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EL James Getty Images 1.jpeg

Did You All Even Notice That E.L. James Has a New Book Out?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | July 12, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | July 12, 2023 |

EL James Getty Images 1.jpeg

Did you know that E.L. James has a new book out? Yeah, the author of the inexplicably popular Fifty Shades of Grey series just dropped her latest novel. And it’s a sequel to a best-seller. No, seriously, it was released last month. Anybody? Nope? Well, I wouldn’t blame you. I cover this stuff for a living and even I was surprised by the news, despite receiving multiple publicist emails on the subject.

The Missus is James’s creatively titled sequel to The Mister, her first novel not based on Twilight fan-fiction. That first book was released amid a flurry of hype, with critics wondering if James could make lightning strike twice. By this point in time, all three Fifty Shades films had been released, as well as two novels retelling the story from the perspective of its ‘hero.’ The well seemed dry, but James was still a money-maker. Even as the reviews for the films became increasingly brutal, they still earned good profits. At this moment in time, James seemed critic-proof and The Mister proved that.

Sure, it didn’t sell as many copies as Fifty Shades of Grey but nobody expected it to be that sort of juggernaut. It debuted on both the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists and received much pre-release hype. It was also extensively reviewed, including by yours truly. Spoiler: it’s terrible, but more boring than anything else. It certainly demonstrated that James’s scope as an author was narrow, her ambitions limited when not plucking from the Twilight tree. In hindsight, it seemed to signal the tipping point for James. Who was she without Fifty Shades, and what did she want to be?

Many authors got their start with Twilight fanfiction, filing the serial numbers from their stories of Bella and Edward to sell to the masses as original romance. It’s still a controversial practice, although far more commonplace nowadays since Fifty Shades kicked down the doors of fandom etiquette. Writers like Christina Lauren have built successful careers from their initial fics, publishing consistently well-received and high-selling romances that have made them mainstays of the genre. James has not followed in those footsteps. Of the eight novels she has released, six are Fifty Shades related. That’s all she has, and audiences aren’t sticking around for them, not when they have far more plentiful and less problematic options available at the drop of a hat.

So, it’s fascinating to me just how little a splash The Missus has made. There’s been little in terms of pre-release publicity, especially when compared to the first book or anything from the Fifty Shades world. I follow a ton of romance authors and readers and saw nobody talking about it on social media. When I last went to my local bookshop, copies of The Missus were tucked away on a crowded table in-between more hyped titles, a contrast from its predecessor which received pride of place on its own display in front of the door. And it’s nowhere to be seen on the New York Times bestseller list. She did debut on the recently-revived USA Today bestseller list, but only at number 58. For contrast’s sake, the latest novel by Colleen Hoover, a writer whose earliest success was heavily linked to the post-Fifty Shades boon in romance and New Adult fiction, is at number one.

It has received some attention, but mostly through a paltry collection of uniformly negative reviews. The Telegraph compared the book to Alan Partridge, dismissing James’s ineptitude in tackling issues more serious than bonking and land ownership. Kat Brown’s review over on i News called the book ‘the literary equivalent of a beta blocker,’ decrying its repetitive nature and superfluous details, as well as noting how it liberally borrows from the work of Jilly Cooper. Brown added, ‘you get the feeling more than ever that James really couldn’t care less about sex, but is expected to write about it because of the enormous success of that series.’ Again, James was never well reviewed, but that’s easy to overlook when the people love what you release. It’s harder to ignore when there’s such silence.

I received a few publicist emails about The Missus, most of which were standard PR fluff, but there was one detail I couldn’t get over. They kept emphasizing how speedy the publishing turnaround was with the book, and how ‘super-quick’ this ‘speed of light’ process was. Granted, I don’t work in publishing so can’t completely confirm this, but it doesn’t seem like a major selling point to note how you essentially rushed a novel onto shelves. Given how the reviews note the book’s repetition, poor sentence structure, and erratic pacing, it suggests that the editing process was meager to non-existent.


I can’t imagine this being the end of James’s career. When you’ve published one multi-million best-seller that kickstarted an entire publishing trend, you get a lot of opportunities to release whatever the hell you want for the next decade or so. But I do think it symbolizes the rut that James is in. What does she want as a writer? What stories does she want to tell? She’s a prized rarity in publishing: an author with the freedom to do whatever the hell she wants and have a decent sized captive audience eager to engage with it. She doesn’t have to write romance or erotica if she doesn’t want to, and she certainly doesn’t have to copy herself (and Stephenie Meyer) endlessly. Yet that’s the cycle she’s made for herself.

Romance and erotica have moved on from what James made her name with. Fifty Shades of Grey was never supposed to change the world. It was fanfiction from a big name fan of Twilight who got a tiny publishing house to put some money behind it. That it exploded into popularity as it did remains one of the weirder miracles in modern pop culture. It made its stamp and inspired many to follow/copy in its footsteps. Most of those figures, however, have evolved. This is the era of Colleen Hoover, Bridgerton, Jenny Han’s TV domination, a surprising number of published Adam Driver/Reylo fics, and BookTok. James has gotten stagnant, and the myriad issues of her work - the misogyny, the fatal misunderstanding of BDSM culture, the vaguely rapey hero, the fetishizing of obscene wealth, the fact that it’s clearly still Twi-fic, the embarrassing ineptitude of the prose - aren’t worth overlooking when the competition is at a whole other level.

E.L. James will be fine. She’s rich, and I’m sure The Missus will bring in a few quid she can put towards her next ivory back-scratcher. Perhaps the advances will shrink alongside the marketing budgets, but she won’t go away anytime soon. Being a midlist author who makes a living from it is the dream for most of us. Still, her fluke of fame and fortune feels like a wasted opportunity she has neither the talent nor drive to achieve. You can only be a bad writer for so long before people put your work down. It seems like we’ll inevitably see her do a gender-swapped Fifty Shades rewrite, just to hammer home her lack of ideas. Any bets on when we’ll hear that announcement?