"IT'S SO BAD IT IS GOOD"
Saturday, August 17, 2013 @ 9:36 AM
According to Forbe’s List of the world’s top-selling authors, British author E. L. James takes the winner’s rostrum. James is estimated to have earned $95 million from her mummy-porn novel, Fifty Shades of Grey.
She narrowly beat James Patterson whose novels have placed $91 million into his already bulging bank account. Can books like theirs really be so good? Of course not. As one of Fifty Shades of Grey surmised, “It is so bad it is good.”
The titillating yarn is written in amateurish style. Perhaps this gives such books added value. It could be that the content’s flow relates better to the unsophisticated reader’s way of thinking. How many readers today are educated enough to immerse themselves into Trollope’s or Charles Dickens novels? I suspect very few.
Ironically, one of the salient marketing pluses of James book is the book’s unprofessional style of writing. This leads us to wonder aloud, had Fifty Shades of Grey been passed to an academic expert in English literature for ghosting would it have been so successful. I doubt it very much.
Older readers will recall a 1960s parody made at the expense of the BBC. It was a recording of Louis Armstrong’s (Satchmo) rendering of Old Man River.
The ballad’s attraction was primarily the way in which the original and popular song was sung in the lingua franca of the time, place and society. When the parody was released in the 1960s the singer, Satchmo was constantly interrupted by a BBC presenter.
During these interruptions, the singer was constantly ordered to express the lyrics in the clipped (and grammatically correct) form. In doing so, it turned one of the 20th Century’s most endearing ballads into an audio monstrosity unlikely to have sold a single copy.
Maybe this analogy explains why so many ’badly written’ novels are voted winners by their readers.