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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
#82> 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.
Re: How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author
#83One 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.
Re: How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author
#84Re: How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author
#85This 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?
Re: How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author
#86a team of ghost writers :)
Re: How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
Re: How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author
#88For 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.
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
Re: How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.