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For those unfamiliar: His books are quite generic but provide some fun for the casual reader.
He has released over 200 books and sold over 400 million copies. He uses a team of ghostwriters to actually develop the books/series after he gives the detailed outlines of the characters and the stories.
His success is mainly how he has been able to scale up and release so many books with his name attached.
Which is fine. It makes him a 'unicorn' in software business parlance.
I would say that it's bad for writing, though. Ultimately, what he's doing exacerbates the absurdly lopsided distribution of visibility and rewards that writers experience.
Most books sell horribly, and not for reasons of low quality but because discoverability is a huge problem, even in today's world of recommendation algorithms and the like. There are a good number of "famous" writers who live in poverty, because the percentage of books that sell well enough to live on is so small.
Traditional publishers don't bother to invest much in a book unless they are sure it would sell without them (i.e., the author has 4,000,000 Instagram followers). The typical budget for marketing and publicity is about $300. The thing is, trad-pubs don't have to be better. They're inundated with unsolicited manuscripts ("slush") and even though very few of those are excellent, at least 5% are in a state where a competent editor could turn it into a book as good as any other commercial bestseller. They have all the power and, to them, authors are a fungible commodity. Oh, and if you think a literary agent is going to help you navigate this, well... unless you went to prep school with an agent, you won't even get _read_. You'll sit in a query pile, possibly get a glance by a 19-year-old unpaid intern, and get a form-letter rejection 18 months later.
You can self-publish, but less than 1% of the population has the savings and free time to do it right. It costs $10,000, minimum--you'll have to hire an editor, a cover designer, a formatter... and while you probably won't be able to afford a publicist you'll be competing against people who can--and non-writing efforts will take up at least a hundred hours of your time--some people find the marketing aspect fun and if that's you, great, but most writers don't, which is a big part of why so many of them pursue traditional publishing even though it's abusive if you're in the bottom 99%.
Allowing big-name authors to supercharge their apparent productivity by hiring teams of "co-authors" who do the actual writing exacerbates this problem. I don't see a good way to fix it, and what Patterson does probably shouldn't be outlawed, but it still sucks. The book world, in which name and "author brand" matter far more than literary quality, is already pretty moribund... and this kind of stuff doesn't help.
I have read only one of his book. And do not find enough motivation to buy another of his book. Dunno if it is my taste, but you comment explains a lot
So basically, he is not a writer, but more of manager and product owner for massive team of writers?
It's not that unusual. Tom Clancy has been doing it for decades, and before that "Carolyn Keene" (the collective pseudonym of every Nancy Drew writer).
It's a brand. This brand happens to be presented as a person, a single author. But, as with every brand, scratching the surface reveals more to the story.
Yes, he's using SCRUM to make sure all creativity and spirit is lost to
"the process".
like Jeff Koons, but in print.
The title is misleading. Patterson is not the living author to have sold the most books. JK Rowling has sold more, and perhaps others (Akira Toriyama, Danielle Steel). [1] I think the claim is that he is currently selling the most per year.
Oddly, I had never heard of Patterson. How is that possible given his apparent cultural dominance?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction...
>Oddly, I had never heard of Patterson. How is that possible given his apparent cultural dominance?
If he writes in a genre you don't read, then it's not that surprising. Most men have never heard of Nora Roberts, who comes close to matching Patterson in sales.
Every book store and library I've ever been in has a whole "James Patterson" shelf. Easy to find, since his name is the biggest thing on the spine. You can somehow just tell they're garbage without even taking one off the shelf.
> You can somehow just tell they're garbage without even taking one off the shelf.
For better or worse, I honestly think I just blank out these kinds of books. Still, I would have thought that the existence of a living author selling in the hundreds of millions would trickle down to me through one cultural tributary or another. Maybe through articles like this, through a blockbuster film adaptation, through word of mouth, etc.
Interesting that he is open about using ghost writers while Danielle Steel still claims to work around the clock authoring her nonstop stream of novels.
His books are everywhere in airport bookstores in Canada and the US. I think I have also seen them in large bookstores, such as Indigo.
>I think the claim is that he is currently selling the most per year
They're making an oddly specific claim
>Publishers Weekly has determined that he is the best-selling author of the past seventeen years.
It's hard to walk through a library, book store, or airport without seeing a James Patterson novel on display (his name is the largest text usually)
The books are formulaic, they're pretty straightforward, the plot twists are sometimes easy to predict. I've listened to / read over 25 of the Alex Cross books (the main character of his most popular book series,) I actually like the characters and their personality and their continuity throughout the series. It's not the best prose.
I read a lot. I think of it like watching Law & Order or some other cop TV show. I mostly read these types of books on airplanes or listen to them when driving.
The books aren't really meant to have the lingering impact of a 19th century classic or a 1984/brave new world or something like the alchemist. They don't take you to a new world or explore sci fi concepts. No aliens or weird tech or anything like this. Just a mirror of the real world with real world constraints with likeable characters and interesting, if sometimes dated, plots.
