Speaker 1: Along came an influencer. How America's best selling writer became
Speaker 1: Mister Beast's co author after decades top the thriller game,
Speaker 1: James Patterson is fending off waning sales by doubling down
Speaker 1: on collaborations and dabbling in romanticy io by Waheeni Vara
Speaker 1: read Aloud by Mark Leedorf. A couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: James Patterson stopped by the University of Iowa Writers Workshop,
Speaker 1: the graduate program Flannery O'Connor and Dennis Johnson once attended.
Speaker 1: Having established himself as one of the world's best selling
Speaker 1: authors while bypassing every convention of highbrow literature, Patterson had
Speaker 1: quietly become the workshop's biggest patron, helping writers attend at
Speaker 1: no cost. Lan Samantha Chang, the novelist who directs the workshop,
Speaker 1: says that without Patterson's support, the program would have to
Speaker 1: choose between drastically cutting the number of students or no
Speaker 1: longer offering equal financial aid to each. Patterson's only request
Speaker 1: was that he be saves his beneficiary's writing for his
Speaker 1: reading pleasure. An Instagram post from the visit shows him
Speaker 1: wearing rumpel jeans and a read band books, sweatshirt. He
Speaker 1: mostly cracked jokes and told stories, but he also gently
Speaker 1: urged the students to consider what their audience wanted. They
Speaker 1: responded warmly to his delight and surprise. I was at
Speaker 1: a reception where the students lined up and talked to
Speaker 1: him one on one. Chang recalls people were saying things like,
Speaker 1: my mom.
Speaker 2: Just loves your work.
Speaker 1: Patterson, who as of this spring has been publishing for
Speaker 1: a half century, built his career on an apparent paradox.
Speaker 1: He became one of the most commercially successful authors of
Speaker 1: all time, with a body of work that even fans
Speaker 1: poke fun at. It was bad, but not half as
Speaker 1: bad as I'd expected. One Reddit comet reads another skips
Speaker 1: the niceties. Patterson reads like a thirteen year old on Riddlin.
Speaker 1: Even people who have worked closely with him will announce
Speaker 1: that they don't enjoy his work, as if to avoid
Speaker 1: esthetic guilt by association. It was paint by numbers, says
Speaker 1: Sarah Crichton, his publisher from nineteen ninety six to two
Speaker 1: thousand and one at Little Brown, now a division of
Speaker 1: Hashet Book Group. But if Patterson's name is sometimes a punchline,
Speaker 1: He's been in on the joke. His innovation was always
Speaker 1: less about careful craftsmanship than about turning out a high
Speaker 1: volume of plot centric and passibly enjoyable material. Denise Roy,
Speaker 1: Patterson's editor, says, some writer friends have told her she's
Speaker 1: become a less patient.
Speaker 2: Reader over time.
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, well, Jim probably taught me that, She says,
Speaker 1: if you can't get right into the story, people probably
Speaker 1: aren't going to keep reading. Patterson turns seventy nine this
Speaker 1: year and still publishes a book or two a month.
Speaker 1: He maintains this pace famously with a lot of help.
Speaker 1: For most projects, he'll compose an extensive outline, sometimes running
Speaker 1: to one hundred plus pages, then turn it over to
Speaker 1: a co author who expands it into a full fledged manuscript.
Speaker 1: David Shelley, chief executive officer of Hashett, compares Patterson to
Speaker 1: the visual artists Jeff Cohons and Andy Warhol, both also
Speaker 1: known for churning out ideas and having others do much
Speaker 1: of the labor. Like Coons, a former Wall Street broker,
Speaker 1: Patterson has business roots. While starting out as an author,
Speaker 1: he made his living in advertising, eventually becoming the youngest
Speaker 1: CEO of the global agency J Walter Thompson's North American operation.
Speaker 1: One thing I love about the publishing business is that
Speaker 1: it's this intersection of creativity and commerce, and Jim is
Speaker 1: the perfect embodiment of that, Shelley says. In a way,
Speaker 1: the story of Patterson's five decade career is the story
Speaker 1: of US publishing, of tensions and trends playing out as
Speaker 1: profit driven multinationals and investment firms gradually took over traditional publishers. Hashette,
Speaker 1: part of the French conglomerate La Gardere, has itself acquired
Speaker 1: a number of smaller publishing companies in recent years. On
Speaker 1: earnings calls, the corporate parents brag about their biggest sellers,
Speaker 1: not their Pulletzer or Booker prize winners. Success in modern
Speaker 1: publishing is defined as exactly the thing at which Patterson
Speaker 1: has excelled, selling tons of copies. Patterson's nearly four hundred
Speaker 1: books have accounted for more than four hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five million copies sold worldwide. Within the US, he's the
Speaker 1: top selling author of at least the past two decades,
Speaker 1: according to the book Scan service of market research provider Sircana.
