briarcliff mansion, new york — in book publishing, there’s james patterson — and basically everyone else.
his author biography: “james patterson has written more bestsellers and created more enduring fictional characters than any other current novelist.” loved by critics and peers? Not that much. but his popularity among readers remains undisputed. he is an industry unto himself.
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and now the author of popular thrillers (and children’s books and young adult novels and romances and mysteries) has released bookshots, a series of short, cheap, plot-driven novels aimed at an audience more prone to read on smartphones than on paper. (naturally, there is an app for it).
“Nowadays, when so many people have decided to go much of their lives without reading books, I think creating a new habit for them is a smart thing to do,” says Patterson, 69, sitting in his summer home study in the hudson valley, the room dominated by a sleigh bed where he reads and edits.
the trick? “I’ve cut the fat out of commercial novels,” she says. “In a great number of novels, there is more to them than there should be.”
not in these books. sentences are simple and declarative.
and often double as paragraphs.
chapters are hiccups. questions? rampant. answers? abundant and fast. Italics excites. Verbs outnumber adjectives, which Patterson seems to see as the literary equivalent of parsley. (do you want to write like this? you can! via james patterson’s online master class!)
“Each chapter is designed to advance the plot and characterization,” he says, “and to turn on the movie projectors in our heads.”
Movies figure prominently in Patterson’s world. television too. Bookshots’ managing editor, Washington native Bill Robinson, has experience in both fields and serves as executive producer on “Zoo,” the CBS series based on Patterson’s book of the same name. More than once, Patterson refers to himself as the literary equivalent of a showrunner.
He has a way of making big statements calmly, in contrast to his feverish characters, but with the absolute conviction of a very successful man. he labels book photography “a revolution” and “something huge”.
Paperbacks will be sold in airports, pharmacies, department stores, sometimes attached to clip strips like gummy bear bags. the motto: “stories at the speed of life”.
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“People want things faster. they want to binge,” says the ex-advertiser and one-time creative chief of j. walter thompson “these books are like reading movies.”
at the fiction buffet, bookshots are small plates if we’re being nice, junk food if we’re not: under 150 pages, about the size of an ipad mini, $4.99 RRP. two titles a month to start.
recalls patterson editor little brown’s last decision: “honestly, i would have been more aggressive.”
Last year, he wrote 117 volumes for bookshots.
although written is not the precise verb. conceived, sketched, co-written and curated. Patterson hands out exhaustive notes and outlines, sometimes 80 pages long, to co-authors, and his printing press regularly dumps contributors’ efforts like lottery tickets. “The success rate when I write the outline is almost 100 percent. when other people do it, it’s 50 to 60 percent,” she says.
is one of the first writers credited with promoting books through television commercials, releasing more than one title a year, and maintaining a group of writers that rivals the field of this year in the kentucky derby. “It may be a factory,” says Robinson, “but it’s a handmade factory.”
His tidy study overlooking the Hudson River is packed with past and present book projects, including a three-inch-thick binder labeled “Ideas,” a sheet listing 21 separate projects summarized by their titles.
the brevity of book photographs serves another teacher: patterson’s mortality. “Jim realized that his ideas would never come to fruition at the regular rate of publication,” says Robinson.
“the publication does not innovate”, says patterson. “It’s a bit strange, in this world where everything changes every 10 minutes.”
Patterson’s first 1976 novel, “The Thomas Berryman Number,” was initially rejected by 31 publishers. It remains one of his most acclaimed, winning the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. it sold about 10,000 copies. By comparison, “15th Affair,” created with Maxine Paetro and, yes, the fifteenth volume of the Killer Women’s Club series, sold 20,000 copies in one week.
for a man of words, so many, many words, patterson also has an astonishing amount of numbers. over 40 years, he has produced 158 titles and sold 325 million copies. Last year, according to his publisher, one in 21 hardcover adult novels sold in the United States featured Patterson’s name on the cover. Forbes estimates his annual book-related earnings at around $89 million.
Though it flouts tradition, Patterson’s preppy attire (linen shirt, clear glasses, boat shoes) and the look of his home, an elegant stone stack, are Ralph Lauren on steroids. She grew up in working-class Newburgh, 35 miles north and a world away from Briarcliff Manor. this, by the way, is the minor house. The 20,000-square-foot winter estate in Palm Beach was purchased for $17.4 million in 2009 before Patterson and his wife, Sue, invested an additional $14 million to renovate it.
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but if he lives like few authors, he also defends philanthropy on a spectacular level.
[james patterson, honored for his literacy work, says we need to do more.]
He and Sue fund 400 annual teacher education scholarships at 22 colleges and universities, many of them historically African American. Patterson has provided more than 650,000 books to the U.S. soldiers and 250,000 public school students in various cities. he has donated millions to school libraries and more than a million to independent bookstores.
All success stems from one simple root: your love of storytelling. “I remember wandering through the woods as a kid and telling story after story,” he says. on long drives, he would “write entire musicals in the car and sing songs he had written for them.” and he is never short of stories.
“I don’t like doing nonfiction,” he says. “turn off my strength, which is my imagination”. Sure, but he’s also written non-fiction.
has come under heavy fire from critics, who rarely bother to review his work, and he generally stays out of the band of better-known thriller writers. Stephen King called him “a terrible writer.” For all of Patterson’s gruff bravado (he’s rarely photographed smiling and will correct people who dare to question his abilities), it’s clear all of this can hurt.
Gesting to a well-reviewed new thriller he found lacking (he devours literary and popular fiction at about the same rate he writes), he says, “some of the guys got together and decided the author was out.” The “boys” are Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben and Lee Child.
patterson’s fictional characters tend to be nothing like him, except in their flurry of activity. his michael bennett series features a widowed detective with 10 adopted children. He and Sue, a sunny American former swimmer and ad designer a decade his junior who created several book photography covers, have been together for 19 years. His home is a museum of images of his only son, Jack, his recent graduation from boarding school, his father’s rare day off to write.
Patterson’s best-known hero is Alex Cross, an African-American D.C. detective with a doctorate in psychology. (Patterson dropped out of Vanderbilt’s English graduate program after a year.) Patterson appreciates the challenge of creating heroes unlike himself: “The more difficult the task, the more unlikely it is that someone else did it, which allows it to be fresh. ”
You don’t like to follow editorial tradition or the accepted rules of writing. “I don’t care about the rules per se. they either work or they don’t. I’m going to try to write a book that’s a bestseller,” she says. when she started fiction, “she would write at the top of each chapter, ‘be there, be there, be there on the scene. feel what the hero feels. if you’re getting electrocuted, feel that. you can’t be distant. you can’t be watching from another room.”
You haven’t given much thought to slowing down or taking more than a day off. “I don’t work to live. I play. why would I stop playing?
will it stop when it’s dead? He shrugs. “maybe.” given the large archive of ideas, the army of co-authors, maybe not even then.
After a tour of the garden, the pool, the terrace, the remains of his fiction, the author returns to his nest on the second floor. The printer has spat out another novel by a co-author, built on his model, and the cut-throat industry of Patterson Inc. sparks to life.
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