EL James‘s latest erotic novel has already topped bestseller lists, despite not being being available until the stroke of midnight.
The new book, titled Grey, will be in shops tomorrow but is available to download on Kindle from midnight and is already number one on Amazon’s eBook best-seller chart.
Its author is in New York on publication day as part of an international publicity campaign for the book which is a guaranteed best-seller.
The surge in sales is not just in downloads. Waterstone’s fiction buyer Chris White said:
‘Grey has been our fastest growing pre-order offer so far.Our pre-orders have risen at an unprecedented rate since the announcement and we’re expecting very strong sales on the day of publication.’
The new book is a re-telling of the first novel in the hit series about an affair between mysterious tycoon Christian Grey and lover Anastasia Steele from the point of view of its title character.
Jamie Dornan played Grey and Dakota Johnson was his lover in the hugely successful film version of the story.
James said she wrote the book after demand from fans. On the opening page, she says it is ‘dedicated to those readers who asked … and asked … and asked … and asked for this’.
The Fifty Shades trilogy – Fifty Shades Of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed – has sold more than 125 million copies around the world.
The original racy novel in the trilogy is still the best-selling Kindle book of all time, according to Amazon.
The popularity of the book soared online after readers embarrassed to be seen with a hard copy of the saucy tome preferred to buy the eBook.
It has made James a millionaire many times over. This year’s Sunday Times Rich List estimated her fortune at £75 million.