Speaker 1: In online forums, librarians and booksellers sometimes complain that his
Speaker 1: output is so prolific it crowds out more literary work.
Speaker 1: For Patterson, the lack of high brow appeal seems like
Speaker 1: both a point of pride and a source of defensiveness.
Speaker 1: That's the thing that best selling authors do, he says,
Speaker 1: we actually get people coming into bookstores.
Speaker 2: But here's the plot twist.
Speaker 1: In recent years, Patterson's sales have dropped off, surpassed by
Speaker 1: those of Rebecca Yarro's and other younger female authors. Celebrities
Speaker 1: from outside the book world, Prince Harry, ru Paul have
Speaker 1: also put out high profile titles that overshadowed career author's
Speaker 1: work in the press and on bestseller lists. And so
Speaker 1: after pioneering a publishing ecosystem that treated authors as name
Speaker 1: brands and farmed out sentence level craft to lower profile collaborators,
Speaker 1: Patterson is doubling down on a gambit he's dabbled in
Speaker 1: for nearly a decade, teaming up with some of the
Speaker 1: biggest celebrities in the world and taking on the role
Speaker 1: of less recognized name himself. I visited Patterson at his
Speaker 1: mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, in December to learn both
Speaker 1: how he'd pulled off his decades long domination of the
Speaker 1: bestseller rankings and whether he'd be able to renew it.
Speaker 1: I'm an author, myself, an Iowa Writer's Workshop graduate. But
Speaker 1: even though my three books have gotten critical praise, one
Speaker 1: was even a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Patterson has
Speaker 1: outsold me more than ten thousandfold. Standing at his door,
Speaker 1: I estimated that my house could fit comfortably on his
Speaker 1: driveway alone. When the door opened, his publicist shuttled me upstairs,
Speaker 1: passed a tower of Patterson titles and a stylized painting
Speaker 1: of a row of Patterson's spines. He met me a
Speaker 1: few minutes later in his office, overlooking the ocean. Thick
Speaker 1: stacks of paper lined the lower shelves of his bookcases,
Speaker 1: each topped by a blue sheet with the name of
Speaker 1: a published or forthcoming project, outlines and drafts.
Speaker 2: He explained.
Speaker 1: A basket labeled ideas held pages and pages covered in tiny,
Speaker 1: barely legible handwriting. Those were notes for future books, which
Speaker 1: he flashed in my direction for a few seconds, then
Speaker 1: covered up possessively. I asked if I could take a
Speaker 1: picture of a page. No, because then it'll all be
Speaker 1: out there and people will steal fifty of my ideas,
Speaker 1: he said. It wasn't clear if he was joking. People
Speaker 1: had told me about a down to earth sense of humor,
Speaker 1: but they'd also mentioned a prickly self protectiveness. Maybe the
Speaker 1: partnerships at him feeling especially invested in delivering original plots.
Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, Patterson collaborated with Bill Clinton on the
Speaker 1: thriller The President Is Missing, which became a huge hit.
Speaker 1: Since then, he's done two more Clinton collaborations and one
Speaker 1: with Dolly Parton. When I visited, he was finishing up
Speaker 1: novels co authored with the actor Viola Davis and the
Speaker 1: influencer Mister Beast, set to publish in March and September, respectively,
Speaker 1: With line by line authorship back in Patterson's hands. He
Speaker 1: told me, perhaps strategically, that he'd renewed his attention to
Speaker 1: craft for the last couple of years. The books, I mean,
Speaker 1: they are what they are, but I think they're better,
Speaker 1: he said. He regards his novel with Davis Judge Stone
Speaker 1: out on March ninth, as his most accomplished yet. His
Speaker 1: publicist described it as a literary work. Patterson also revealed
Speaker 1: to me that he and his wife Sue had funneled
Speaker 1: more than two hundred and twenty million dollars, about a
Speaker 1: third of their wealth, into charitable giving, focusing on support
Speaker 1: for authors, readers, teachers, students, booksellers, and librarians. The Iowa
Speaker 1: Writers Workshop funding was part of that. It was as if,
Speaker 1: having spent his career outsourcing the crafting of his books,
Speaker 1: Patterson was campaigning to be recognized for his contribution to literature.
Speaker 1: One person who's worked with him and asked not to
Speaker 1: be identified to avoid professional repercussions, says he goes back
Speaker 1: and forth between dismissing literary writers as not for a
Speaker 1: popular audience and then wanting to be seen as a
Speaker 1: literary writer because he feels somewhat ghettoized as a pulp writer.
