Fifty Shades of Grey spin-off, Grey, smashes sales records despite woeful reviews
It's a triumph on both sides of the Atlantic
E. L. James’ new version of her raunchy bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey has obliterated sales records despite being savaged by the critics.
Told from the perspective of the sadomasochistic main protagonist Christian Grey, new book Grey sold 647,401 copies in its first three days – smashing the previous 551,000 sales tally achieved by Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol in 2009.
The staggering success has also been echoed Stateside where Grey sold a whopping 1.1million copies in just four days.
By June 2015, the first three Fifty Shades books had sold more than 125million copies worldwide and the series had been translated into 52 languages.
That impressive 125million tally is now set to expand even further with the incredible success of the fourth book.
Proof that the general public don’t always listen to critics, last week the press were almost universal in their slamming of Grey.
The Daily Telegraph gave it one star out of five saying it’s “about as sexy as a misery memoir and as arousing as the diary of a sex offender."
The Guardian dubbed it “creepy beyond belief” and The Independent criticised Christian Grey’s internal monologues, writing: "The effect is increasingly comical – Mills & Boon meets Peep Show – while the rest of his internal monologue is spent stating the bleeding obvious."
Grey was released on 18th June to coincide with the fictitious birth date of Christian Grey.
Echoing the success of the novels, the Fifty Shades of Grey movie starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson broke numerous Box Office records and has made £360million to date.