‘Fifty Shades’: 100 Million Books Sold
The bestselling "Fifty Shades” trilogy by E L James celebrated a double triumph last week. 100 million books from the series have now been sold worldwide, 45 million of them in the United States by Vintage Books – this makes it the fastest-selling series in the history of Random House. Book one, "Fifty Shades of Grey" is also celebrating a record: It has now spent 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
At the peak of the Fifty Shades craze, the trilogy sold an average two copies every second in the U.S. And people are clearly still excited about the erotic love story between billionaire Christian Grey and student Anastasia Steele first published in spring 2012: last year, more than five million copies of the trilogy were sold in the U.S. alone.
Random House publishers also published "Fifty Shades" in the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain and achieved sales successes similar to those seen by Vintage. For instance, Arrow Books sold more than 27 million books in the U.K. and the Commonwealth countries. In addition, more than a million copies of the original English edition were sold in other countries such as France, Brazil and Germany.
German readers did, however, prefer the German translation published by the Random House subsidiary Goldmann, and it has been a source of joy for the publisher ever since, selling 8.2 million books including e-books to date. In Spain, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial reports sales running into the millions, with demand still continuing strong. In all, the "Fifty Shades" trilogy has been translated into 51 languages, including Russian, Hebrew, Thai, Serbian, Mongolian, Korean and Slovak. “The Fifty Shades trilogy struck a chord around the world that continues to resonate,” said Anne Messitte, publisher in the U.S. “We see new readers coming to the books every day, and the sales, two years after our initial publication, remain strong and steady.”
The Random House imprint Vintage Books first published “Fifty Shades of Grey" as an e-book on 12 March 2012 and shortly afterwards as a paperback on 3 April 2012. Since then the trilogy has continuously been on the New York Times bestseller lists with the first volume "Fifty Shades of Grey" almost always in the top ten. And the story continues: The movie "Fifty Shades of Grey" starring Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey and Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele will open in U.S. theaters on 14 February 2015 - Valentine’s Day - and is bound to boost book sales once more.
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Claire von Schilling
Penguin Random House, Executive Vice President, Director Corporate Communications and Social Responsibility Penguin Random House
