james patterson inc. - nytimes.com

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January 24, 2010

James Patterson Inc.By JONATHAN MAHLER

Like most authors, James Patterson started out with one book, released in 1976, that hestruggled to get published. It sold about 10,000 copies, a modest, if respectable, showing for afirst novel. Last year, an estimated 14 million copies of his books in 38 different languagesfound their way onto beach blankets, airplanes and nightstands around the world. Pattersonmay lack the name recognition of a Stephen King, a John Grisham or a Dan Brown, but heoutsells them all. Really, its not even close. (According to Nielsen BookScan, Grishams, Kingsand Browns combined U.S. sales in recent years still dont match Pattersons.) This is partlybecause Patterson is so prolific: with the help of his stable of co-authors, he published nineoriginal hardcover books in 2009 and will publish at least nine more in 2010.

There are many different ways to catalog Pattersons staggering success. Here are just a few:Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by JamesPatterson. He is listed in the latest edition of Guinness World Records, published last fall, asthe author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out ofdate: he now has 51 35 of which went to No. 1.

Patterson and his publisher, Little, Brown & Co., a division of the Hachette Book Group, havean unconventional relationship. In addition to his two editors, Patterson has three full-timeHachette employees (plus assistants) devoted exclusively to him: a so-called brand managerwho shepherds Pattersons adult books through the production process, a marketing directorfor his young-adult titles and a sales manager for all his books. Despite this support staff andhis prodigious output, Patterson is intimately involved in the publication of his books. A formerad executive Patterson ran J. Walter Thompsons North American branch before becoming afull-time writer in 1996 he handles all of his own advertising and closely monitors just aboutevery other step of the publication process, from the design of his jackets to the timing of hisbooks release to their placement in stores. Jim is at the very least co-publisher of his ownbooks, Michael Pietsch, Pattersons editor and the publisher of Little, Brown, told me.

A couple of months ago, I sat in on one of Pattersons regular meetings with Little, Brown todiscuss the marketing and publicity for his coming titles. The meeting was held not, as youmight expect, at the publishers offices in Midtown Manhattan but in the living room ofPattersons Palm Beach home, a canary yellow Spanish-style house on a small island in LakeWorth. Pattersons wife, Sue, a tall, athletic-looking blonde whom he met at J. WalterThompson, served coffee and gooey chocolate-chip cookies to the guests: Pietsch; MeganTingley, the publisher of Little, Browns young-readers books; and David Young, the C.E.O. of



Hachette.

Pietsch and Tingley showed mock-ups of covers and presented ideas they had been working on.From the plush, caramel-colored couch facing them, Patterson, who is a trim 62 with a habitualslouch and laconic manner well suited to his dry sense of humor, acted as creative director, afamiliar role from his years in advertising. At one point, the conversation turned to the nextinstallment in Pattersons Michael Bennett series, which revolves around a Manhattanhomicide detective and widower with 10 multiracial adopted children (Cheaper by the Dozenmeets Die Hard, as Patterson describes it). Pietsch mentioned a possible promotional line,New York Has a New Hero. Patterson instantly amended it: Finally, New York Has a Hero.

A number of former Little, Brown employees who attended these sorts of meetings withPatterson in the 1990s and early 2000s described him to me as low-key but intimidating, morecutthroat adman than retiring writer a kind of real-life Don Draper. Unsatisfied withpublishings informal approach to marketing meetings, Patterson had expected corporate-stylepresentations, complete with comprehensive market-share data and sales trends. A lot ofauthors are just grateful to be published, Holly Parmelee, Pattersons publicist from 1992 to2002, told me several weeks earlier. Not Jim. His attitude was that we were in businesstogether, and he wanted us both to succeed, but it was not going to be fun and games.

But that was when Patterson was still making a name for himself and fighting for hispublishers full attention. Now that he is the worlds bestselling author and Little, Browns mostprized possession, Patterson seemed agreeable, easygoing. Even when he shot down an idea,like Pietschs suggestion that Patterson promote the new Michael Bennett book with a day ofevents in all five boroughs, he did so gently: I just dont want for it to be like one of thosethings when an athlete goes through and shakes four hands. Halfway through the meeting,Patterson suggested that they take a short break to listen to some songs from a musical hesdeveloping based on his romance novel Sundays at Tiffanys.

When the meeting was over, Patterson and his wife drove everyone to lunch in their matchingMercedes sedans. On our way to the restaurant, they took us past their future home, anoceanfront mansion in Palm Beach that they bought last year for $17.4 million and are now inthe midst of renovating. Theres my little cottage, Patterson said as the 20,000-square-foothouse came into view.

ACCORDING TO FORBES magazine, Patterson earned Hachette about $500 million over thelast two years. Hachette disputes the accuracy of these numbers but wouldnt provide me withdifferent ones. Regardless, it seems safe to assume that Patterson, who puts out more bestsellers in any given year than many publishing houses, is responsible for a meaningful portionof the companys annual revenues. I like to say that Jim is the rock on which we build thiscompany, David Young told me in his office one recent morning.