Speaker 1: Patterson's warring qualities can be traced partly to his childhood
Speaker 1: in Newburgh, New York. His father, Charles, grew up in
Speaker 1: the basement of the local poorhouse. Charles's mother worked as
Speaker 1: its charwoman. Charles dreamed of being a writer, but instead,
Speaker 1: after college, went off to fight in World War II.
Speaker 1: When he returned, he married a devoutly Catholic school teacher
Speaker 1: and took unromantic jobs driving a bread truck, selling insurance
Speaker 1: while drinking too much. The couple had four kids, James,
Speaker 1: Jimmy back then followed by three girls. Patterson's father was
Speaker 1: harsh and competitive with his son. Once a year he
Speaker 1: challenged James to a race, always winning, until finally, James
Speaker 1: later recalled, I was going to kick his butt, and
Speaker 1: he just kind of elbowed me off the road. Both
Speaker 1: parents demanded much of him. The idea I had growing up,
Speaker 1: and I held on to it into my forties, was
Speaker 1: that my folks only cared about me as long as
Speaker 1: I was number one in my class, he writes at
Speaker 1: his memoir. James would wander the woods alone, inventing escapist
Speaker 1: war and sports stories. At one point, he learned that
Speaker 1: the founder of the New York Daily News shared his
Speaker 1: last name, and imagined the man showing up in a
Speaker 1: limousine to spirit him off to the city. Instead, he
Speaker 1: got himself to New York by winning a full scholarship
Speaker 1: to Manhattan College, where he studied English literature. During summers,
Speaker 1: he would work as an aide at McLean Hospital, a
Speaker 1: in psychiatric institution near Boston. He was captivated by the
Speaker 1: personalities he met there and by the twenty five cent
Speaker 1: used paperbacks he'd pick up in Cambridge and read during
Speaker 1: his shifts. He gravitated to serious literature James Joyce, Henry James,
Speaker 1: and began trying to write some of his own. After
Speaker 1: graduating in nineteen sixty nine, he entered an English doctoral
Speaker 1: program at Vanderbilt University, where his fiction impressed a professor
Speaker 1: named Walter Sullivan, a novelist who'd studied with Flannery O'Connor
Speaker 1: at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I needed that kind of encouragement,
Speaker 1: Patterson told me. He decided to leave Vanderbilt after a year,
Speaker 1: submitting a fiction manuscript to earn his master's degree. But
Speaker 1: when Patterson shared it with his father, Charles dismissed it
Speaker 1: as immature. It was like a boy standing next to
Speaker 1: a puddle at midnight and urinating, Charles said in a
Speaker 1: New York Magazine profile of his son. The assessment was accurate,
Speaker 1: Patterson says, but still a little cruel. The manuscript, one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty one page collection of linked stories, sits
Speaker 1: in Vanderbilt's library archives. It's never been published or written about.
Speaker 1: Before my visit to Palm Beach, I had requested a
Speaker 1: copy and opened it, expecting to find seeds of the pulp.
Speaker 1: Writer Patterson became simple plots, familiar language characters with the
Speaker 1: complexity of stick figures. Instead, I encountered a moving and original,
Speaker 1: if slightly unpolished, work of literature. The main character, Jeffrey Candor,
Speaker 1: is a working class kid who's on the edge of
Speaker 1: adulthood and at war with himself. A former altar boy,
Speaker 1: he craves a simple life close to nature and spiritual wisdom,
Speaker 1: but his worldly ambition and an uncanny ability to manipulate
Speaker 1: people and situations in its service, as a girlfriend puts, it,
Speaker 1: keeps getting in his way. The language is as poetic
Speaker 1: as it is unpretentious. The boy was chewing on a
Speaker 1: tutsie roll and his father was sucking a cigarette he
Speaker 1: was about to light or eat. Reads one characteristically evocative line.
Speaker 1: That story has Jeffrey getting involved in a hoodlum uncle's
Speaker 1: plot to steal a piano. He's trying to shed his
Speaker 1: altar boy identity. In a modern Patterson tale, the piano
Speaker 1: theft would either succeed or be foiled. In this one, delightfully,
Speaker 1: the plot is itself a plot. The ending suggests that
Speaker 1: the uncle never planned to steal a piano at all,
Speaker 1: He just needed help buying one. Jeffrey realizes he's neither
Speaker 1: a gangster nor an altar boy, though he remains at
Speaker 1: a loss for what else to be. At Patterson's house
Speaker 1: in Palm Beach, I pulled the thesis from my back pack
Speaker 1: and slid it across the table to him. I'm curious,
Speaker 1: he said, putting a hand on it. I'd opened it
Speaker 1: to a passage I found deeply affecting about Jeffrey falling
Speaker 1: short of his mother's expectations. Patterson looked at it for
Speaker 1: a few long seconds, then pushed it back to me. No,
Speaker 1: I won't read it right now, he said, promising he
Speaker 1: would later.
