41–50 of 89 posts
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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.
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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.
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
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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.
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…
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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 m…
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.
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.
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 m…
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.
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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.
The article specifies “living author.” Agatha Christie and possibly others have him beat otherwise.
Moses (or whoever wrote the Pentateuch) probably has everyone beat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Bible#Table_...