Like movie studios, publishing houses have long built their businesses on top of blockbusters.But never in the history of publishing has the blockbuster been so big. Thirty years ago, the



industry defined a hit novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies inhardcover. Today a book isnt considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one millioncopies.

The story of the blockbusters explosion is, paradoxically, bound up with that of publishingsrecent troubles. They each began with the wave of consolidation that swept through theindustry in the 1980s. Unsatisfied with publishings small margins, the new conglomerates thatnow owned the various publishing houses pressed for bigger best sellers and larger profits.Mass-market fiction had historically been a paperback business, but publishers now put moreenergy and resources into selling these same books as hardcovers, with their vastly morefavorable profit margins. At the same time, large stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders wereelbowing out independent booksellers. Their growing dominance of the market gave them theleverage to demand wholesale discounts and charge hefty sums for favorable store placement,forcing publishers to sell still more books. Big-box stores like Costco accelerated the trend bystocking large quantities of books by a small group of authors and offering steep discounts onthem. Under pressure from both their parent companies and booksellers, publishers becameless and less willing to gamble on undiscovered talent and more inclined to hoard theirresources for their most bankable authors. The effect was self-fulfilling. The few books thatpublishers invested heavily in sold; most of the rest didnt. And the blockbuster became evenbigger.

Patterson has been a beneficiary of the industrys shifting economics, but he was also a catalystfor change at Little, Brown and in the world of publishing in general. When Pattersonpublished his breakout book, Along Came a Spider, in 1993, Little, Brown was still a largelyliterary house, whose more commercial authors included the historian William Manchester,biographer of Winston Churchill. Pattersons success in the subsequent years encouraged Little,Brown to fully embrace mass-market fiction. But more than that, Patterson almost single-handedly created a template for the modern blockbuster author.

There were, of course, blockbuster authors before Patterson, among them Mario Puzo, JamesMichener and Danielle Steel. But never had authors been marketed essentially as consumergoods, paving the way for a small group of writers, from Charlaine Harris to Malcolm Gladwell,to dominate best-seller lists often with several titles at a time in the same way that brandslike Skippy and Grey Poupon dominate supermarket shelves. Until the last 15 years or so, thethought that you could mass-merchandise authors had always been resisted, says LarryKirshbaum, former C.E.O. of the Time Warner Book Group, which owned Little, Brown until2006. Jim was at the forefront of changing that.

The lesson was not easily learned. Publishing is an inherently conservative business. Pattersonrepeatedly challenged industry convention, sometimes over the objections of his own publisher.When Little, Brown was preparing to release Along Came a Spider, Patterson tried topersuade his publisher that the best way to get the book onto best-seller lists was to advertiseaggressively on television. Little, Brown initially balked. Bookstores typically base their



stocking decisions on the sales of an authors previous books, and Pattersons had not doneparticularly well. This was going to be the first of several novels about an African-Americanhomicide detective in Washington, D.C., named Alex Cross; the prevailing wisdom was that theaudience for a series built around a recurring character needed to be nurtured gradually.Whats more, large-scale TV advertising was rare in publishing, not only because of theprohibitive cost but also for cultural reasons. The thinking was that selling a book as if it were alawn-care product could very well backfire by turning off potential readers.

Patterson wrote, produced and paid for a commercial himself. It opened with a spider droppingdown the screen and closed with a voice-over: You can stop waiting for the next Silence of theLambs. Once Little, Brown saw the ad, it agreed to share the cost of rolling it out over thecourse of several weeks in three particularly strong thriller markets New York, Chicago andWashington. Along Came a Spider made its debut at No. 9 on the New York Times hardcoverbest-seller list, ensuring it favorable placement near the entrance of bookstores, probably thesingle biggest driver of book sales. It rose to No. 2 in paperback and remains Pattersons mostsuccessful book, with more than five million copies in print.

Its not hard to understand the popularity of Along Came a Spider. Its a police proceduralwith an uncomplicated yet ever-twisting plot, some sex, betrayal and plenty of violence. Thebooks hero, Cross, is smart and tough, yet sensitive and vulnerable. He has a Ph.D. in forensicpsychology from Johns Hopkins, lost his wife in a drive-by shooting leaving him to raise histwo children alone plays Gershwin on a beat-up baby-grand piano and volunteers at the soupkitchen of his local parish. Still, hundreds of suspenseful, fast-paced novels are published eachyear; few become successful, let alone blockbusters. Its entirely possible, even quite likely, thatwithout those ads, Along Came a Spider never would have made the best-seller list, and thatJames Patterson would now be just another thriller writer.