Speaker 2: Instead.
Speaker 1: It's too much, I suggested, Yeah, he said, his voice
Speaker 1: a bit too loud, he deflected with a quip. So
Speaker 1: I could have been a writer. After Vanderbilt. In nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: Patterson returned to New York, moving into a cheap hotel
Speaker 1: in Hell's Kitchen. He'd been trying to sell his fiction
Speaker 1: to magazines, but no one bit. He'd heard that writers
Speaker 1: could get work drafting copy for the advertising firm Jay
Speaker 1: Walter Thompson, so he showed up the headquarters with the
Speaker 1: portfolio he'd put together, then kept returning week after week
Speaker 1: until the firm hired him. That year, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez's
Speaker 1: One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in English. Reading it,
Speaker 1: Patterson felt both thrilled and intimidated. It occurred to me
Speaker 1: that I wouldn't I couldn't write anything this good. He
Speaker 1: told me, so, I said so. I said, well, I
Speaker 1: don't want to write a pretty good book, and I
Speaker 1: don't care about writing for snobs.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: A couple of pulpier hits had come out around then,
Speaker 1: the Day of The Jackal the Exorcist, and Patterson liked
Speaker 1: them enough, so I said, maybe I could write something
Speaker 1: like that. It was decided then he'd try writing a thriller.
Speaker 1: He drafted the attempt with pencil and paper at his
Speaker 1: kitchen counter, putting in a couple of hours each morning
Speaker 1: before work and a couple more afterward. When he finished it.
Speaker 1: Thirty one publishers rejected the manuscript before Little.
Speaker 2: Brown said yes.
Speaker 1: The Thomas Berryman Number, published in nineteen seventy six, won
Speaker 1: an Edgar Award, the highest American honor for mystery and
Speaker 1: crime writing, but didn't sell particularly well. After that, Patterson
Speaker 1: told me, I said, oh, I think I'll try to
Speaker 1: go make a lot of money.
Speaker 2: I asked if he meant that again.
Speaker 1: I couldn't tell if he was kidding f Yes, he
Speaker 1: said he'd wanted a ticket out of advertising. He wrote
Speaker 1: three more novels in the next four years, all far
Speaker 1: pulpier than the first, but those two didn't sell many copies.
Speaker 1: Patterson's girl friend at the time was a generous, upbeat
Speaker 1: woman named Jane Blanchard, who helped him see himself after
Speaker 1: a childhood marked by his father's harshness.
Speaker 2: As were worthy of love. Jane totally saved me.
Speaker 1: Patterson writes in his memoir, She turned me around. One
Speaker 1: day they were at the post office when Blanchard had
Speaker 1: a seizure. Doctors found a malignant brain tumor. Patterson began
Speaker 1: helping care for her, but her cancer couldn't be cured.
Speaker 1: He was at work when he got a call from
Speaker 1: Blanchard's sister telling him the end seemed near. He rushed
Speaker 1: to the hospital, a scene he recalls in the most
Speaker 1: affecting section of his memoir. When she heard me whispering
Speaker 1: up against her cheek, she squeezed my hand twice, he writes,
Speaker 1: then she was gone. Ten minutes had passed since he arrived.
Speaker 1: For a year after Blanchard's death, Patterson couldn't write. He
Speaker 1: threw himself into advertising instead, racing up his agency's ranks.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty eight, he became the North American.
Speaker 2: CEO of J.
Speaker 1: Walter Thompson, having helped compose lyrics for several of the
Speaker 1: most famous jingles of the nineteen eighties, including I'm a
Speaker 1: Toys r us Kid and Aren't You Hungry for Burger King,
Speaker 1: but novels remained his calling. He soon put out another
Speaker 1: couple of pulpy thrillers with underwhelming sales, along with a
Speaker 1: co written non fiction book about public opinion. Then he
Speaker 1: decided to start approaching publishing the way he'd approached advertising
Speaker 1: as a business. More or less, We'll be right back
Speaker 1: with Along Came an Influencer. How America's best selling writer
Speaker 1: became mister Beast's co author Welcome Back to Along Came
Speaker 1: an influencer. How America's best selling writer became mister Beast's
Speaker 1: co author. With his next novel, Along Came a Spider,
Speaker 1: Patterson put pressure on Little Brown by getting his agent
Speaker 1: to first drum up excitement in Hollywood. The following week,
Speaker 1: he had bids from four parties. Little Brown won out
Speaker 1: with a one million dollar offer for the book and
Speaker 1: a sequel. Patterson took over marketing for the novel, too,
Speaker 1: getting designers at Jay Walter Thompson to create ate the
Speaker 1: cover a spider dangling from the title over a lonely
Speaker 1: looking house, and persuading Little Brown to run a two
Speaker 1: week TV ad campaign, whose copy he wrote himself. When
Speaker 1: the book came out in nineteen ninety three, it landed
Speaker 1: at number nine on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction
Speaker 1: bestseller List. It would evolve into Patterson's perpetually best selling
Speaker 1: Alex Cross Detective series. In nineteen ninety six, after a
Speaker 1: few more novels, Patterson quit his day job to write
Speaker 1: and promote his books full time. He would have really
Speaker 1: tacky book. Jackets Crichton, his publisher at the time, recalls,
Speaker 1: I was such a snob. I would say, uugh, this
Speaker 1: is the worst thing I've ever seen. But if it's
Speaker 1: in the airport and people are looking for a fast,
Speaker 1: wild ride on their airplane ride, they would pick it up.
