The Book Machine: Fifty Shades As Case Study On the Commodification of Literature

If you want to understand what “commodification of literature” really means, you can’t just look at spreadsheets or sales charts. You have to follow a story as it mutates over time—watch it move from dangerous and strange to polished and endlessly repeatable. The clearest way to see it is to take a single narrative thread and pull it through more than a century of publishing decisions, all the way from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey.

In 1897, Dracula arrives in the world as a strange, unsettling thing. On the surface it’s a horror novel about an undead count crossing from a crumbling Eastern European castle into modern England. Underneath the plot, it’s a tangle of anxieties about sex, power, foreignness, disease, and the collision between old superstition and new technology. It’s not “vampire romance.” It’s not slotted neatly into a single shelving label. It’s a book that blends gothic horror, travel narrative, pseudo-science, and religious dread. It’s messy in the best sense of the word—too alive to sit perfectly still.

Fast forward a century and change. The vampire has been smoothed out, reinterpreted, recycled. When Twilight explodes into the market in 2005, it doesn’t arrive from nowhere; it’s built on a long line of vampiric tales that owe a clear debt to Stoker’s original template: a powerful, predatory male figure, an innocent young woman, an erotic charge disguised as danger. What Twilight does is sand down the edges. It relocates the vampire into a glossy, abstinence-inflected YA romance. The blood is still there, but it’s tidied up; the violence is muffled under longing and restraint. The horror becomes atmospheric rather than existential.

Now watch what happens next. Fifty Shades of Grey begins life not as an “original” property, but as a piece of Twilight fan-fiction called Master of the Universe, posted online with Bella and Edward as its central couple. When the story is reworked for commercial publication, the vampires disappear and the names change, but the underlying dynamic remains intact: an older, immensely powerful, emotionally damaged man; a younger, inexperienced woman; danger reframed as erotic intensity; submission and control standing in for the old seduction-and-blood dynamic.

If you squint at the lineage, you can see what’s happened. A mythic horror about an undead aristocrat preying on Victorian England has been passed through the machine—simplified, romanticized, eroticized—and emerges decades later as a contemporary billionaire BDSM romance. You go from a vampire count in Transylvania to a brooding immortal in a Pacific Northwest high school to a controlling Seattle billionaire in a penthouse. The details change. The structure doesn’t. In that sense, Fifty Shades functions as a kind of distant, distorted retelling of Dracula—the great-grandchild of the original story, with all the risk and strangeness stripped away and the commercial elements dialed up.

This is what commodification looks like in practice. A narrative pattern is identified, isolated, and turned into a repeatable product. The specifics of the myth—religion, geography, cultural anxiety—are less important than the dependable beats: dangerous man, naive woman, forbidden desire, high stakes that resolve into safety. Once a pattern proves it can move millions of units, the industry begins carving everything around it to fit.

Publishing professionals have been blunt about this shift. Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, wrote in Publishers Weekly that “the mere thought is at once repulsive and terrifying: books as commodities.” Harvard’s Ryan Raffaelli notes that Amazon, in particular, treated books as interchangeable objects in a “placeless” system, where they could be traded online “sight-unseen,” like any other product. Literary scholar Dan Sinykin, in his work on conglomerate publishing, argues that the extreme corporatization of the trade “has radically altered the kinds of books we read and the ways authors navigate the system.”   Put together, these observations all point in the same direction: the system is no longer built primarily to discover singular voices. It’s built to replicate what already sells.

You can see that clearly in what happened after Fifty Shades took off. The trilogy sold more than a hundred million copies and generated a blockbuster film series; Forbes described how it helped turn fan-fiction from a “dirty little secret” into a “money machine.” Academic work on the book talks explicitly about “the commodification of fan fiction,” noting that Fifty Shades transformed a communal, derivative storytelling practice into a highly profitable, tightly owned intellectual property.

