50 Shades of Grey is the new bestselling book around the world by E L James. It is meant to be, because I have not read it, a fairly simple book with quite a lot of eroticism in it, but what I do know is that the author is becoming exceedingly wealthy from the book.

In the United Kingdom alone it has been topping charts week after week, with unprecedented sales, in excess of 500,000 a week and even though it has slowed down recently, it is still selling more than 200,000 copies each and every week. This means it is now far more successful than Harry Potter and even past all the Da Vinci Code books as well. The critics certainly make it clear that it is not an incredible work of fiction saying that it is really ordinary writing but perhaps that is what you need if you want to sell a lot of copies to the wider public. In any event, this blog is, like many of mine, more about educating me, and I look forward to reading all the comments and replies, preferably from people who have read the book as to what they thought and why it is so successful. Literary success is still however very well rewarded – she is estimated to be worth $15 million and even Time Magazine named her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world!