Speaker 1: Crichton remembers Patterson as demanding, asking for a full time
Speaker 1: staff for his books at Little Brown, and shouting at
Speaker 1: junior publicist and marketers, mostly young women, in apparent frustration.
Speaker 1: Patterson says he doesn't remember insisting on a staff, and
Speaker 1: yet Crichton acknowledges Patterson's business instincts were impeccable. In the
Speaker 1: late nineties, he proposed writing more than one book a
Speaker 1: year to expand his audience. Crichton argued that he'd cannibalize
Speaker 1: his own sales. Michael Peach, Patterson's editor at the time,
Speaker 1: recalls Patterson countering, Michael, when you put down a book
Speaker 1: that you just liked, you don't say, oh good, I
Speaker 1: get to wait a year until I read the next book.
Speaker 1: You want to read the next book right away. They
Speaker 1: tried it and sales rose. Later, facing weak sales with
Speaker 1: women and West Coast readers, Crichton recalls Patterson proposed Women's
Speaker 1: Murder Club, a series set in San Francisco with female protagonists.
Speaker 1: Patterson remembers it somewhat differently. He says he chose San
Speaker 1: Francisco not in response to sales, but because he thought
Speaker 1: it would be fun. Crichton says She thought the move
Speaker 1: would come across as two orchestrated, but eventually relented again.
Speaker 1: Sales rose I was wrong, she says, he was right.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and one, Peach replaced Crichton as the
Speaker 1: imprint's publisher. He and Patterson were friends by then. Peach
Speaker 1: trusted Patterson's business instincts and appreciated his unyielding self reliance.
Speaker 1: He's someone who built his own success completely, Peach says,
Speaker 1: he didn't start with anything. Patterson's timing had also been good,
Speaker 1: with his sales benefiting from the rise of Barnes and
Speaker 1: Noble and Borders. Those chains filled their entryways with tables
Speaker 1: stacked with best sellers, charging publishers for the privilege. Publishers,
Speaker 1: not wanting to make bad bets, increasingly relied on the
Speaker 1: known names in their catalogs. Under Peach, Patterson got a
Speaker 1: dedicated team and began negotiating the profit sharing contracts that
Speaker 1: are typical for best selling authors instead of standard royalties.
Speaker 1: The size of his business was greater and greater. He
Speaker 1: became a larger part of Haschet's revenue and profits. Peach says,
Speaker 1: so he had a lot of leverage with his publisher's
Speaker 1: Patterson sought to expand his market even more aggressively. In
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, he'd experimented with collaboration, publishing a novel
Speaker 1: with a co author drawn from the copywriting ranks at
Speaker 1: Jay Walter Thompson, and he'd launched Women's Murder Club with
Speaker 1: another co author from his advertising circle, Maxine Petro. Now
Speaker 1: he recruited a whole stable of writing partners to help
Speaker 1: him increase his output. Patterson also diversified beyond fictional thrillers
Speaker 1: for adults. In two thousand five, after Stephanie Meyer's Twilight
Speaker 1: took off, he started his own young adult series, Maximum Ride.
Speaker 1: In two thousand nine, when a major traveling exhibit inspired
Speaker 1: a King Tut craze, he published his first non fiction thriller,
Speaker 1: The Murder of King Tut. In twenty twelve, at the
Speaker 1: height of the Diary of a Whimpy Kid franchise, he
Speaker 1: started a middle grade series, I Funny with another former
Speaker 1: j Walter Thompson Knight, Chris Gravenstein, that grew in twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen into a children's imprint called Jimmy Patterson, selling mostly
Speaker 1: work that he co authored. Patterson's productivity ballooned accordingly, having
Speaker 1: published fewer than a dozen books in the nineties, he
Speaker 1: more than quadrupled his output in the two thousands. In
Speaker 1: the twenty tens, he started regularly writing or co writing
Speaker 1: a dozen plus books a year. Peach, who became CEO
Speaker 1: of Hashet in twenty thirteen, continued to pitch in on
Speaker 1: editing him around a title a year. By the middle
Speaker 1: of the decade, the Patterson operation employed sixteen people, not
Speaker 1: counting all the co authors. Patterson shared credit by that
Speaker 1: point on most of his books, with the Alex Cross
Speaker 1: series a notable exception.
