By Jason Boog on Galley Cat, March 27, 2012
Online authors should never forget that readers can travel backwards in Internet time and explore their earlier work. This month, author E L James scored a seven-figure book deal to publish the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and a movie deal quickly followed.
This erotica bestseller began as a work of Twilight fan fiction called Master of the Universe, earning a massive fan fiction following years before the book deal. Most traces of this fan fiction history have been removed from the Internet. Using the Wayback Machine, we were able to take snapshots from James’ old work–getting a peek into the book’s previous incarnation as an X-rated version of the Twilight story.
James’ agent told Deadline Hollywood: “This did start as Twilight fan fiction, inspired by Stephenie Meyer’s wonderful series of books. Originally it was written as fan fiction, then Erika decided to take it down after there were some comments about the racy nature of the material. She took it down and thought, I’d always wanted to write. I’ve got a couple unpublished novels here. I will rewrite this thing, and create these iconic characters, Christian and Anna.”
James career began on FanFiction.net, but she moved the work to her personal website, 50Shades.com. Now the site automatically redirects to her author page for straight erotica, but we found old snapshots of this work with the Wayback Machine.
Follow the links below to explore…
Part One: 50Shades.com in December 2010
The Wayback Machine took a snapshot of 50Shades.com in December 2010, storing a copy of the first chapter of Master of the Universe, the fan fiction novel that would later become Fifty Shades of Grey. James had published the novel under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon.
Much more at Galley Cat.
This erotica bestseller began as a work of Twilight fan fiction called Master of the Universe, earning a massive fan fiction following years before the book deal. Most traces of this fan fiction history have been removed from the Internet. Using the Wayback Machine, we were able to take snapshots from James’ old work–getting a peek into the book’s previous incarnation as an X-rated version of the Twilight story.
James’ agent told Deadline Hollywood: “This did start as Twilight fan fiction, inspired by Stephenie Meyer’s wonderful series of books. Originally it was written as fan fiction, then Erika decided to take it down after there were some comments about the racy nature of the material. She took it down and thought, I’d always wanted to write. I’ve got a couple unpublished novels here. I will rewrite this thing, and create these iconic characters, Christian and Anna.”
James career began on FanFiction.net, but she moved the work to her personal website, 50Shades.com. Now the site automatically redirects to her author page for straight erotica, but we found old snapshots of this work with the Wayback Machine.
Follow the links below to explore…
Part One: 50Shades.com in December 2010
The Wayback Machine took a snapshot of 50Shades.com in December 2010, storing a copy of the first chapter of Master of the Universe, the fan fiction novel that would later become Fifty Shades of Grey. James had published the novel under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon.
Much more at Galley Cat.