Hit Makers by Derek Thompson

Author:Derek Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-24T12:40:53+00:00

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On January 6, 2012, Anne Messitte, then the publisher of the Vintage Books imprint at Random House, received an on-demand paperback copy of Fifty Shades of Grey that had been passing around the publicity and editorial departments of another imprint at her company. It was a Friday. On Saturday, she read the book in a single sitting.

Messitte knew little about the novel beyond the fact that Fifty Shades was generating buzz among mothers of the Upper East Side and Westchester, a solidly upper-middle-class county just north of New York City. “I went to dinner with some friends that night, and they asked what I did all day,” she told me. “I told them that I read the first Fifty Shades book. Immediately, somebody at dinner said her friend in Westchester had read it and loved it.” The following week, Messitte read the second installment, Fifty Shades Darker, and felt determined to meet with James. There was just one problem: “E. L. James” was a pseudonym and first-time writer. Messitte didn’t know how to find her.

Meanwhile, another influential New York City mother was making a simultaneous discovery. Lyss Stern, the founder of Diva Moms, a social group for well-heeled mothers with an Upper East Side élan, visited the large Barnes and Noble in Union Square to find Fifty Shades, at a friend’s suggestion. But the author name “E. L. James” wasn’t even in the Barnes and Noble system in January 2012. “The woman at the counter looked at me like I was crazy,” Stern told me.

So Stern went online and bought the e-book. Like Messitte, she finished it in a day. Suddenly obsessed, she evangelized Fifty Shades in her DivaMoms newsletters and invited E. L. James to New York to attend a book party in her honor at a large Chelsea penthouse apartment.

One of the subscribers to the Diva Moms newsletters was Messitte. She e-mailed Stern to attend the event, identifying herself as both a reader and a publisher. Stern responded by e-mail that the event had sold out and forwarded Messitte’s inquiry to Valerie Hoskins, a film agent who was helping James navigate her growing fame.

On January 24, 2012, the three women—Messitte, Hoskins, and E. L. James—met at the Vintage offices in Manhattan to discuss the possibility of relaunching Fifty Shades with a paperback publication. James was hearing directly from readers, booksellers, and librarians about their difficulty sourcing the book, and she was eager to make it more available.

James had strong and specific opinions about how she wanted her book to be presented—in ways, such as packaging, that were unexpected for the romance genre. She had designed her own covers—the now iconic silver necktie, a winking allusion to both the corporate setting and the bondage theme. “I thought it was brilliant,” Messitte said. “People thinking conventionally had told Erika that it should look more like a romance. Erika wanted it to be different. I think the covers’ distinction opened the books up to a much broader audience.”

At the

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