Speaker 2: Patterson was in his sixties.
Speaker 1: By then, he'd married in his late thirties and raised
Speaker 1: a son, and people had seen his anger soften somewhat
Speaker 1: since the early years. Patterson writes in his memoir that
Speaker 1: he came to terms with it in therapy, seeing its
Speaker 1: roots in his father's own anger and feeling his resentment
Speaker 1: of his father's subside in the process. The emotional shift
Speaker 1: helped his image, so did his team's efforts to remake
Speaker 1: him as a kind of elder statesman. Something we worked
Speaker 1: on all the way along was his reputation, says ned Rust,
Speaker 1: the former publisher of the Patterson business, Patterson's contributions to
Speaker 1: book related charities and activism helped. He started a children's
Speaker 1: reading program, took out ads urging the Obama administration to
Speaker 1: bail out the publishing industry, and donated millions of dollars.
Speaker 2: To booksellers, public schools, and universities.
Speaker 1: Accepting an award from the National Book Foundation in twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen for public service, he told the audience, I feel
Speaker 1: uncomfortable because well, I am the elephant in the room,
Speaker 1: the bull in the China shop, the stranger in a
Speaker 1: strange land, the big mac at Cipriani. In twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump awarded him a National Humanities Medal. Looking back,
Speaker 1: rust says that was his decade. That was when he
Speaker 1: was completely on top. Then, in twenty twenty two, on
Speaker 1: a press tour for his newly released memoir, Patterson made
Speaker 1: a rare public misas step. In an interview with London's
Speaker 1: Times newspaper, he referred to a form of racism against
Speaker 1: white men in publishing in media, it's even harder for
Speaker 1: older writers, he added, you don't meet many fifty two
Speaker 1: year old white males. The backlash was swift and intense,
Speaker 1: as people pointed out that white men remained overrepresented in
Speaker 1: publishing and Hollywood. Some revived the old insults James Patterson
Speaker 1: of all people, The author Roxanne Gay tweeted, first of all,
Speaker 1: Reich your own books, pal, My first novel had come
Speaker 1: out the previous month.
Speaker 2: I bristled two.
Speaker 1: Patterson apologized within days. I absolutely do not believe that
Speaker 1: racism is practiced against white writers. Please know that I
Speaker 1: strongly support a diversity of voices being heard in literature,
Speaker 1: in Hollywood everywhere. When I asked him about the comment,
Speaker 1: he said he recalled race and gender coming up in
Speaker 1: the context of a specific conversation about playwrights and actors. Still,
Speaker 1: he said his comment shouldn't.
Speaker 2: Have been said.
Speaker 1: He added that he hadn't been talking about himself. I
Speaker 1: had some empathy for people who had careers and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden can't find work.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean that change shouldn't happen. The fact was
Speaker 1: change had been affecting Patterson too. His Children's imprint had
Speaker 1: been struggling, prompting Little Brown to end its run as
Speaker 1: a standalone operation, and his domestic print sales were dropping
Speaker 1: from four point six million in twenty twenty one to
Speaker 1: four point one million in twenty twenty two. According to
Speaker 1: Sircana's book Scan, the fiction bestseller list was largely dominated
Speaker 1: by younger female novelists, including Colleen Hoover and Sarah J.
Speaker 2: Moss.
Speaker 1: Patterson's print sales have kept falling since then. Last year
Speaker 1: they were at two point five million in the US,
Speaker 1: a forty five percent decline from twenty twenty one, compared
Speaker 1: with a seven percent drop in the overall market. His
Speaker 1: ebook sales have also been trending down. He's in this
Speaker 1: cycle of decline even though his books still continue. You
Speaker 1: need to hit the best seller list overall, says Brenna Conner,
Speaker 1: book industry analyst for Sircana. Rust puts it that Jim
Speaker 1: hasn't had a stretch of luck like this, which is
Speaker 1: not good for a long time. Partly, it's that Patterson's
Speaker 1: readership is aging along with him. You've got the baby
Speaker 1: boomers whose eyesight is getting bad right now, and that's
Speaker 1: the biggest demographic.
Speaker 2: Rust says.
