"James struck licensing agreements for everything from 'Fifty Shades'-branded wine and lingerie to floggers, vibrators and handcuffs..."

"... and oversaw the development of many of these items herself. Perhaps most incongruously, she even licensed a 'Fifty Shades' teddy bear, who comes with mini handcuffs and a blindfold. 'We set about trademarking things just to stop people from making them,' she tells me in her office, which is festooned with 'Fifty Shades' paraphernalia... James wants to show me some nipple clamps she helped design in collaboration with the sex-toy maker Lovehoney, a British company that produced a line of Fifty Shades-themed erotic accessories. Lovehoney had first proposed some heavy, industrial-looking clamps, which James rejected. 'They looked like they could jump start Frankenstein,' James says."

From "The Evolution of E L James/James changed the literary landscape with her blockbuster erotica trilogy, 'Fifty Shades of Grey.' Now she is trying something (sort of) new" (NYT).

Jump start Frankenstein. That's good. Almost good enough to make me read EL James — not quite — who's got a new book. It's about "a wealthy British aristocrat who falls for his house cleaner, a beautiful, mysterious young woman who fled Albania." Ah, yes, Albania. The country you pick when you need a country nobody knows about.*

James worked hard to get Albania:

James traveled to Albania twice to research the novel, and collected a small library of books about the country, including an Albanian dictionary, a guide to Albanian social codes and laws, and a book about Albanian organized crime. Her husband, who’s the household cook, learned to make traditional Albanian stews.

I await Lucky James, the cultural-appropriation restaurant.

It was quite a change from the research she did for “Fifty Shades,” which involved lurking in some of the darker corners of the internet, scrolling through websites devoted to sexual bondage techniques and accessories....

Beneath the frothy fantasy, “The Mister” deals with unexpectedly weighty topics like economic inequality, the plight of undocumented workers, the oppression of women in conservative societies and the way social institutions and governments elevate the wealthy and powerful and exploit the vulnerable.

Get woke and titillated.
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* Or so I learned from the movie "Wag that Dog."