poorly so I'm never going to make yachts full of money from my writing.
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I heard that the author got a lot of people to spread word about it.
I swear I've read this exact blog post before.
Well, I think there are some pony stories which have some very real potential for mass market. Much as I really don't like My Little Dashie, the fact that it has 400k+ hits probably means SOMETHING, and frankly, it is a glurgy tragedy - and people seem to enjoy glurgy tragedies. Which makes me think that if you were to adapt My Little Dashie into something else, file off the MLP serial numbers so to speak, you could have a huge hit.
Of course, saying that, let's face reality here - it already has happened. There are a number of stories about people raising baby animals and then returning them to the wild, which are fundamentally rather similar in nature to My Little Dashie. Even Free Willy could be seen as a variation on this story, wherein there was an actual antagonist beyond the actual need to return to reality. Indeed, I think I actually READ a variation on My Little Dashie which involved a dragon egg many, many years ago - the protagonist gets a dragon egg, raises the little dragon, and then lets them go at the end back to... wherever (some other magical world I think?).
Hard Reset already has a lot of variations in the world. Thunder Struck is, from what I can tell from the story summary, about someone who makes a robot which becomes a person, which Bicentennial Man is. Anthropology is a "magical person/changeling/person raised by wolves comes to the real/human world" story, which has been done. Past Sins is about whether or not someone who was evil in a prior life will have to be evil again in this one by necessity, which I'm sure exists.
Background Pony has a really strong concept behind it and I could easily see it becoming a successful non-pony book or movie.
I mean, sure, Xenophilia is about someone having sex with horses... but uh, frankly, I think there's probably a market for that, too.
I think it is less that anything so heavily promoted would have been so successful, and more that its semi-controversial nature, curiousity, and other things drove sales, along with the promotion and the fact that some demographic of people really did want that story.
Yes and no. It's marketing saturation was good enough that I know people who got it because they 'heard it was good' and were disgusted. But, trashy romance novels with bad boy leads have always had a pretty large market.
So I'd say Fifty Shades' success was partially aggressive sales strategies and partially content. But I think it's more the former than something like Harry Potter's success.
So 50 Shades of Grey was "just" a fanfic at some point? Didn't know that, but it's quite interesting...
Coincidentally, since your earlier post touched a little on the subject, aren't fimfiction story views similar in that manner? But each chapter as separate viewcount, from what I remember...
I'mma link to the 50 Shades Reddit Origins Essay, since it's got some interesting tidbits. Everyone knows that 50SoG was Twilight fanfiction, but I didn't know it was also a humanized AU, as were the majority of Twilight fanfics at the time. Also, the Twilight fandom had trailblazing stories that started crazes same as the MLP fandom does. Masters of the Universe wasn't the first BDSM!AU fic to set the fandom on fire, that was The Submissive (also pulled to publish). Masters of the Universe was a derivative, lower-quality fic pumped out with a bunch of low-level SEO-type stuff that you mentioned in your post.
So, James didn't even hit it off with a fresh idea, still full of adorable, newly-conceived first-draft first-gen kinks (lol) and cliches. She borrowed heaps from an already-established fic, churned that fucker out, and made some serious bank.
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I think MLD succeeded for the same reason that Cupcakes succeeded: They got big really early in the fandom. It's strange to think it, but even two years ago, you could have read all the porn on FIMfic in a single day. The fandom was just kicking into gear, and those two fics were at the forefront of their respective genres. Also, they're both short and easy to read, which really goes in their favor. I remember first seeing MLD after seeing it mentioned on a meme, and if it had been a 20k+ monster I'd have said 'nah' and walked away.
Controversial opinion: I think Xenophilia's prominence is all merit, and that it's top of its genre. Name one long-form HiE erotica better than Xenophilia. Sophistication and Betrayal sucks. This Magic Moment and all of Scatman2001's stories suck. Those are literally the only other prominent stories in that genre I can think of, and both suck. Xenophilia is a competent story in most regards and an excellent story in many others, and I think it's the cream of that particular crop.
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I've read Xenophilia because a bunch of people recommended it to me, and because it was a very prominent story (indeed, I've at least read some of most of the most prominent stories, though admittedly I've not touched The Conversion Bureau at all).
It may well be the best human-in-equestra-fucking-ponies novel, but that's an overly narrow superlative if I've ever heard one.
To be entirely honest, I was not very fond of the clop in that story at all; I found it to be... well, not that sexy I guess. Admittedly, I'm not a big fan of humans boning ponies to begin with, but that story did not change my opinion on the matter at all. Of course, the more cynical might argue that I'm not overly fond of humans banging anyone, but that is neither here nor there.
