Fifty Shades to get cash-in notebook accompaniment
It’s been a hot, awkwardly phrased minute since we last had anything worth reporting on the ol’ Fifty Shades of Grey front. Thankfully however, after three months, our long, hard, throbbing national nightmare is over with the news that Vintage is set to publish the excessively punctuated Fifty Shades of Grey: Inner Goddess (A Journal), which is either a canny piece of Fifty Shades merchandising or a spin-off of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.
In the grand tradition of minimal effort cash-ins, the book will seemingly have comparatively little input from EL James herself. Vintage describes it as giving ‘readers and aspiring writers a place where they can record their innermost thoughts’, which is an elaborately decorative way of saying it’s a jumped-up notebook. The Bookseller lists its contents as being a new foreword by James alongside writing tips (whose source, be it James or otherwise, isn’t made clear), a playlist to accompany the writing process, excerpts from the Fifty Shades trilogy and, most importantly, ‘blank lined pages for writing’, because your imagination is where all the really sexy stuff happens, so long as you give EL James royalties to allow it to happen.
If that all sounds a bit like money for old rope, bear in mind that fans of James’ novels would probably pay well for some Fifty Shades branded rope. Speaking of pretty ordinary kinks, the journal will be presented in a ‘bonded-leather softcover’, because that is a thing that sounds like a thing that excites readers of Fifty Shades of Grey. No word on UK or European publication as yet, but an optimistic 125,000 print run of the official EL James filofax is released in America on 1 May (which, incidentally, is also this writer’s birthday, so now you know what to get me to complete my long, inevitable transformation into Liz Lemon).
Responses