Patterson quickly turned Alex Cross into a booming franchise, encouraging Little, Brown tounify the series with a single jacket style shiny, with big type and bold, colorful lettering and titles drawn from nursery rhymes (Kiss the Girls, Pop Goes the Weasel, The Big BadWolf), with their foreboding sense of innocence interrupted. Jim was sensitive to the fact thatbooks carry a kind of elitist persona, and he wanted his books to be enticing to people whomight not have done so well in school and were inclined to look at books as a headache,Kirshbaum says. He wanted his jackets to say, Buy me, read me, have fun this isnt MobyDick.

Patterson built his fan following methodically. Instead of simply going to the biggest book-buying markets, he focused his early tours and advertising efforts on cities where his bookswere selling best: like a politician aspiring to higher office, he was shoring up his base. Fromthere, he began reaching out to a wider audience, often through unconventional means. Whensales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the EastCoast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, TheWomens Murder Club, about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San



Francisco.

No sooner had Patterson established himself in the thriller market than he started moving intonew genres. Kirshbaum didnt initially like the idea; he was worried that Patterson wouldconfuse his thriller fans. Pattersons first nonthriller, Miracle on the 17th Green, published in1996, did very well. That same year, Patterson wanted to try publishing more than one bookdespite Little, Browns view that he would cannibalize his own audience. In addition to Miracleon the 17th Green, Patterson published Hide and Seek and Jack and Jill, each of which wasa best seller. From there, Patterson gradually added more titles each year. Not only did morebooks mean more sales, they also meant greater visibility, ensuring that Pattersons namewould almost always be at the front of bookstores, with the rest of the new releases. Pattersonencountered similar resistance when he introduced the idea of using co-authors, which Little,Brown warned would dilute his brand. Once again, the books were best sellers. Eventually, Istopped fighting him and went along for the ride, Kirshbaum says.

Pattersons vision of a limitless empire forced Little, Brown to reorder its priorities. Publishershave finite resources, and the demands of publishing Patterson were extraordinary even for ablockbuster author. Some Little, Brown editors worried that other books were suffering as aresult. To have one writer really start needing, and even demanding, the lions share of energyand attention was difficult, Sarah Crichton, Little, Browns publisher from 1996 to 2001, toldme. There were times when some of us resented that. When Jim felt that resentment, heroared back. And he was too powerful to ignore.

Crichton says she was continually surprised by the success of Pattersons books. To her, theylacked the nuance and originality of other blockbuster genre writers like Stephen King or DeanKoontz. Jim felt his ambitions werent being taken seriously enough, Crichton says. And inretrospect, he was probably right.

WHEN I VISITED Patterson one day in Florida this fall, his wife met me at the door in tenniswhites. Patterson soon followed in a white polo shirt, pleated blue trousers and boat shoes. Hestopped in the kitchen to pour himself a glass of orange Fanta and led me upstairs to his homeoffice, an airy, uncluttered wood-paneled room overlooking a lap pool Sue, who is 10 yearshis junior, was an all-American swimmer at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1970s andthe Intracoastal Waterway.

Pattersons bookshelves are evenly divided between thrillers books by Michael Connelly andJeffrey Deaver and more highbrow, literary fare like Philip Roth, John Cheever and DenisJohnson. When I asked him what he was reading now, Patterson mentioned Wolf Hall, byHilary Mantel, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and The Power Broker, RobertCaros doorstop biography of Robert Moses. My favorite books are very dense ones, Pattersontold me. I love One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Im a big James Joyce fan well, at leastuntil Finnegans Wake. He kind of lost me there.

There is no computer in Pattersons office; he writes in longhand on a legal pad and gives the



pages to his assistant to type up. Hanging above the round wooden table where he works is aphotograph of President Clinton taken during the Monica Lewinsky scandal walking down thesteps of Marine One with a copy of Pattersons When the Wind Blows tucked under his arm.(Pattersons popularity in Washington is apparently bipartisan: the wall of one of hisdownstairs bathrooms is plastered with fan mail from both George Bushes.) Neatly arranged onan adjacent L-shaped desk were 23 stacks of paper of varying heights, Pattersons works inprogress.

Patterson grew up in Newburgh, N.Y., the son of a tough man who overcame a difficultchildhood. Raised in the local poorhouse by a single mother, Pattersons father earned ascholarship to Hamilton College and dreamed of becoming a writer or a diplomat but wound upselling insurance. He didnt have a father, and I dont think he knew how to do it, Pattersontold me. (When his father retired, he wrote a novel and showed it to Patterson, already anestablished author. Patterson gave him the same advice he gives all first-time novelists: Writeanother one.)

Patterson discovered books late for a man who now makes a fortune writing them. Right afterhis senior year in high school, his family moved to a suburb of Boston, and Patterson got a jobworking nights and weekends as an aide at McLean Hospital in Belmont. With nothing else todo on his overnight shifts, he guzzled coffee and read.

