How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author | Hacker News Reader

How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author

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84 pointssamclemens84 comments

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.

> 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...

We wrote https://juliadatascience.io in a few months and have about 4k unique visitors per month (https://juliadatascience.pirsch.io/). The cover is designed for free by ourselves via a plotting library. Yes, we’re not selling millions but we have spent only 60 dollars (on the domain name).

I'm in the process of doing this free for someone I know. I got into it clueless to how any of this works and what it may cost. Reading you post $10,000 minimum and researching a few days ago on how much book editors get paid (and exactly how) slightly shocked me!

It depends on the nature of the work and also the project. You don't have to spend $10,000 if you're just looking to create a book that you can give to your friends. If you want it to have any chance of commercial or critical success, though, you're going to need a level of polish that you have to pay for.

First of all, congrats. Writing a book is difficult, and writing one that people actually enjoy reading, even more so.

Second, trade and technical publishing are completely different markets. You need a literary agent to even sit at the table in trade (or traditional) publishing. You also have no chance in hell of getting one ("querying" is a waste of time) if you don't have preexisting connections or have a trendy "hook".

Plus, the objective functions are different. If you write a technical book that only sells 10 copies per month (I'm assuming 0.25% of visitors buy, although that might be on the high side) but it improves your career, you win.

Fiction authors, on the other hand, are trying to make enough in royalties to live on. You'll get about $3 per copy in royalties. You need to be targeting a large audience to even have a chance. Large audiences mean lots of competition; other people out there can hire publicists or somehow have the connections ("querying" agents is a waste of time) to make it in trad-pub (which is deeply flawed, but they can sell books when they get their shit together). If you sell less than 1000 copies, you're done--for good. Your name now has negative value, but no publisher (or agent) is going to touch an anonymous pen name (no platform, no photo with the family and the dog) either.

In traditional publishing, you have to make it a full-time job or you will be flushed out of the system (but they don't tell you that). Most of the time isn't spent on the writing (as the quality of much of what's produced these days shows) but marketing. Your "advance" is basically your marketing budget--they can't force you, but "eating" your advance instead of spending it to market your book (the publishing house won't) is frowned upon.

In self-publishing, there are no rules, but it seems that the successful self-publishers, on average, spend even more time on self-promotion, which writers famously dislike doing.

> First of all, congrats. Writing a book is difficult, and writing one that people actually enjoy reading, even more so.

Thanks. Credits go to the co-authors and the book being in a niche.

> In self-publishing, there are no rules, but it seems that the successful self-publishers, on average, spend even more time on self-promotion, which writers famously dislike doing.

Yes. We were lucky that our book got successfully promoted by the co—authors who already had some social media followers and it got picked up in the niche that it’s aimed at including some hyperlinks.

What stops fiction authors from picking a niche as well? It’s a common strategy for people who start a business to. Expecting to earn a living from day one by writing seems very unlikely even with publishers.

> What stops fiction authors from picking a niche as well?

Trad publishing and a lack of any real discoverability.

I don't read much fiction in text format, anymore, so take Audible, for example. I have a backlog of maybe 50+ books in that format, and the store front is atrociously bad. There is a lot of what I call "pulp fiction" pushed at me - some of it is OK, most of it is garbage, good in the way that stale rice will feed you and not kill you, but only barely edible.

You are given a selection of maybe, 9-10 books, if you want to "discover" you have to do quite a bit of work, which the trad publishers don't make easy (remember, marketing budgets push particular books, not good books).

So even finding a niche is close-to-impossible for the average Joe - trad publishing pushes what sells, despite quality, and so niches simply don't form.

So you can imagine, those who are self-publishing, must do a great deal of effort to even establish that niche (website, marketing, distribution, technical knowledge for all the former), and, unlike tech authors, they aren't usually tech savy.

So I would say two things stop them in particular:

a) There is no access to manuscripts which is not filtered by nepotism, or a small crew of editors. You can't self publish and submit to github, and expect a niche following to occur.

b) Authors are human beings, who want to make a living. Understandably, they don't want to give away their hard work for free (their manuscripts), and we don't have a commonly agreed upon way to benefit them for their work, if the public decides they are good.

