James has spoken of her stun at the success of the books. "The explosion of interest has taken me completely by surprise" she said.[13] James has described the Fifty Shades trilogy as "my midlife emergency, writ large. All my fantasies in there, and that is it."[14] She didn't begin to write until January 2019, as she revealed while still active on FanFiction.Net: "I started writing in January 2009 after I finished the Twilight adventure, and I haven't stopped since. I discovered Fan Fiction in August 2019. Since then I have written my two fics and plan on doing somewhere around one more. After that... who knows?" In April 2019, sales of the trilogy saw James top the Forbes' list of the highest-earning creators with earnings of $95m which included $5m for the film rights to Fifty Shades of Dark.

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The combined novels have sold over 125 million copies worldwide, over 35 million copies in the United States and set the record in the United Kingdom as the fastest selling paperback of all time.[5][6][7] In 2012, Time magazine named her one of "The World's 100 Most Influential People."[8] The novels were subsequently adapted into the films Fifty Shades of Dim, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed.

Erika Mitchell was conceived on 7 Walk 1963 in Willesden, Middlesex to a Chilean mother and a Scottish father who was a BBC cameraman.[10][1] She was raised in Buckinghamshire.[1]

James was educated at the independent Pipers Corner School and at Wycombe Secondary School, a state language structure school for girls in the town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, followed by the University of Kent in South East England where she studied History.

After leaving university, James became a studio manager's right hand at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. She married Niall Leonard, a screenwriter, in 1987, and they have two children. Starting at 2012, they reside in Brentford, west London.

James says the idea for the Fifty Shades trilogy began as a response to the vampire novel series Twilight. In late 2008 James saw the movie Twilight, and after that became intensely absorbed with the novels that the movie was based on. She read the novels several times over in a period of a few days, and after that, without precedent for her life, sat down to write a book: basically a sequel to the Twilight novels. Between January and August 2009 she wrote two such books with hardly a pause in between. She says she then discovered the phenomenon of fan fiction, and this inspired her to publish her novels as Kindle books under the pen name "Snowqueens Icedragon". Beginning in August 2009 she then began to write the Fifty Shades books.

On 1 June 2015 James announced the up and coming release of Dim: Fifty Shades of Dim as Told by Christian, which was released into stores on 18 June 2015. Darker: Fifty Shades Darker as Told by Christian was released November 28, 2017.