It seems that the author...
of this "Grey" trilogy, ripped her material off from the movie "Secretary" (2002). Especially since that movie has to do with bondage and the last name of the lead character played by James Spader is Grey.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbSXfx-A8Y&lc=UgzKGw6vbu_gDiOD7wJ4AaABAg
EL James took a bunch of ideas from better-written Twilight fanfics and wrapped them into one horrible Frankenstein's monster of a fic. At first this intrigued people because there were some genuinely interesting concepts in it even if the execution was god-awful. Bdsm fics can be a lot of fun, even if the readers aren't actually into bdsm. The website she was using allowed people to leave kudos/upvotes/whatever it used on every chapter. So if you have ten dedicated followers and thirty chapters, that's a minimum of 300 upvotes. Add that to the amount of people who were still riding the Twilight bandwagon (which was still running strong) and were excited at any long-running fic that updated fairly frequently, and you'd probably have a whole bunch of dedicated followers. Not to mention the people who just upvoted it in passing. James took advantage of the Twilight craze and suddenly had an hugely popular fic on her hands.share
When she decided to publish, she actually showed a bit of marketing genius. Despite the publishing company she was working with wanted to make crazy changes so that the book actually made sense, she managed to maintain the majority of the structure and characterization from the original (plagiarized) fic (and all the flaws that came with them). Then she galvanized her dedicated group of followers to buy the book and leave a bunch of positive reviews. Those followers then convinced a bunch of casual fans/people who didn't actually give a shit about her writing to do the same. Fanfiction readers and writers can get very excited when something from the community gets published, because then it feels like a legitimate work of art rather than something to be looked down on (even though everything written in James's fic should be looked down on).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbSXfx-A8Y&lc=UgzKGw6vbu_gDiOD7wJ4AaABAg
These people desperately want fanfiction to be taken serious by the general public, so they backed FSOG even though it wasn't good at all. With so many people leaving so many positive reviews on the book, mainstream erotica fans got interested and started picking it up. Suddenly, James had a huge audience consuming the book.
Then the initial backlash started to come in. There were the legitimate responses of the people who called it abuse and the bdsm community which hated how they were being represented. Unfortunately, a lot of the backlash also came from people who look down on the erotica market in general. When they critiqued it, they weren't making fun of the book as much as they were making fun of the people who read them. They would talk about how the only people who read erotica are middle-aged women who haven't had sex in years (which is not true at all). In response to this, erotica fans got angry and supported the book even more out of spite. There were plenty of better books they could have been supporting, but FSOG was the one that was in the public eye, so that's the one they wanted to succeed. They drowned out all the people who had genuine critiques of the book and lumped them in with the assholes who stereotyped them.
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