At first, Pattersons literary taste ran toward the highbrow Jerzy Kosinski, Jean Genet, EvanS. Connell. I was a snob, he says. After graduating from Manhattan College in 1969, Pattersonwas given a free ride to Vanderbilt Universitys graduate program in English literature butdropped out after just one year. I had found two things that I loved, reading and writing, hetold me. If I became a college professor, I knew I was going to wind up killing them both off.

Instead, Patterson moved to New York and got a job as a junior copywriter at J. WalterThompson. He also started reading commercial books like The Exorcist and The Day of theJackal. I always felt I could write a reasonable literary novel, but not a great one, he says.Then I thought, I can do this. I understand it, and I like it. Patterson set up a typewriter onthe kitchen table of his small apartment on 100th Street and Manhattan Avenue and wroteafter work every night and on weekends. The result was his first novel, The Thomas BerrymanNumber.

More than a dozen publishers rejected Pattersons manuscript before his agent, whomPatterson found in a newspaper article, finally sold it to Little, Brown for $8,500. I remembergoing up to Boston Little, Brown was still in Boston then and walking into this library witha huge fireplace, Patterson recalls of his first visit to his publisher. On the bookshelves wereall of these other Little, Brown books, Catcher in the Rye, The French Lieutenants Woman,The Executioners Song. Im thinking, Theyre going to publish me? This is so cool.

The Thomas Berryman Number is the story of a newspaperman in Nashville who is assignedto cover the assassination of a local politician and ends up on the trail of his murderer, a



professional killer from the Texas panhandle named Thomas Berryman. The action bouncesaround a lot, ricocheting between Berrymans various murders, the newspapermans reportingand his subsequent effort to turn his articles on the case into a book. Berryman bears none ofthe hallmarks of Pattersons later thrillers. Its more brooding and stylized, more classicallynoir. The bad guy Berryman is not a sadist or a psychopathic serial killer; hes a hired gun.There is no real good guy, other than the reporter and narrator. At its best, the prose can call tomind Raymond Chandler. Heres Berryman in the books opening pages, about to hitch a rideout of Texas with a man he would soon kill: Thomas Berryman shaded his sunglasses so hecould see the approaching car better. A finely made coil of brown dust followed it like astreamer. Buzzards crossed its path, heading east toward Wichita Falls.

The book won a prestigious Edgar Award for a first novel from the Mystery Writers of America.No doubt, some of those who praised it at the time would now say Patterson has failed to liveup to its literary promise. Thats not how Patterson sees it. Its more convoluted, more bleak more of the sort of thing that some people will find praiseworthy, he says of The ThomasBerryman Number. The sentences are superior to a lot of the stuff I write now, but the storyisnt as good. Im less interested in sentences now and more interested in stories.

After The Thomas Berryman Number, Patterson wrote several more books for a number ofdifferent publishers that were neither successful nor critically acclaimed. In 1980, he tried hishand at the demonic child genre memorably popularized by the film Rosemarys Babywith the horror novel Virgin (which was later retitled and published as Cradle and All). In1987, the year the movie Wall Street was released, he published a Wall Street thriller calledBlack Market.

Patterson is unsentimental about his early, somewhat clumsy attempts at popular fiction.Thats an absolutely horrifying book, he says of his 1977 novel, Season of the Machete, thestory of a sadistic husband-and-wife team who carry out a series of gory machete murders on aCaribbean island. I actually tell people not to read it.

Several weeks later, I witnessed this firsthand at one of Pattersons signings. When a womanhanded him a copy of the book to autograph, he groaned. Not my best work, Patterson said.Its scaring me half to death, the woman answered. Dont read it, Patterson replied.

WHAT IS PERHAPS most remarkable about the Patterson empire is the sheer volume of booksit produces. The nine hardcovers a year are really only the beginning. Nearly all of those booksare published a second and third time, first as traditional paperbacks, then as pocket-size,mass-market paperbacks. Scarcely a week goes by when we arent publishing something byJames Patterson, Young told me, only half-joking.

This summer, Patterson will begin his fourth thriller series, Private, which centers on adetective agency with branches all over the world. In addition, he does frequent thriller one-offs, including an annual summer beach read, usually set at or near a resort.



The thriller genre is generally not for the squeamish, but Pattersons tend to be especiallygraphic, and the violence often involves sociopathic sexual perversion and attractive youngwomen. For instance, the villain in his second Alex Cross novel, Kiss the Girls, is apsychopath who kidnaps, rapes and tortures college girls in an underground bunker; at onepoint, he even feeds a live snake into the anus of one of his victims.

As long as there has been mass-market fiction, it has had its detractors. In the late Victorianera, the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold denounced the tawdry novels whichflare in the bookshelves of our railway stations, and which seem designed . . . for people with alow standard of life. Yet even within the maligned genre, Patterson has some especially nastycritics. The Washington Posts thriller reviewer, Patrick Anderson, called Kiss the Girls sick,sexist, sadistic and subliterate. Stephen King has described Patterson as a terrible writer.

