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Erotic novel ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ has outstripped the Harry Potter series to become the fastest selling paperback of all time. The author has described her books as “romantic fantasy” stories, which offer women a “holiday from their husbands.” The book, the first instalment of an X-rated trilogy, has beaten JK Rowling and ‘Da Vinci Code’s’ author Dan Brown to the UK record. At first, most sales of the series, about a depraved relationship between a young female virgin and her rich older lover, were of the more discreet ebook version. But, as the trilogy’s popularity soared, physical book sales have taken off. Last week alone, the first installment of the novel sold more than 100,000 paperback copies – a feat that most of the ‘Harry Potter’ books and all of the ‘Twilight’ novels failed to achieve. The novel has been Britain ’s best-selling book for the past nine weeks, while the trilogy has held the top three spots on the UK paperback book chart for the past six weeks. Experts have said that the success of the racy books – dubbed “mummy porn” – has been driven by frustrated middle-aged mothers. Philip Stone, who compiles book charts for ‘The Bookseller magazine’, said that their reputation had been spread “totally through word of mouth.” “It is highly unusual for a book to sell so well without there being a film adaptation or the author being well known, like Dan Brown or JK Rowling.,” the Daily Mail quoted Stone as saying. “Clearly it has become acceptable for something like this to be talked about openly,” he said. A spokesman for Nielsen Book-Scan, which compiles the official chart figures said that the sales have not been driven by readers who buy novels regularly but by those readers who buy maybe three or four books a year. Publishers are now rushing to bring out more similar erotic fiction – including ‘Jane Eyre Laid Bare’, that is an explicit rewrite of Charlotte Bronte’s novel.

‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ selling faster than Harry Potter in UK