Tech has less of a problem here, we often work backwards. We work on something for free, give it away on github, find it gains a niche following, and experience some sort of reward down the line (hired by major tech company, doing consulting work, e.g.). We also don't have the same market forces - nearly everyone reads, almost everyone can write (well is another matter), we can solve esoteric problems, fiction writing is often formulaic and thereby constrained in topics.

We still experience the forces of trad publishers in the form of app-stores, OS or hardware vendors, but we aren't as limited as fiction writers are in the scope of our domain. Tech writing is also usually extremely ephemeral, often a just published tech book will be out of date as soon as it is available, or one or two years into its existence. Not to say that tech writing is not useful or work, just illustrating how different the problem spaces are.

It's past time to recognize this, along with blogspam, synthetically generated content, and spam as what they are ... pollution. There are varying forms of pollution. Even shows like Mythbusters and Pawn Stars are filled with their own pollution, repetitively showing the same clips three times.

Things designed to capture attention, that are not novel, new, different, useful etc, should be treated as attention polluters and dealt with by being "unsurfaced." In a world with a plethera of information, rising the cream to the top is more important than ever. Facebook is focused on removing the scum from the bottom and letting the rest float around. Google is focused on something else besides identifying and raising cream. The Youtube community is waay to focused on making shocked open mouth face thumbnails. More than ever people need tools and teams that exist to identify and promote good.

Treating attention like a muscle that can be trained and controlled, isnt enough. The world has become too toxic, that left without better tools, the people become either passive consumers of pollution OR spend a significant amount of mental effort constantly evaluating and denying pollution. Garbage in, garbage out.

> 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.

How do you think famous painters and other artists work, even (or especially) the "old masters" (e.g. Rembrandt van Rijn)?

The $10,000 number is a little too high.

I'd say it's easy to start spending and keep spending the bucks if you're aiming to duplicate a conventional print run from a large press, with no expense spared, but it isn't necessary.

Sites like Canva will take care of cover art, and print on demand presses like Blurb let you start with a very reasonably priced short run and will hook you up with a variety of distribution networks.

You can quite literally publish a professionally packaged book for a few hundred dollars or less.

There's also Amazon, but I've never tried it so can't comment on it.

> I would say that it's bad for writing, though.

What a weird take. Especially in this day and age. Where news stories are built on tweets, we're engaged in a comment section of a super niche topic, there's a proliferation of a lifetime of video uploaded to youtube every day. many lifetimes streamed live on twitch.

I don't think this impacts writing at all. I think you could argue the opposite point. The amount of people reading books is on the decline. But the amount of people reading and engaging with textual content is on the rise.

Traditional publishing is nearing end of life. What's the point?

My pov: The fate of all of these centralized institutions is the same, a mass proliferation of alternatives and as a result, less power, and ultimately, death.

So basically, he is not a writer, but more of manager and product owner for massive team of writers?

Yes, he's using SCRUM to make sure all creativity and spirit is lost to "the process".

Is it Agile

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.

And "Franklin W. Dixon" ( Hardy Boys).

It's quite traditional. Alexander Dumas used ghostwriters to produce a comparable number of books and many old master artists had entire workshops of apprentices producing art in their name.

George Orwell published an essay claiming that the serial school stories then being published (Billy Bunter) were written in such a artificial tone that they were obviously being produced by a series of jobbing writers, provoking an indignant response from the author https://orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys

I feel like this is quite big omission in way we talk about past writers. It is pretty major difference against actually writing that much.

We constantly talk about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, don't we?

I don't and my school did not. This info was not in in booklets about plays I have seen either.

I have seen that one mentioned couple of times on HN, not elsewhere. Through, I dont care about Shakespeare at all and never discuss him. HN is pretty much only community where Shakespeare gets mentioned frequently (for me for mysterious reasons).

We talk about it critically as an aspect of live entertainment, like TV today, not like it was a problem across every form and we should always be critical of who was a real author or poet in Shakespeare's time period.

Tom Clancy is no longer among us.

AFAIK, Clancy only had one or two ghostwriters near the end of his life that have published subpar books when he was near-death (and posthumously). So it’s not quite the same as a “team of ghostwriters” while Patterson is in the prime of his writing career

like Jeff Koons, but in print.

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

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...

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.

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.