Patterson has written in just about every genre science fiction, fantasy, romance, womensweepies, graphic novels, Christmas-themed books. He dabbles in nonfiction as well. In 2008,he published Against Medical Advice, a book written from the perspective of the son of afriend who suffers from Tourettes syndrome, and last year, he took on the supposed murder ofthe child pharaoh King Tut.

Pattersons fastest-growing franchise is his young-adult books. He published his first Y.A. title,Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment, in 2005, not long after the languishing genre wasjump-started by blockbusters like Harry Potter and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Lastmonth, he introduced his third Y.A. series, Witch and Wizard, a dystopian fantasy about ateenage brother and sister who wake up to discover that they are living in a totalitarian regimeand that they have supernatural powers that have made them enemies of the state. Despitesome negative prepublication reviews, the book was critic-proof, making its debut at No. 1 onthe Times best-seller list for childrens chapter books.

Each of Pattersons series has its own fan base, but there are also plenty of people who readeverything he writes. His books all share stylistic similarities. They are light on atmosphericsand heavy on action, conveyed by simple, colloquial sentences. I dont believe in showing off,Patterson says of his writing. Showing off can get in the way of a good story.

Pattersons chapters are very short, which creates a lot of half-blank pages; his books are, in avery literal sense, page-turners. He avoids description, back story and scene setting wheneverpossible, preferring to hurl readers into the action and establish his characters with a minimumof telegraphic details. The first chapter of The Swimsuit, a recent thriller with a villain whoabducts women for pornographic snuff films, opens with the kidnapping of a supermodel on abeach in Hawaii:

Kim McDaniels was barefooted and wearing a blue-and-white-striped Juicy Couture minidresswhen she was awoken by a thump against her hip, a bruising thump. She opened her eyes in theblackness, as questions broke the surface of her mind.



Where was she? What the hell was going on?

TO MAINTAIN HIS frenetic pace of production, Patterson now uses co-authors for nearly all ofhis books. He is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each bookor series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course. This kind of collaboration is secondnature to Patterson from his advertising days, and its certainly common in other creativeindustries, including television. But writing a novel is not the same thing as coming up withjokes for David Letterman or plotting an episode of 24. Books, at least in their traditionalconception, are the product of one persons imagination and sensibility, rendered in a singular,unreproducible style and voice. Some novelists have tried using co-authors, usually withlimited success. Certainly none have taken collaboration to the level Patterson has, with his fiveregular co-authors, each one specializing in a different Patterson series or genre. DukeEllington said, I need an orchestra, otherwise I wouldnt know how my music sounds, Pietsch told me when I asked him about Pattersons use of collaborators. Jim created a processand a team that can help him hear how his music sounds.

The way it usually works, Patterson will write a detailed outline sometimes as long as 50pages, triple-spaced and one of his co-authors will draft the chapters for him to read, reviseand, when necessary, rewrite. When hes first starting to work with a new collaborator, a bookwill typically require numerous drafts. Over time, the process invariably becomes moreefficient. Patterson pays his co-authors out of his own pocket. On the adult side, hiscollaborators work directly and exclusively with Patterson. On the Y.A. side, they sometimeswork with Pattersons young-adult editor, who decides when pages are ready to be passed alongto Patterson.

Some Patterson fans have complained in online forums that his co-written books feel toocookie cutter and lack the roller coaster feel of his previous work, but his sales certainlyhavent suffered. In at least one instance, Patterson took on a co-author in an effort to boostsales: last year, after noticing he wasnt selling in Scandinavia, he invited Swedens best-sellingcrime writer, Liza Marklund, to collaborate with him on an international thriller. Their novel,The Postcard Killers, is just being published in Sweden and will be out in the U.S. thissummer.

For the most part, though, Patterson draws his co-authors from the vast sea of strugglingwriters. A few weeks after visiting Patterson, I had lunch with one of his collaborators, MichaelLedwidge, in Manhattan. An amiable 39-year-old redhead in a black leather jacket and jeans,Ledwidge told me he grew up in a large, working-class Irish family in the Bronx. He wanted tobe a cop, but when he applied in 1993, the Police Academy was oversubscribed. So he workedas a doorman and started writing a heist novel on the side. When Ledwidge learned that he andJames Patterson shared an alma mater, Manhattan College, he delivered his half-finishedmanuscript to Patterson one morning at J. Walter Thompson. That night, his phone rang.

It must be James Patterson, Ledwidge joked to his wife.



It was. Patterson helped Ledwidge get his first book published and his writing career started. Afew books later, Ledwidge had garnered some critical acclaim but not much commercialsuccess. In 2003, Patterson suggested that they collaborate on Step on a Crack, his firstMichael Bennett novel. Ledwidge leapt at the opportunity. The book went straight to No. 1 onthe Times best-seller list. One book quickly led to another. In 2005, Ledwidge quit his day jobas a cable-splicer at Verizon, left the Bronx for Connecticut and became a full-time co-authorfor James Patterson.