I thought that some of the ideas that the story had were interesting, but unfortunately the story never really executed on them very well. The idea of a civilization with a very different male:female ratio and the expectations that would put on people is potentially interesting, but the story didn't really end up doing as much with it as it could have/should have, and the whole "alien culture" thing never really quite worked out all the way. There was also the weird plot with Princess Celestia which got aborted, as well as the whole thing with Lyra and pony fighting styles which was given some amount of emphasis and then never really went anywhere. The rather abrupt ending wherein they all lived happily ever after with a bunch of random plot threads being left hanging didn't really help the story's case, either.
Thus, in summmary, I thought that the premise behind the story was actually pretty solid, but found the execution to be lacking.
I think even beyond all that, though, I never bonded with Lero; he was really quite generic and bland. I really didn't ever get a good grasp on who he was, as a person, even after over a hundred thousand words, and honestly, a lot of the time he seemed to just kind of go along with the flow of the story rather than be an active participant in it. He served to give commentary, but in a story which was all about the differences between humans and ponies, he doesn't really care very much and is very laid back about it all, which realy kind of messes up the basis of the plot, which is all about how ponies are different from humans. He is entirely too reasonable about everything, and just pretty much does whatever, and it just doesn't work with the setup of the story and results in him being a cardboard cutout who is moved around to advance the plot rather than a really 3D character.
Now, it may well be the greatest human-in-equestria-fucking-ponies novel, and I will probably never read another one and thereby it will by definition remain the greatest human-in-equestria-fucking-ponies novel I've ever read, but that doesn't make it good, it makes it a very lonely entry in its category. It serves its audience adequetely, I think, providing some sort of plot around a bunch of human-on-pony action, but the story could have been - and frankly, should have been - much better than it was, and Lero could have been a much more interesting character and thereby actually helped to further the central idea behind it, which was that pony society was weird. If he had cared more and been more difficult about things, and more weirded out by things, I think it would have helped actually make him a real character.
Of course, it may be that the reason he was so bland and generic was to make it easier for the audience to put themselves into his shoes, because they all want to... well, everyone knows that meme.
2542964 Chuck wrote a long and interesting dissection of what have xenophilia so great, but unfortunately the blog seems to be gone now, presumably because it was marked nsfw and got purged. Shame really. I thought it was insightful.
I just wish I'd saved a copy.
2543078
That is unfortunate. I suspect I would agree with a lot of what he said about it being interesting, because it is an interesting story - or rather, it has interesting ideas.
The problem is that I didn't actually enjoy it very much; the ideas it had excited me, but the actual execution of the story really didn't. Looking back at the first couple chapters, the flow of the story is often very awkward and stilted, and oftentimes it doesn't feel entirely natural, like the writer has these ideas that they want to push out there but they kind of feel misshapen and not completely formed.
2543083 I suspect that's a result of its origin as a oneshot that got extended after the fact.
You mean people lie? With statistics? On the INTERNET?
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...'k I'm going for a walk now.
2542663
Wolf Children has alot of those bases covered. Excellent animated film, go watch if you haven't.
Another particular example in general off the top of my head is Written in Dust (probably my favourite fic on the site) which, if you struck away the already bare links to MLP, would make for a fantastic film / TV series. If I had a dream, it would be to produce something like that.
2543164
To be fair, that's probably the correct reaction.
I'm sorry for being crude; that's what I get for posting when I'm tired and all my filters turn off.
2543083
2543078
I have recreated an (almost entirely unchanged) SFW version of that blogpost here.
2543597
The Bella Swan comparison tempts me to take this story out of my bookshelf. Please tell me that Lero is not also a clingy sociopath.
2544144
Not at all, Lero is a thoroughly decent and likeable bloke in the story. The comparison is that they're both intended as reader inserts, and the emotional dynamics of the reader vis-a-vis the story work through them in similar ways.
Wait...
50 Shades of Gray was a Twilight Fanfic in an earlier incarnation...
No wonder I've had a natural aversion to it!
The only Twilight I read is Sparkle!
I read the linked article.
I'm pretty sure the 2 million number was referring to a different story.
That has no bearing on your major point, which I understood as "50 shades of grey was as much a marketing success as tapping-into-pent-up-demand success". Which I think is true of marketing period.
I'm sure that with a more complex algorithm and more invasive tracking you could get a more accurate reader count. But how would you score partial reads? Remember that a person who buys a book and doesn't finish it--still buys the book.
Then again inflated figures have long been an industry staple. So many copies "sold" (as in "New York Times Bestseller!") refers to library sales and wholesale lots to bookstores, not to copies bought retail by an intended reader. And worse still the blurb "MILLIONS OF COPIES IN PRINT!"
And then there's the fellow in the Pratchett or Adams or Gaiman novel who sold his soul to the Devil in order to become a best-selling novelist, the one of whom millions of people said "You know, I bought his book--I just can't seem to get around to reading it."
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D'oh!
You're right.
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The dragon book is definitely Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher because yea, Bruce Coville stuff was awesome when I was a kid. And I am replying to this over a year later thanks to Bad Horse relinking this blog, and because I can
3824287
Ah, yes. That was the book!
But yeah.