Meet Mr Fifty Shades: EL James's husband speaks out
If on entering your local bookshop you can find your way past the teetering stacks of EL James' Fifty Shades trilogy, you might come across a slim new crime novel, Crusher. That one's mine. Perceptive reviewers have noted that the hero's father, Maguire, is an embittered Irish hack consumed with envy of his peers. That must be you, they insist. What modern novelist doesn't envy EL James, the 40-something TV executive and mother of two who has outsold Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson, turbo-boosted the turnover of UK bookshops, and left men the world over begging for less sex and more sleep? But my book is a gritty urban murder mystery; Fifty Shades is an erotic romantic fantasy, and I couldn't have written it in a million years. I'm the least romantic fecker that ever lived – ask my wife Erika, aka EL James. Our first Christmas together I bought her a tin opener, and my earliest experience of kinky sex was her trying to shove it up my arse.
Both our books were born out of frustration. I've been in the TV screenwriting business for 20-odd years, and I've made a decent living at it, but I was getting tired of having my best ideas mangled, and spat out, by the process. Erika had been working in TV as a head of production, and she was great at her job, but never really happy. Then, late in 2008, she saw the first Twilight movie, devoured all the books in one sitting, and suddenly knew what she really wanted to do – write her own romantic fiction. We went out and bought her a desk, she sat down and started typing, and produced two novels, working every spare minute she had. If she was happy, I was delighted – I finally got to watch The Sopranos and The Wire back to back with no one moaning about the violence or the impenetrable slang.
Erika discovered the fanfiction.net forum and started submitting stories under the user name Snowqueens Icedragon. When she came up with the saga that was to become Fifty Shades Of Grey, she started to gather a fanatical following for her steamy sex scenes and cliffhanger endings. She'd write a new chapter every week or so, and I would proof-read it, checking her spelling, adding and subtracting commas, cutting back on those bloody ellipses… and occasionally suggesting a tweak if I thought the meaning was unclear. We'd sworn we'd never work together in TV – as a producer she would have fired me that day I was directing The Bill and ran over by 30 minutes – but one evening a week we'd sit down together at her laptop and go through her latest instalment, and somehow we managed that for 18 months without killing each other. We did fall out once; I stomped off without finishing the chapter, and she published it anyway, and if any commas were in the wrong place, no one noticed.
Whenever Erika encountered a story problem, she'd describe it, and I – being a bloke – would come up with a simple solution that was clear, elegant and always so utterly wrong she'd immediately devise her own. I don't think she once followed a suggestion of mine.
I didn't envy her publishing a novel – at that stage Fifty Shades Of Grey was barely known – but I did envy the fun she'd had writing it, which is why I decided to write my own.
By that time Erika had published the first two volumes of the Fifty Shades trilogy through a tiny Australian company. I felt a twinge of panic when she told me she was giving up her job – she was the only one of us with a regular income – but she wanted to focus on her writing, and she was selling a few hundred copies of Fifty Shades a week. I thought, well, we should be OK for six months or so, and I'll probably have landed an episode of something by then…
Niall Leonard: 'Every week we’d get reports of another sales record Erika had broken, and we’d sit in our tatty Brentford kitchen trying to take it all in.' Photograph: Pal Hansen for the Guardian
Nobody could have imagined how Fifty Shades would take off. At first there were rumours on Twitter that American mums were exchanging copies at school gates and soccer pitches. That sounded sweet, and kind of naughty, but nothing to get excited about. Then, on New Year's Eve 2011, two separate messages arrived from Hollywood producers asking about the movie rights, and a review appeared on Amazon by a reader who mentioned that every woman in her New York hairdressing salon was either reading the book or talking about it. We looked at each other and thought, "Oh shit…"
Throughout January and February, sales grew at an absurd, unbelievable rate. It topped the Amazon erotica chart, then their general fiction chart, then entered the New York Times Bestsellers list and kept climbing. Emails demanded to know the name of the genius in charge of Erika's marketing campaign. There was no marketing campaign. Apart from a few book blogs, it was all word-of-mouth. In fact, Erika was turning down invitations to appear on US TV that any publicist would have killed for. But after 20-odd years in the business, television held absolutely no glamour for her, and the book was selling just fine without it: the original publisher couldn't meet the demand, and book shops were constantly running out of stock. Even when Random House took over as publisher, they could barely keep up. Women were buying copies by the half-dozen to give to their friends. By June it was causing paper shortages in the US, and lumber mills in Canada were rehiring laid-off workers. It was a tsunami, an avalanche – I gave up trying to find metaphors that could bear the weight. Every week we'd get reports of another sales record Erika had broken, and we'd sit in our tatty Brentford kitchen trying to take it all in.
Erika wrote Fifty Shades to entertain herself and a few online friends. She never dreamed it would become a bestseller, still less a landmark in publishing or a figure of speech.
Our families and friends were, and are, as thrilled and proud and as amazed as we are, and we soon realised everyone in our street, and eventually the entire neighbourhood, knew exactly who EL James was. All the locals have been lovely, and said very little about it, apart from the occasional polite request for Erika to sign a book. Journalists ask if fans turn up on our doorstep asking silly questions. No, but journalists do. Do we have a dungeon? Or a Red Room of Pain? Maybe, and maybe there's a helicopter pad on the roof in case Christian Grey drops in for a spanking. Fifty Shades Of Grey is a fantasy – have they forgotten what that means? Do they chase JK Rowling down the street daring her to use her Avra Kedavra spell? Do they ask Hilary Mantel how many courtiers she's beheaded?
And in the middle of all this madness, just when I was getting used to my new career carrying my wife's bags to the airport, my agent sends the manuscript for Crusher to a publisher. And here we are.
So, these days we have two novelists in the house. It would be nice to picture us working on opposite sides of the same desk, like Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser, but in our case it's probably better to stay out of crockery-throwing range. I work in my shed, Erika works at her desk, and we meet up in the kitchen for mealtimes or coffee. Now we're both freelance, our days are less predictable, but little else has changed. Commentators can conjure ridiculous royalty figures out of the air and imply that our afternoons are spent in an infinity pool with trained dolphins bringing us goblets of chilled Bolly, but in real life the dog has to be walked, and the kids have to be fed and ferried around, and there are exam results and ageing relatives and the next novel to fret about. Yes, when Fifty Shades Of Grey hit number one on the NYT Bestseller List we swapped our pongy old Honda for a big shiny VW, but that's about it – although now the door has fallen off the oven we may refit our tatty kitchen sooner rather than later.
That cynical old hack Maguire would mutter that my novel is getting this coverage because I'm Mr EL James. Well, of course it is. But, like most novelists, I'm hardly going to refuse publicity. I'm not a masochist. And that's all I'm going to say about our sex life.
Crusher, by Niall Leonard, is published by Doubleday at £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99, including mainland UK p&p, visit the Guardian Bookshop.