To be fair, most crime/thrillers are formulaic and if you don't follow the standard structure it won't exactly be easy to get published. There's the basic structure, usually three acts and certain expectations the audience has (fake ending/final twist, speech praising the villain, visit to the villains lair etc).
A pretty good book that covers this is: "The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know" where the author goes through Silence of the Lambs. I think he also has a similar book for a romance novel. After reading that book (or similar books by other authors) you'll be pretty confident in forecasting what happens in most movies, you watch, too. Self-reflection at the midpoint for example. It's a pretty interesting exercise to scroll to the 33% mark in any given ebook and search for the typical act 1 -> act 2 transition etc.
> A 2010 profile of Patterson in the Times Magazine portrays him as a brilliant marketer closely involved in every level of the publication and promotion of his books. According to the profile, Patterson felt so strongly that “Along Came a Spider” should be advertised on television that he produced a commercial at his own expense. He urged his publisher to release the subsequent titles in the Alex Cross series with a signature style of cover art, making himself not just an author but a brand. This marketing savvy is another side of Patterson that’s absent from “James Patterson.” Instead, the author presents himself as a “blue-collar kid” (his father was an insurance salesman, a detail also not mentioned in the book) who lucked into the best job in the world. In the book’s first chapter, he ascribes his success to a saying drummed into him by his grandmother: “Hungry dogs run faster.” Yet the ravenous ambition that so obviously drives him is a subject he skirts again and again.
Seems like a case of childhood emotional neglect: a void that can never be filled no matter how much achievement.
The article specifies “living author.” Agatha Christie and possibly others have him beat otherwise.
Moses (or whoever wrote the Pentateuch) probably has everyone beat.
HC Andersen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kostabi does the same thing for "fine" art.
edit: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-decades-80s-ar...
I’ve never read any Patterson books. Anyone have a recommendation of a single one to read to get a feel for what makes him a best seller?
I think it's not so much a single book, but that he writes long series of them with well developed characters that bridge across them. There is one series (Alex Cross) I'm listening to on audio book now that has at least 29 books in it.
None of them are super great but its like comfort food ... you finish one and the familiar characters are all there when you go back for the next. So this is the secret to have people buying huge numbers of books ... you always want the next one in the series.
Mind you, I borrow these for background listening / when I go to sleep at night. I would never spend the time on them as a focused activity.
I tried one last year, worst book i have read in 10 years. I have no idea why they are popular. They are all written by ghost writers i think.
Read the first "Alex Cross" book.
It's...not very good, but it's a pretty good example of Patterson's work. I read the first 3-4 books in the Alex Cross series, but gave up after finding no growth or improvement on the character or the author.
I think you'll find his popularity similar to what makes lots of other things popular. His books are rather bland, but not quite boring. He doesn't pack a lot of exposition between the action so the plot moves forward. Unfortunately this often makes the characters seem quite stupid as they rush to action rather than ponder the situation. I find this unrealistic and annoying, especially given Alex Cross's profession.
Obviously, I'm not a fan.
Along Came a Spider if you like crime books. It's pretty decent. There's a movie with Morgan Freeman if you'd prefer to go that route.
Short sentences.
Ironically, there's even a masterclass by James Patterson on how to write like James Patterson https://www.masterclass.com/classes/james-patterson-teaches-...
Sounds like a recruiting pipeline.
Both Danielle Steel and J.K. Rowling appear to have sold more books. Steel’s numbers in the wiki entry are from 2010, and Rowling’s from 2018; I assume they have only increased since then. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction...
Interesting.
I run the literature recommendations site Gnooks:
And Patterson is on position 39 of the most like authors.
Position 1 is held by Joanne K. Rowling:
I wonder what that says about the demographics of Gnooks. Maybe that the users are younger.
Joanne
One summer I got stuck in the back woods of Alberta with nothing to read but a plastic grocery bag filled with James Patterson novels. I read everything in that bag and not for one second did I believe one word of anything that he had written. Gawd, what an awful experience. I'll never read another book by that lame ass hack again.
I read two or three books of his when I was in school to improve my english. I found him on the NYT best seller's list, where he seems to be a constant. You could argue that at some point this becomes self sustaining, but then again, there aren't many with a track record this consistent.
He's a hack like Jeff Rovin or Dan Brown. But as long as he keeps turning that crank, he can produce airport fiction the masses will snap up and make shittons of money. There's a reason why they call it "potboiler", and even good authors are known to produce it.
False. James Patterson became the world's best outliner who handed off his ideas to other authors to make whole.
I read lots of (genre) fiction books but never heard of this guy before today, or any of his books.
I assumed many of his books were ghostwritten
a team of ghost writers :)
Simply dreadful stuff.
This is a guy who co-wrote Clinton autobiography in the height of Epstein drama. And everyone still cheers him.
did he help diddle kids as research?
Literally don't even know who that is.
Go into any book store or library (at least in the us) and you'll probably find out. Every one I've been in has had a table at the main entrance full of his books or on a table in the young adult section.
You do now ;)