Ledwidge told me that he and Patterson have an easy working relationship, that Pattersonplayfully teases him when he writes a scene that Patterson doesnt like and praises him whenhes pleased with something. I asked Ledwidge if he missed writing his own books. Honestly? he asked. Not at all. This is much more fun.

ONE NIGHT IN Florida, Patterson and I met his wife and their 11-year-old son, Jack, fordinner at the Palm Beach Grill. When the matre d noticed Patterson entering the restaurant,she told him his table was ready. A well-dressed, white-haired woman quickly spun around.

Are you James Patterson? she asked excitedly.

Yes, Patterson answered.

I just read your last one. What was it called?

Patterson hesitated, unsure which book she was talking about.

It was brutal! she woman continued.

The Swimsuit? Patterson ventured.

Yeah, the woman said. Boy, was it brutal! I liked it, but it was brutal!

After dinner, Sue and Jack went home, and Patterson and I had another glass of wine andcontinued talking. Patterson told me that Jack, who had been working on his laptop for most ofthe meal, only recently started to like reading. It required a deliberate effort on Pattersonspart. Beginning a few summers ago, Patterson told Jack he didnt have to do any chores; he justhad to read for an hour or so every day. The first summer Jack resisted. The second summer hedidnt complain. Last summer, he no longer needed any prodding. Patterson ticked off some ofthe books Jack had recently read and enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird, A Wrinkle in Timeand Huckleberry Finn with obvious pride.

Patterson told me that Jacks initial reluctance to read helped inspire him to move into the Y.A.genre. He wanted to write books for preteens and teenagers that would be fun and easy to read.The young-adult realm was, in one sense, a big leap for an author known for violent thrillers. Atthe same time, it was a natural fit for Patterson, whose unadorned prose and fast-paced plotsare well suited to reluctant readers. Promoting literacy among children has since become a pet



cause for him; he has his own Web site, ReadKiddoRead.com, aimed at helping parents choosebooks for their children. There are millions of kids who have never read a book that they liked,and that is a national disgrace, Patterson said. What Im trying to do is at least wake upseveral thousand of them.

Later, our conversation turned to Pattersons critics. Thousands of people dont like what Ido, Patterson told me, shrugging off his detractors. Fortunately, millions do. For all of hiscommercial success, though, Patterson seemed bothered by the fact that he has not been givenhis due that unlike King or even Grisham, who have managed to transcend their genres, hecontinues to be dismissed as an airport author or, worse, a marketing genius who has cynicallymaneuvered his way to best-sellerdom by writing remedial novels that pander to the publicsbasest instincts. Caricature assassination, Patterson called it.

Patterson said too much has been made of his marketing savvy. (A few years ago, a professor atHarvard Business School went so far as to do a case study on him.) To Patterson, theexplanation for his success is less complicated. Whether hes writing about a serial killer, a loveaffair between a doctor and poet in Marthas Vineyard or a middle-aged ad executive whomiraculously becomes an exceptional putter and joins the senior golf tour, his books areaccessible and engaging. A brand is just a connection between something and a bunch ofpeople, Patterson told me. Crest toothpaste: I always used it, it tastes O.K., so I dont have anyparticular reason to switch. Here the connection is that James Patterson writes books thatbubble along with heroes I can get interested in. Thats it.

Patterson considers himself as an entertainer, not a man of letters. Still, he bristles when hehears one of his books described as a guilty pleasure: Why should anyone feel guilty aboutreading a book? Patterson said that what he does coming up with stories that will resonatewith a lot of people and rendering them in a readable style is no different from what King,Grisham and other popular authors do. I have a saying, Patterson told me. If you want towrite for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for a few friends, get a blog. But if you wantto write for a lot of people, think about them a little bit. What do they like? What are theirneeds? A lot of people in this country go through their days numb. They need to be entertained.They need to feel something.

Shortly before we left the restaurant, Patterson brought up The Swimsuit again. I like TheSwimsuit, he said. Its nasty, but I like it. But I think I went a little farther than I needed to.Im going to tone it down for the paperback.

Patterson noticed a look of surprise on my face; its not every day that an author decides torewrite one of his books. Look, he said, if youre writing Crime and Punishment orRemembrance of Things Past, then you can sit back and go: This is it, this is the book. This ishigh art. Im the man, youre not. The end. But Im not the man, and this is not high art.

Whatever ambivalence once existed toward Patterson inside Little, Brown has long since beenreplaced by unequivocal enthusiasm and gratitude. Pietsch, who succeeded Crichton as



publisher, says Patterson belongs in the same class as Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Everynovel of Jims is master class in terms of plotting, pace and striking the right balance betweenaction and emotional content, Pietsch told me. I have never read a writer who I think is betterat keeping your eye moving forward and your heart moving forward.

