ABC's "GMA" Airs Segment On Erotic New Novel Featuring Watchung Booksellers

The erotic new novel that's fast becoming a suburban phenomenon, Fifty Shades of Grey, also is helping put Montclair even more in the limelight.

On Saturday, The New York Times mentioned in an article on the front all about the growing popularity of the novel.

Then, on Tuesday morning, ABC's Good Morning America aired a segment on the novel dubbed "Steam Between The Pages" featuring an interview with Watchung Booksellers' Margot Sage-El. 

The GMA segment described how the book is "steaming up marriages" across the country with one fan describing it as "Sex and the City times a million."

Sage-El talked on air about how it's been hard to keep the popular book in stock.

"The minute they come in we already have a waiting list ... we're sold out of the book within a day," she said.

Indeed, Sage-El told Montclair Patch that the shop had sold out of the book early Saturday and so she had scrambled to find a copy to use for the filming of the GMA segment on Monday.

Fortunately, she found two on the "hold" shelf.

E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy, which has been labled by some as "mommy porn," has been signed up by a paperback division of Random House Inc. On Saturday, Vintage Books announced that it had acquired the three books—Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed. E-book editions will be out this week and paperbacks are expected in early April.

The novels previoiusly had been distributed by an Australia-based publisher, the Writer's Coffee Shop Publishing House. The trilogy follows the romance between a young, handsome billionaire, Christian Grey, and an innocent college student, Anastasia Steele. It has sold more than 250,000 copies, and by Saturday, the first volume had reached the top spot on both Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

Indeed, this Montclair Patch editor's own book club just finished reading this erotic novel—and everyone loved it so much that the book club is now reading the second installment.

"It is first and foremost a romance novel with incredible character development. Why does Christian Grey do what he does and how does Anastasia Steele come to understand him and more importantly herself and her own needs?" said one Montclair fan, Christine James. "Both characters grow themselves as they grow together."

For those of you who still don't have it, a new stock of the book is expected to arrive at Watchung Booksellers by Thursday.

Check out the Times article here.