Speaker 1: When I told friends I was profiling Patterson, they invariably
Speaker 1: mentioned a father or father in law who adored him.
Speaker 1: In fact, his audience is about seventy percent female. But
Speaker 1: those readers too skew older. Younger women these days seem
Speaker 1: more interested in female written escapist novels from the romance, fantasy,
Speaker 1: and hybrid romanticy genres. Last year's twenty best selling print
Speaker 1: books in the US included two titles from Yarros's mega
Speaker 1: hit Imperian series. Patterson didn't make the list. Adult book
Speaker 1: sales are also getting slightly less top heavy. The one
Speaker 1: hundred best selling titles make up around eight percent of sales,
Speaker 1: compared with nine percent a few decades ago, according to BookScan.
Speaker 1: That's partly because social media has fractured how people learn
Speaker 1: about books. Traditional ad campaigns pushing preordained bestsellers aren't as
Speaker 1: reliable a sales driver as they used to be these days,
Speaker 1: Connor suggests conversations on TikTok, YouTube, substack and other platforms
Speaker 1: seem to be nudging sales toward more diverse options. Yarros's
Speaker 1: first imperial novel, for One, took off after going viral
Speaker 1: on TikTok. Patterson points out that the traditional retail landscape
Speaker 1: is fractured. Two more people shop online, borders no longer exists,
Speaker 1: and Barnes and Noble has stopped letting publishers pay for
Speaker 1: favorable placement, instead leaving decisions to local store managers. Big
Speaker 1: box stores such as Costco have deprioritized book sales, and
Speaker 1: bestsellers are widely available to read for free through libraries
Speaker 1: ebook systems on Overdrive, the main platform for ebook checkouts.
Speaker 1: Patterson was last year's second most borrowed author, after Jeff
Speaker 1: Kenney of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Fame celebrity, though,
Speaker 1: remains a reliable path to attention. When Patterson's first Clinton
Speaker 1: collaboration came out in twenty eighteen, it sold two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand copies in its first week and spent
Speaker 1: longer as a Number one New York Times bestseller than
Speaker 1: any other novel published that year. It also earned maybe
Speaker 1: the best review the Times had ever given Patterson. Ambitious
Speaker 1: and wildly readable, the writer declared. Since Patterson's initial success
Speaker 1: with the Clinton and Pardon partnerships, other celebrities have joined
Speaker 1: in on the trend. Hillary Rodham, Clinton with Louise Penny Reese,
Speaker 1: Witherspoon with Harlan Coben, Keanu Reeves with China Mieville. Patterson
Speaker 1: came up with the idea for Judge Stone following the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v.
Speaker 2: Wade.
Speaker 1: The plot centers on a trial in Alabama involving a
Speaker 1: doctor performing an abortion on a black thirteen year old.
Speaker 1: The judge, too, is black. Patterson's invitation to Davis to
Speaker 1: write it with him, which involved co creating the plot
Speaker 1: and characters, reading drafts and giving notes, was partly strategic.
Speaker 1: He'd always wanted more of his books to be adapted
Speaker 1: for screen, and he admitted he hoped this one could
Speaker 1: become a movie starring Davis as the judge. Patterson had
Speaker 1: first imagined a male judge and suggested Morgan Freeman, who
Speaker 1: acted in a few adaptations of Patterson's Alex Cross novels,
Speaker 1: as a co author who could star in an eventual adaptation,
Speaker 1: but his film and television team suggested Davis instead, and
Speaker 1: Patterson figured it would be easy enough to make the
Speaker 1: judge a woman. Patterson was characteristically blunt about the appeal
Speaker 1: of working with Davis. One she's black. That was very helpful,
Speaker 1: he said. Two, she had an abortion, something she'd written
Speaker 1: about in her memoir. Three as an actor, and a
Speaker 1: really good actor. She really has a sense of good
Speaker 1: dialogue versus bad. The dialogue he'd given the thirteen year
Speaker 1: old girl had felt inauthentic to her, for example, so
Speaker 1: she'd changed much of it, a lot of the diet dialogue,
Speaker 1: and here is Viola's, he said. He later added that
Speaker 1: Davis's honest, intense a very good writer. Davis said in
Speaker 1: an emailed statement that working with Patterson reminded her of
Speaker 1: why she wanted to be an artist. We had a
Speaker 1: sacred space of collaboration where honesty, new ideas, vulnerability, our
Speaker 1: differences were all welcomed and fed this beautiful alchemy.
Speaker 2: She said. It made me feel alive again.
Speaker 1: The Mister Beast partnership grew out of a call Patterson
Speaker 1: took with Albert Lee, an agent at United Talent Agency.