Once publishers realized how large the audience was for that particular configuration—wealthy, damaged man; young woman; graphic sex; a vaguely transgressive feel that still lands safely inside a conventional romance arc—they didn’t stop and ask, “What other strange, singular books might we be missing?” Instead, much of the industry chased the template. As one reporter noted, Sylvia Day’s Bared to You was marketed explicitly as a “Fifty Shades clone,” with a nearly identical gray cover featuring an isolated object and copy that echoed the original trilogy. Libraries and publishers compiled long lists of “Fifty Shades read-alikes,” recommending dozens of novels designed to scratch the exact same itch. A romance blogger described the “legacy of Fifty Shades” as an entire visual style: anonymous billionaire covers, a single symbolic object on a dark background, designed to signal the same experience at a glance.

This is cookie-cutter marketing in its purest form. Take one unexpected hit, isolate its surface features, and then mass-produce variations: similar covers, similar titles, similar taglines, similar dynamics between characters, all packaged for the same demographic. Instead of asking what else literature can do, the system asks how to re-bottle the same lightning with the least possible risk. Books become slots in a category machine. If your manuscript fits the mold, it has a fighting chance. If it doesn’t, every stage of the process—from acquisition to shelving to online recommendations—quietly pushes you out.

For authors whose books don’t sit neatly in any aisle, these dynamics show up as a series of small, demoralizing conversations. An editor loves the work but admits they “don’t know how to position it.” A sales team wants a clearer label and cleaner comps. A marketing department asks if the story can be made “more like X meets Y.” The problem is rarely that the manuscript is weak. The problem is that it refuses to behave like a commodity.

For readers, the experience is subtler but just as real. They find themselves surrounded by books that feel strangely familiar, even when the plots are different. Tropes repeat. Structures repeat. Cover designs blur together. The market tells them these similarities are proof that they’re “getting what they want,” but what they’re actually getting is what the system already knows how to sell. Anything that would have surprised them, challenged them, or required different tools to market simply never reaches their hands.

This is why small and mid-size presses matter so much. They live closer to the ground, away from some of the pressures that drive conglomerates to chase only safe bets and established patterns. They still have to survive financially, but they have more freedom to say yes to the book that doesn’t fit any current trend and more patience to nurture work that won’t explode on TikTok in the first week. When they choose to publish something that refuses to flatten itself into a product, they are not just making an artistic decision. They are pushing back against a system that has quietly decided that literature should be as predictable as cereal or shoe brands.

But running a press like that requires a different kind of leadership. If you’re an editor, publisher, or list manager trying to resist cookie-cutter logic, you are swimming against a strong current: sales reports, retailer expectations, algorithm dashboards, authors worried about “platform,” internal pressure to match last year’s numbers. Without a clear sense of self-governance—of how you make decisions, what you value, and what you’re willing to say no to—it becomes almost impossible not to slide back into the default mode of “pick the safest thing that looks like the last hit.”

That’s where a book like John Bentley’s I Lead Me becomes more than just generic leadership reading. On the surface, it’s about personal responsibility and self-direction. Beneath that, it’s a manual for staying grounded when everything around you incentivizes passivity and drift. Bentley doesn’t talk in buzzwords; he walks through the practical work of noticing where you are acting on autopilot, clarifying what you actually stand for, and then aligning your choices with that standard—even when it costs you something in the short term.

For people in publishing—especially at small and mid-size houses—those skills are not abstract. They’re the difference between acquiring yet another predictable clone of last season’s success, or taking a calculated risk on a manuscript that might actually move literature forward. They’re the difference between letting algorithms and categories make your choices for you, or deliberately curating a list that reflects real conviction.

That’s why we’re offering a FREE digital sample of I Lead Me as a reader magnet. It gives you enough of the book to understand Bentley’s approach and enough concrete material to start applying it to your own decisions—whether you’re running a press, shaping an imprint, or just deciding what kind of writer you want to be. You can download the sample by entering your email address, read it on your own time, and then look back at the books on your desk with a sharper eye. Click the image below to download your sample!

Ask yourself, after you’ve read it: am I publishing, acquiring, or writing stories because they fit the current cookie-cutter—because they’re easy to package and sell—or because they actually deserve to exist? Am I treating books as commodities, or as works that might still surprise, unsettle, and endure?

How you answer those questions will determine what kind of shelves readers will inherit ten years from now.