Sex that sells on book shelves

It seems everyone is at it. The fuss may have died down over EL James’s Fifty Shades... trilogy, which earned the author a cool £6.5m, but where Christian Grey led others will undoubtedly follow. Take a look at any airport bookshop or browse the aisles of the big supermarkets and the shelves are now dominated by erotic fiction and romance.

Sales are rocketing and thanks to the arrival of e-books those who feel too embarrassed to ask their local librarian for a copy of Little Red Riding Crop can order online.

This surge in demand means publishers are also desperate to sign up new authors. It’s partly why Mills and Boon, which a few years ago unveiled its own racier range of novels, has decided to launch its So You Think You Can Write? competition.

Next month the company, which is offering a publishing deal for the best talent, is hosting a series of events, including one in Yorkshire which promises to reveal the secrets to romantic fiction writing.

“People used to be a bit sniffy about Mills and Boon, but I think that is changing,” says Sarah Mallory, from Todmorden, who wrote her first novel for the publishers in 2000. “The company celebrated it’s centenary a couple of years ago and the publicity which that event attracted showed just how much it had moved on

“I think a lot of people thought Mills and Boon was a bit twee, but they produce such a range of books from tender romance to erotic fiction.

“I guess my books fall somewhere in the middle, they’re not exactly Fifty Shades of Grey, but it’s not just about holding hands either.”

Sarah will be running a workshop for aspiring writers at Keighley Library early in September. While initially writing on evenings and weekends, she became a full-time author in 2008 and now writes an average of three books a year for Mills and Boon. While set in the Georgian and Regency England with titles like The Illegitimate Montague and Disgrace and Desire, they’re part historical novels, part good old fashioned romances.

“I don’t think I had even read a Mills and Boon before I began writing for them, to be honest I was more into writers like Georgette Heyer,” she says. “However, back in 2000 I slipped off a kerb and I broke my ankle. I was laid up on the sofa for 12 weeks and that’s a long time to do nothing.

“I’d had an idea for a romantic novel in my head and it seemed to be a perfect opportunity to actually write it. I’ve always loved the Georgian and Regency period ever since I was at school. There’s a definite glamour about life then, but it also feels accessible.”

This year Sarah won the RONA Rose award presented by the Romantic Novelists’ Association for her book The Dangerous Lord Darrington and while there are no hard and fast rules to writing a bestseller, when it comes to romance the reader does have a number of expectations

“There are certain things guaranteed with a Mills and Boon book,” says Sarah. “You know you are going to get a happy ever after and the guy always gets the girl. However, the trick is working out how the characters get to that point. It’s about escapism, but whenever anyone asks for advice on how to get started, the one thing I always say is that you have to write from the heart. It takes an awful lot of energy to complete a book and if your heart is not in it 100 per cent you’ll never get there.”

Such is the rush to find the next big hit, a number of publishers are turning to the classics. Small publishing house Total-E-Bound has announced that it is launching a series of erotic rewrites of works like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Sherlock Holmes.

Quite how you sex-up a man who never goes anywhere without his deer stalker remains to be seen, but Charlotte Brontë has already been given a makeover courtesy of Eve Sinclair in, wait for it, Jane Eyre Laid Bare, which was released this month.

“Even though I enjoyed writing it, it was very much about doing a serious take on it,” says Sinclair, who published her version of the 1847 classic with Pan Macmillan. “We’ve taken Charlotte Brontë’s text and changed it very little. We’ve just enhanced what’s already there. It was very obvious to me where to put the sex scenes in and I’ve added them in Brontë’s tone.

“I studied the novel at school and then I did a dissertation on the eroticism between Jane Eyre and Rochester for my English degree. There must have been hundreds of thousands of people who have written essays about the subject, so there’s something there.

“There was a mash-up of Pride and Prejudice with zombies, which I read with great interest. I thought that if they can get away with the undead ripping off the characters’ faces, sex isn’t going to do any harm. Then Fifty Shades came about and I thought, ‘Right, let’s do it now’.”

Fans of the original might dispute Sinclair’s use of the word “enhance”. Jane’s childhood, a key part of the original has been axed entirely. Instead, the reworked novel opens with the heroine arriving at Thornfield Hall where her sexual desires are at once awakened by Mr Rochester.

Sinclair doesn’t stop there. Instead of a mad wife in the attic, it later transpires that Rochester is grooming Jane on behalf of a dominatrix he keeps hidden up there.

Fifty Shades of Grey author EL James has had all sorts of criticism aimed at her, with many claiming the book is misogynist in its portrayal of female subservience. Much the same complaints could be levelled at Sinclair, but ever since the book was published she has insisted that despite her additions Jane Eyre remains a credible role model.

“After Jane discovers what Rochester is up to, she decides to call it quits. My last line is, “Reader, I left him”, because I felt very strongly that she was being controlled. But I don’t think there is anything wrong with charting a woman falling love, and that feeling of powerlessness.

“When that is taken to an extreme it’s a different matter, but I do think falling in love and being out of control is part of a woman’s fantasy. Those who think it lazy and unoriginal to mess with a classic should get over themselves. There were lots of different versions of Jane Eyre even in Brontë’s own lifetime.”

Regardless of any literary merit, if a book sells then publishers will want to keep on repeating the success.

“It was vampires and conspiracy thrillers before erotica became the must-have genre,” says Wayne Brooks, editor of Jane Eyre Laid Bare. “If the book buying public have moved their attentions to erotic fiction, then as a publisher, part of our job is to give the public what they want to read. When you see one novel sell 500,000 copies in one week, it’s not rocket science to think, ‘That’s doing well – will those readers want more?’

“What isn’t so easy is choosing the right ones to publish, because whenever there is a surge in one type of novel you can guarantee your reading pile will be full of the same type of books for months later.

So what does Jilly Cooper, the original bonkbuster author think of this phenomena?

“I don’t want to be pompous about it, but I think it’s awful. There are enough sexy classics already, like Tom Jones and a lot of Shakespeare is pretty sexy. But with something like Jane Austen, it’s an awful shame, because she wasn’t like that.

“It was enough to have Darcy coming out of the water in a nice clinging shirt in the TV adaptation, but certainly in the book he and Elizabeth didn’t sleep together.

“PD James is a classic example. She’s a great writer and she did an extension of Pride and Prejudice, but she kept within the confines of Jane Austen. They can do interpretations, but I don’t see why they have to change the whole moral compass. It’s ridiculous.”

* Sarah Mallory will be holding a workshop in romantic novel writing at Keighley Library on September 8. To find out more about Mills and Boon’s So You Think You Can Write project go to: www.soyouthinkyoucanwrite.com