The word-of-mouth success of Fifty Shades of Grey, the first title in a trilogy of erotic novels, has been covered by news sources from The New York Post to the Today Show. It is now #1 on the NYT Combined Print & E-Book Fiction best seller list.

Libraries trying to fill the demand have had difficulty ordering it; it’s published by a small Australian press and print runs are sold out quickly. That will soon be solved; according to the NYT, RH/Knopf/Vintage has won a bidding war to republish the book and 750,000 copies of the redesigned paperback edition will be available within “weeks” (the Amazon database lists the release date as April 3).

Libraries aren’t the only ones who have had trouble ordering the book, NYC’s McNally Jackson bookstore tweeted  “Thanks to today’s Times, I’m down to explaining our lack of 50 Shades of Grey to customers only a single time an hour.”

Baker and Taylor replied to our inquiry that they will make the Random/Vintage editions available for ordering once the publisher supplies the data and will continue to supply the Australian version (POD, via Lightning Source; ISBN 9781612130293).

OverDrive confirmed that the Random House eBook edition will be available to libraries soon; it is in their metadata feed from Random House. They plan to make it live later today or by tomorrow at the latest.

Former publisher Judith Regan, who published several controversial titles in her time at HarperCollins, called the book “really badly written” on the Dr. Drew show on CNN on Thursday (after the ad; 1:19 minutes in to the show).

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2012 at 11:42 am and is filed under 2012/13 - Winter/Spring, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.