Trivia / The Mister

• Extremely Lengthy Creation: E. L. James stated she originally came up with the idea for the novel before writing Fifty Shades of Grey; she wrote a rough draft of The Mister in 2009 but didn't fully know how to make it work, plus she then got preoccupied writing Fifty Shades and working on the movies. She finally completed it and got it published in 2019, ten years after writing the initial draft.
  E.L. James: I had the rough draft I’d written, but I didn’t really understand the characters at all. And then over the years they’ve slowly crystallized. But with Alessia, I had to go to Albania to get a better idea of what she is like and where she’s from and all of that, because it’s actually very difficult to find information about Albania. So, I went last March and everything sort of fell into place, and I was able to finish the book.
• Fandom Life Cycle: It started out at Stage 0b as most people knew of it via the association with the author's previous books, the Fifty Shades of Grey series. It reached Stage 3 upon its publication in 2019, then quickly slipped somewhere between Stage 6a and 6b. Although The Mister sold alright, making it onto the New York Times Bestseller List, it paled in comparison to Fifty Shades of Grey's sales and didn't remotely generate the same level of interest from either fans or wider society (for example, The Mister doesn't even have a fan wiki, unlike Fifty Shades). The average person likely either doesn't know it exists or only knows it as "the other novel the Fifty Shades lady wrote". It was announced in 2020 that a movie adaptation is in the works, so it remains to be seen if this changes anything.

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