Thanks in part to Patterson, Little, Browns identity has changed considerably since he firstvisited the publishers former offices in a town house on Beacon Hill in Boston. In addition toPatterson, it is now home to such thriving commercial novelists as Michael Connelly andStephenie Meyer, author of the wildly popular Twilight vampire series, as well as consistentbest sellers like Malcolm Gladwell and David Sedaris. In 2008, a year in which many of itscompetitors were laying off employees and shutting down imprints, Little, Brown gave outChristmas bonuses.

In September, Little, Brown hosted an anniversary dinner in Pattersons honor 20 Years ofPublishing James Patterson in a private room at Daniel, one of the most expensiverestaurants in Manhattan. (Patterson left Little, Brown after The Thomas Berryman Numberbut returned in 1989, a few years before Along Came a Spider, with a book called TheMidnight Club.) It wasnt the sort of party you see often in the world of publishing, particularlynow, with much of the industry in free fall. In addition to a meal of crabmeat salad, beeftenderloin and warm madeleines, the 45 guests were given party favors: bottles of red winewith labels that read Vintage Patterson.

Days earlier, Hachette Book Group and Pattersons representative, the Washington lawyerRobert Barnett, hammered out the terms of a new 17-book deal. (Forbes reported that thecontract is worth at least $150 million, though Little, Brown and Patterson dispute thenumber.) Dont you need to be home writing? I joked with Patterson. He told me matter-of-factly that hed already started 11 of the 17 books, and even finished more than a few of them.

Some toasts accompanied the dinner. Pietsch talked about the conflicting mythologysurrounding who actually discovered Patterson. (Not only did I know the editor whodiscovered James Patterson, I once ate a hamburger cooked on his grill.) Pattersons young-adult editor, Andrea Spooner, recounted her campaign to persuade her father, an Englishprofessor, that Patterson was a worthy writer. ( Its worth noting, Daddy, that Dickens wasone of the most popular and successful storytellers of his time, too! ) When Young told thecrowd that Patterson contributes significantly to five of Hachettes six publishing groups,Patterson interjected: What am I missing?

FaithWords, Young replied, referring to the companys religious imprint.

I can do that, Patterson said.

Patterson was the last to speak. The only man in the room without a tie, he wore a black T-shirtbeneath his dark suit. Im sorry my good friend Stephen King couldnt be here, he began. Itmust be bingo night in Bangor.



Patterson then proceeded to tell one of his favorite stories about his mothers father, who drovea frozen-foods truck in Upstate New York. During the summer, Patterson said, he wouldoccasionally get up at 4 in the morning to ride along with him. As they drove over a mountaintoward his first delivery, Pattersons grandfather, an irrepressibly joyful man, would be singingat the top of his lungs. One day he said to me: Jim, I dont care what you do when you growup. I dont care if you drive a truck like I do, or if you become the president. Just remember thatwhen you go over the mountain to work in the morning, youve got to be singing, Pattersonwent on. Well, I am.

Its no surprise that Patterson loves what he does. Whats not to love? He plays golf mostmornings on Donald Trumps Palm Beach course and spends the rest of the day working onguaranteed best sellers for which he is paid millions.

But the image of Patterson as a carefree man lucky enough to make money doing what he lovesis a bit misleading. Patterson is nothing if not relentlessly ambitious. At J. Walter Thompson,he rose from the lowly station of junior copywriter to become the youngest creative director inthe firms history along the way dreaming up such ad slogans as Im a Toys R Us kid and then the C.E.O. of the companys North American operations. And as Patterson is the firstto admit, he didnt even like working in advertising. It goes without saying that writing wasnever just a hobby for him.

Pattersons current preoccupation is Hollywood. Despite some attempts, including two AlexCross films (both starring Morgan Freeman), which Patterson doesnt think much of, somemade-for-TV movies, a failed ABC series and a lot of books that were optioned but neverdeveloped, there still hasnt been a blockbuster film or hit TV show based on one of his novels.

A few years ago, Patterson hired a former colleague from J. Walter Thompson, Steve Bowen, tooversee the development of his various movie and television projects. In 2007, they signed adeal with Avi Arad, the producer of the Spider-Man and X-Men films, to make a moviebased on Pattersons Maximum Ride young-adult series. In addition to trying to make surethat Patterson is more involved in the development process, Patterson and Bowen plan toproduce some projects themselves. They have already raised the financing for a new Alex Crossmovie that Patterson is helping to write.

When I met Bowen, a good-looking ex-Marine with a trimmed, graying beard, for coffee inManhattan several weeks after the dinner at Daniel, he told me that part of his challenge is tochange Hollywoods perception of Patterson. He cited Clint Eastwood, whose name was oncesynonymous with Dirty Harry and spaghetti westerns, as a model for the sort of imagetransformation they are aiming to pull off. Jims been wrongly stereotyped out there as themaster of slash and gash, Bowen said. What people dont fully understand is that theres aunique talent and storytelling ability that has allowed him to do what hes done in the bookworld. He just knows whats going to grab people. The man has a golden gut.

