Fifty Shades Of Book Sex?
The success of Fifty Shades of Grey — and the book world’s rush to embrace its profits and success — raise the question of whether you can no longer sell a book without some heart-thumping, explicit and kinky sex: kinkier even thane Leda and the Swan.
The Atlantic Wire’s Jen Doll wrote a terrific piece about this: Does Every Book Have to Be Sexy Now?
“Of course erotica, even the BDSM kind, has been around for a lot longer than the first book in the Fifty Shades trilogy.
“When we applaud ourselves for discovering this whole new untapped genre (that has actually existed for ages), we can’t separate the popularity of the books from the hype about the books.
“All this media attention, all these people talking and writing about the series, positively or negatively, gets more and more people to buy the series. The sales secret of Fifty Shades is not sex.
“It is publicity, a publicity machine, really. The amazing, unexpected, frequently grassroots publicity about this book, and not the content, is what’s new.”
Of course, this has massive, throbbing, turgid implications for authors.
Of course.
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Yep, Doll is right that sex in books ain’t new.
Interestingly, the 1980s had a similar trend of graphic, explicit sex. This was pre-AIDS territory where the sexual revolution had a lot more than fifty schools of outrageousness. Nothing was taboo. The kinkier the better.
My editors encouraged excess and outrageousness, and so I obliged them. Pinnacle sold several million copies of those thrillers. Of all of them, Queensgate Reckoning probably had more lurid sex than any other.
After Queensgate was published in 1982, one book reviewer dubbed me “the Sidney Sheldon of thrillers.” I was never actually sure whether that was a compliment or not.
When I wasn’t writing books, I honed my sex scene skills by writing the odd couplings that were supposedly sent in by Playgirl readers … you know, sex with aliens, sex in bank vaults and atop symbolically phallic television towers and high rises.
I was on the faculty at UCLA at the time teaching journalism and never, ever mentioned any of this to anyone.
There. I have confessed. The weight has lifted almost like … nevermind.
THE COMING TREND
Over the next few years, with the rise of AIDS and other biologically creative STDs, sex in books grew softer, more cautious, less explicit and extreme. Indeed, the sex in my 2005 thriller Perfect Killer was described by Publisher’s Weekly as “almost chaste.”
So now, as I finish Nassau Directives for fall publication, I face a dilemma: I wrote the first draft of this book back in about 1989 or so and originally had an over-the-top, Caligula-like orgy scene aboard a super-yacht. And a few other explicit and off-beat sex scenes.
I eliminated some of the scenes and turned the volume on that orgy way, way down, from XXX to almost R.
So, now with the 50 Shades phenomenon swelling like …
I wonder if I should put them back in. Amp things back up.
Share your thoughts about this on Facebook, Google+ or elsewhere to let me know what I should do. I listen to my readers.
Please Note: I use various links to my books in this and other posts. But every link to every book can be found on my web site at Lew’s Books.
