Fifty Shades: By the Numbers

When E.L. James announced on June 1 that she planned to release Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian on June 18 (the fictional billionaire’s birthday), presales rocketed the forthcoming paperback and Kindle editions to #1 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. So this seems like a good time to take a by-the-numbers look at the series to date. Note on the below: for sanity’s sake, when we refer to the “Fifty Shades books,” we are counting only the trade paper editions of each book in the trilogy, plus the trade paper boxed set.

1.25 Million: Announced first print run for Grey

104: Actual number of shades of gray, per Pantone colors with that name

$166,167,230: Domestic box office sales for February’s Fifty Shades of Grey movie

2017: Year the film version of book two, Fifty Shades Darker, is scheduled for release how many miles high the Fifty Shades books would reach, if each copy sold to date was stacked one on top of the next

#42: Rank of Christian among U.S. baby boy names in 2014, down from #30 in 2011 (the year before Vintage published the first book)

#240: Rank of Anastasia (the name of the books’ female lead) among U.S. baby girl names in 2014, up from #372 in 2011

30,482: Number of years that have been spent reading the Fifty Shades books, assuming every copy that has been sold was read at a speed of 90 seconds per page

TV Tie-in Watch

Zoo, a standalone thriller by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge, debuts at #4 in mass market with 15K print units sold, and at #24 in trade paper with 3,473 sold. The 13-part TV adaptation will air on CBS beginning June 30, costarring James Wolk, who played Bob Benson on Mad Men. Zoo was originally published in hardcover in September 2012 and sold 37K print units its first week.

Notable Debuts

The Water Knife
by Paolo Bacigalupi
#19 Hardcover Nonfiction
2,996 print units

Bacigalupi’s first book with Knopf is also his first novel for adults since 2009’s Hugo Award–winning The Windup Girl, which publisher Night Shade reissued in paperback May 5.

P.S. I Still Love You
by Jenny Han
#6 Children’s Frontlist Fiction
6,880 print units

This sequel to 2014’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before bested that book’s first-week sales by almost 2,000 units.

Our Souls at Night
by Kent Haruf
#11 Hardcover Fiction

The final novel by Haruf, who died in 2014, is set, like his others, in the fictional town of Holt, Colo.


Make Something Up
by Chuck Palahniuk
#13 Hardcover Fiction
4,446 print units

The same week that this book, Palahniuk’s first short story collection, was published, Dark Horse released the first installment of Fight Club 2, the author’s comic book sequel to his 1996 novel, Fight Club.

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Author Imprint Units
1 Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Dr. Seuss Random 32,393
2 Radiant Angel Nelson DeMille Grand Central 31,439
3 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Marie Kondo Ten Speed 29,222
4 The Girl on the Train Paula Hawkins Riverhead 29,216
5 Paper Towns John Green Penguin/Speak 28,913
6 Top Secret Twenty-One Janet Evanovich Bantam 26,779
7 The Wright Brothers David McCullough Simon & Schuster 25,430
8 All the Light We Cannot See Anthony Doerr Scribner 24,344
9 Piranha Cussler/Morrison Putnam 20,788
10 The Marriage Season Linda Lael Miller Harlequin 18,020