IN THE MID-1960S, Jacqueline Susann, the author of Valley of the Dolls (30 million copies



sold), famously demonstrated via hundreds of bookstore signings that even blockbusterbooks are built one reader at a time. When Patterson was still making his name, he, too,barnstormed the country, signing books late into the night and exhausting publicists. Thesedays, though, Patterson doesnt do many bookstore events. He certainly doesnt need thepublicity, and he would rather be home with Sue and Jack. But on a Monday night in mid-November, he turned up at a car-dealership-size Barnes & Noble in a strip mall on Route 17 inParamus, N.J., to promote his latest Alex Cross novel, I, Alex Cross.

This is Pattersons 16th Cross book. Since Along Came a Spider, Cross has been through a lot.He has had several jobs and a number of ill-fated relationships; he has chased down numerousserial killers, a Russian mobster and a cult of goths; and has even written his own novel basedon his late uncles investigation of a series of lynchings in Mississippi in the early 1900s.

Patterson came straight from the Newark airport, arriving early to sign the stores I, AlexCross stock in a back room. We havent seen you in years, said Dennis Wurst, a Barnes &Noble manager of author promotions who stopped by to say hello.

Hows business? Patterson asked.

It helps when you write an Alex Cross book, Wurst answered.

A month before, Barnes & Noble was caught in the crossfire of a preholiday pricing warbetween Wal-Mart and Amazon, with Wal-Mart dropping its prices on several hardcoverblockbusters, including I, Alex Cross, to $8.99, more than 50 percent off the retail price. Thebattle set off a panic inside an already-anxious publishing industry: such deep discounting mayhelp move merchandise, but along with trends like the proliferation of e-readers that instantlydeliver many blockbusters for $9.99 or less, it further devalues books. The days of $25hardcovers are surely numbered. Without those revenues, publishers will be even morereluctant to devote shrinking resources to new, unproven authors, which will, in turn, limit therange of books being published.

Whatever the future of publishing may hold, Pattersons place in it seems secure. By the timehe was introduced at the Paramus store, in excess of 300 people more women than men, butfairly evenly divided, with a handful of children as well had crowded into the bookstoreslarge event space to see him. Stragglers were looking vainly for a spot on the wall to lean upagainst. Patterson, dressed casually in a sweater and slacks, delivered some brief remarks, tooka handful of questions and then got down to the main event signing books. To avoid a crushof people at the signing table, the staff divided the audience into several groups by letter. Theywere told that Patterson would autograph any of his books purchased in the Paramus store andone additional title from their own Patterson collection, but that he would not personalize anycopies.

The system quickly broke down. Patterson was soon adding names and short inscriptions tobooks. He bantered easily with his fans as he wrote. Many asked about Jack; more than one



wanted to know if he had brought any pictures.

I skipped work to be here, one woman said as her husband snapped a picture of her withPatterson.

Thats always a good thing, Patterson said.

Well, Im a police officer, so I guess thats bad, the woman replied.

I wont tell, Patterson said.

There is something unique about the relationship between readers and their favorite authors, asense of emotional intimacy that doesnt exist, say, between sports fans and athletes.Pattersons fans can read him virtually all year. They arent just addicted to his books; they seehim as a constant companion, a part of their lives. One woman asked Patterson to sign a bookfor her grandmother, who passed away a few days earlier. We used to read your bookstogether, and I want to put it in her casket with her, she said. Another told Patterson that hegot her reading again after a recent stroke. A truck driver said that he had never read any ofPattersons books but that he had listened to every single one of them on the road: I dontknow what Id do without them.

Still another woman gestured at her elderly mother, whom she was pushing in a wheelchair:She just had heart surgery. You make her happy, and that makes me happy.

And that makes me happy, Patterson said.

After an hour of signing books without interruption, Patterson seemed to be doing fine. Werereally cooking along here, he told his publicist. A half-hour later, though, Patterson wasstarting to tire. This is getting out of hand, he said.

After almost two hours, a voice finally came over the loudspeaker: Will all remaining groupsplease report to the James Patterson signing area. Patterson signed his last books, posed for afew photographs with some of the stores employees and got ready to go. That was a fairlyrespectable crowd, he said as we walked to the escalator.

On our way out, Patterson picked up on a theme he raised with me weeks earlier, during ourconversation about his detractors. This goes to the notion we were talking about in Florida,about my critics people who call themselves open-minded but then make judgments aboutwhat I write, he said. Well, these people like it. Theyre happy. So whats the big deal?

Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of The Challenge:How a Maverick Navy Officer and a Young Law Professor Risked Their Careers to Defend theConstitution and Won, which is just out in paperback.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:



Correction: January 24, 2010 An article on Page 32 this weekend about the writer James Patterson refers incorrectly to hisshare of the publishing market. Since 2006, Mr. Patterson has written one out of every 17hardcover novels not hardcover books bought in the United States.

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