Fifty Shades of Grey means maximum profits for publisher random House

The Fifty Shades of Grey series by E.L. James continues to break even more records. In 2012, over 70 million copies of the erotic novel were sold, driving publisher Random House’s profits through the roof.

Considering we’re in an economic crisis, Random House isn’t doing too badly, since their operating profit has leapt up by 75% year-on-year to €325 million in just 2012. Thanks to being in the spotlight with E.L. James’s book, the company will be merging with one of the biggest publishers in the UK Pearson’s Penguin, causing revenues to increase by 22.5% year-on-year up to €2.1 billion.

The usual number of sales on ebooks at random house accounts for around 20% of their total sales, but not since Fifty Shades of Grey has arrived on the scene, which has boosted this number to 50%, and the print version of Fifty Shades accounted for one in ten of the 750 million books that the publisher carries.

“In 2012, our profits and sales hit an absolute record level, a historic all-time high,” said Markus Dohle, the Random House chairman and chief executive, “Our success has shown again one thing very clearly, that the core of our business in the 21st century, in a digital age, remains the same. It is so important to continually invest in content and creativity and to market that well.”
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Although the publisher doesn’t want to solely thank Fifty Shades of Grey for the success of the company, it says that Rod Stewart’s autobiography and John Grisham’s The Racketeer should also be thanked as well.

“Clearly Fifty Shades was the main driver but it was not the only one,” said Thomas Rabe, the Bertlesmann chief executive, “In the middle of May we have Dan Brown’s Inferno coming.”

Fifty Shades of Grey began life as a piece of Twilight fan fiction called Master of the Universe that was then molded into the Fifty Shades of Grey we know today. It was released as a self-published ebook that went viral with its popularity, until Random House picked up the series. While novels in the past go through the traditional channels of a literary agent connecting with publishers, Fifty Shades of Grey has shown us that it is possible not only to break the rules, but to break into stardom. Maybe it’s a one off fluke, but maybe more and more authors will try to get noticed this way.