Sex sells, so they say. And the accounts of EL James, author of the Fifty Shades of Grey bondage trilogy, prove it. James’s company, Fifty Shades Ltd, raked in almost £20m last year, with a profit of £9.8m.
The accounts show that James, 52, took a dividend of £2.6m from the company last year, compared with £3.2m in 2013. Almost £1m was given to charity. While last year’s profits pale against the £25m made the previous year, the accounts confirm that James’s fortune continues to grow. Last year she was sitting on cash and shares in her company worth more than £37m, up from just under £30m in 2013.
The accounts cover the period before she earned royalties from Grey, her new take on the Fifty Shades trilogy. Nor do they include any share of her royalties from the first Fifty Shades film, starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, which broke box-office records with sales of more than $569m (£360m).
The trilogy’s extraordinary success gave James leverage over the film studios when negotiating the sale of the rights. It is reported that she was given final approval over the script, actors and director – even having control over the costumes, set and merchandising tie-ins.
That last clause will have proved particularly lucrative. James has launched a range of products tied to the movie, which reportedly include mugs, jewellery, key chains, a CD, a coffee-table book and a range of lingerie and T-shirts. She has even launched two wines inspired by the film.
Small wonder, then, that the accounts suggest that James can be confident that the trilogy will continue to earn her millions for years to come. The report says: “The review of the business states that the company had a very successful year during which it secured further royalty and licensing agreements.” And it promises: “The company continues to be profitable, with income streams contracted to continue for a number of years.”
James has become a phenomenon in the publishing world. Her combined novels have sold more than 125m copies, more than 35m in the US, and the first instalment was the UK’s fastest-selling paperback ever.
James’s new spin-off novel, Grey, which tells the same story but from the perspective of its male lead, Christian Grey, has broken the first-week UK sales record for adult books. It sold 647,401 copies in its first three days, beating Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, which sold 551,000 copies in five days in 2009. It was sSavaged by critics, one of whom said it was as “sexy as a misery memoir”, Grey has also become a hit in the US, selling more than 1.1 million copies in four days.
James’s phenomenal rise up the publishing charts has made her powerful. In 2012, Time magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people. In the same year, the US book-trade bible, Publishers Weekly, named her its publishing person of the year.
It is a remarkable achievement for someone who describes herself on her website as “a former TV executive, wife and mother-of-two based in the leafy suburbs of west London”, and who self-published her earliest works on the internet using the name Snowqueens Icedragon before being snapped up by a publisher. However, James still has some way to go to beat JK Rowling, whose Harry Potter and Robert Galbraith books have sold more than 400m copies.