I'm kinda surprised you haven't because his books always end up as mass market paperbacks and are sold at every drug store, Walmart, airport kiosk,etc.

Kiss the Girls? Along came a spider? Both were pretty successful movies? (There was also Alex Cross, which was a flop)

But Patterson is formulaic. If it's not your formula, you won't notice. Other cultural tributaries are the book aisles in your local Walgreens/CVS, which are overflowing with Patterson. But, again, if you're not in that audience, you won't see it.

And if your attitude is "I blank out on these kinds of books", your friends will know, and they won't bother to inform you. (Or they have told you once or twice, and you blanked, and they stopped).

There is so much media content out there that unless you happen to be interested in a particular niche, you can miss pretty large events.

>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.

Which obviously means someone else is the best selling author of the past eighteen years.

>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.

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)

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.

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.

All very good points, and if you ever want to read/listen to the books that defined the genre and formula, pick up A Study in Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (or one of the numerous short stories that accompanied his works.)

What I like about the short stories in particular on audible is the stories are quick and digestible and novel. Perfect for a bedtime story or a quick car ride. In particular, this[1] one is worth the 1 credit if you're an audible subscriber. Stephen Fry for 68 hours. Hard to beat.

1: https://www.audible.com/pd/Sherlock-Holmes-Audiobook/B06WLMW...

> 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.

HC Andersen

Moses (or whoever wrote the Pentateuch) probably has everyone beat.

Mao has the “Little Red Book”, I think that one is the most popular book in the world after Bible.

In fairness it's easy to have a best seller if you just shoot the people who won't read it

But it is far, far easier to become a bestselling author than it is to become the dictator of a large country - which is kinda a prerequisite for the "or we'll shoot you" strategy.

Let's throw in the collected works of L. Ron Hubbard if we're going that route. His books are always selling off the shelves... because Scientologists are "strongly encouraged" to buy them by the cartload.

Last I paid attention, scholars seemed to agree that there's nothing resembling a single author for the Pentateuch. Wikipedia's coverage of this is terse at best, but near-nobody here is likely to read a "serious" account of this subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Bible#Table_...

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 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.

FTA: "Patterson supplies detailed outlines for his books. His co-writers then flesh out these narrative skeletons into installments of popular series"

He has scaled up thrillers like a startup. Hence his personal wealth is crazy.

It's an unexplained phenomenon. I know of a Russian author, Dontsova [1] that is the same: hundreds of shitty detective novels, immensely popular.

[1] A wikipedia article, as badly written as the books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darya_Dontsova?wprov=sfti1

Maybe it’s best understood like a Big Mac. One crappy burger after another, eaten for eternity because they are reliably average. There’s money to be made as a serial provider of homogeneous sustenance

It's the exploit/explore tradeoff. In the cultural industries, most consumers (the majority of whom don't care to be more than that) prefer to exploit--that is, read or watch or listen to something very similar to what they already have--than explore.

We think readers should be a smarter crowd--and, thus, more upscale in their choices--than TV watchers and popular music listeners (as both groups comprise, roughly, the general population). This is possibly the case, but it seems to be cancelled out by the massive time investment involved in seriously reading a book: eight hours for a typical novel, as opposed to an hour for a TV show or 3 minutes for a pop song. The high cost of exploration means that the book world has the same problem and, unfortunately, the processes and people who are trusted to filter for quality, quite frankly, don't. Traditional publishers follow the market and "book buzz" is built from the opinions of highly influential non-readers.

The target market probably doesn't see it as shitty or uninnovative, but rather as the next instalment with their beloved series/characters/author.

The people who go to Marvel movies aren't looking for fresh new superheros, or an challenging new format where Batman explores the true root causes of crime in society.

Short sentences.

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.

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.

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.

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:

https://www.gnooks.com

And Patterson is on position 39 of the most like authors.

Position 1 is held by Joanne K. Rowling:

https://www.gnooks.com/top

I wonder what that says about the demographics of Gnooks. Maybe that the users are younger.

    Joanne

Hah, first time I heard her name

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.

You do now ;)

I don't. I didn't read the article

Sure you do, you know his name now. You’ll notice James Patterson books everywhere unless you close your eyes

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.

I just go straight to the magazine rack and grab a copy of 2600 or browse the manga section

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