Fascination With “Mommy Porn” Waning?

I was somewhat relieved to read that, for the first time since publication, sales of Fifty Shades of Grey are in decline. This comes from the BBC:

Sales of E L James’ Fifty Shades trilogy of erotic novels have fallen for the first time in two months.

After increasing for eight consecutive weeks, last week sales slipped by 16% to 1.21m (£5.4m), according to industry publication The Bookseller.

However the British novelist still topped bestseller lists by a huge margin, with the first book Fifty Shades of Grey shifting 534,088 copies.

Even in decline, though, the numbers are staggering:

Print sales of book one alone now stand at 2,833,988, putting it in 11th place in a list of the bestselling books since records began in 1998.

It is currently behind Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, but has now overtaken huge bestsellers such as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

We’ve previously written about the book here and here.

READ MORE: “British Charity Calls for Fifty Shades of Grey Book Burning,” by Carolyn Kellogg (Los Angeles Times).