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

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

#61

Post by cs137 »

browie wrote: post #58
huijzer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sel…

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.

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

#63

Post by huijzer »

cs137 wrote: post #60
huijzer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sel…

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 "…

> 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.

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

#64

Post by basch »

cs137 wrote: post #47
quickthrower2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

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

#66

Post by Fargoan »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #32
Fargoan wrote: post #10

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.

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

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

#67

Post by duped »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #13

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...

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)

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

#69

Post by bitwize »

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.

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

#70

Post by bitwize »

easytiger wrote: post #37
shp0ngle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.
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