Speaker 1: They'd been in touch since Patterson collaborated a decade earlier
Speaker 1: with Albert Einstein's State, represented by Lee, on a middle
Speaker 1: grade series called Max Einstein. Now Lee's client, Mister Beast
Speaker 1: real named Jimmy Donaldson, wanted to write a novel. Patterson
Speaker 1: flew to Donaldson's studio compound in North Carolina, where they
Speaker 1: went for a long walk and tossed around ideas. I
Speaker 1: found his instincts to be stunning Patterson told me. By
Speaker 1: the end the conversation, they'd begun sketching out a plot
Speaker 1: about an intense global contest like Mister Beast's Beast Games
Speaker 1: TV competition, but more extreme, with one hundred contestants and
Speaker 1: a billion dollar prize. There was a real connection there,
Speaker 1: so we said, let's do this, Patterson recalled. Donaldson said
Speaker 1: in a statement sent through a representative that he loves reading,
Speaker 1: but felt he hadn't encountered books at an earlier age
Speaker 1: that engaged and interested him. We both are so lucky
Speaker 1: to have devoted fan bases, and we wanted to join
Speaker 1: forces and encourage the younger generation to read and show
Speaker 1: them that it's fun, he said. Harper Collins won a
Speaker 1: bidding war, which Deadline reported reached eight figures, for the.
Speaker 2: Right to publish the project.
Speaker 1: The novel comes out in September. In some ways, the
Speaker 1: stakes are higher than ever for both Patterson and Hashett. Peach,
Speaker 1: Patterson's longtime ally and friend, stepped down in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four from running Haschett in the US and was replaced
Speaker 1: by Shelley, who was already CEO of Hashett UK and
Speaker 1: stayed on in that role too. By then, the Patterson
Speaker 1: operation had shrunk from its peak of around sixteen in
Speaker 1: the mid twenty tens.
Speaker 2: To about half that.
Speaker 1: Shelley has further shaken up Patterson's business, moving a couple
Speaker 1: of roles from the standalone team to the broader Little
Speaker 1: Brown or Hashett organizations, and changing up some other personnel. Rust,
Speaker 1: a fixture of Patterson's team since the two thousands, was
Speaker 1: among those who left, Shelley says, Hshett continues to invest
Speaker 1: significantly in Patterson. La Guardare reported strong earnings last year
Speaker 1: in its publishing business and flagged Judge Stone as a
Speaker 1: bright spot ahead. The collaborations with celebrities, Shelley notes, could
Speaker 1: help introduce new readers to earlier Patterson titles. It's to
Speaker 1: some extent, almost a trojan horse. I suppose, connecting with
Speaker 1: audiences who might have decided, no, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: read to James Patterson, but they would want to read
Speaker 1: something written by Viola Davis or Bill Clinton or mister Beast.
Speaker 2: He says.
Speaker 1: Then they're like, actually, I love this book, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to investigate the other stuff. Patterson still wakes up
Speaker 1: each morning at five thirty or six am. He starts
Speaker 1: his day writing long hand with a pencil on a
Speaker 1: legal pad.
Speaker 2: Computers aren't his thing.
Speaker 1: Then turns to a half dozen or so outlines for
Speaker 1: new projects. When he finishes, he faxes the material to
Speaker 1: his longtime assistant to type out on the fax machine.
Speaker 1: He might find pages waiting for him too, the latest
Speaker 1: chapters from a co author or an Instagram post drafted
Speaker 1: by someone at his publishing house. He'll mark up the
Speaker 1: pages by hand and fax them back. Patterson has a smartphone,
Speaker 1: but he barely uses it. If he needs to talk
Speaker 1: to someone, he picks up the landline. For two decades,
Speaker 1: he spoke almost daily with his longtime lawyer, Robert Barnett,
Speaker 1: who negotiated book deals for him and other major figures,
Speaker 1: including the Clintons and the Obamas. Last year, amid all
Speaker 1: the changes at Hashet, Barnett died. The silence is deafening,
Speaker 1: Patterson said in an emotional speech at Barnett's memorial service.
Speaker 1: When I visited, Patterson was still shaken by Barnett's death
Speaker 1: and hadn't yet announced what he would do about representation.
Speaker 1: During our conversation, he seemed put off by certain decisions
Speaker 1: his publisher had recently made. He'd just published The Last
Speaker 1: Days of Marilyn Monroe, a book that he'd envisioned as
Speaker 1: nonfiction but had been published as fiction because he'd taken
Speaker 1: some factual liberties. I don't know why, he said, I
Speaker 1: don't know who did that. When I asked him to
Speaker 1: sign a book for my best friend's father, a reissue
Speaker 1: of Along Came a Spider, he curled his lip at
Speaker 1: the cover, which Little Brown had redesigned. Little Brown says
Speaker 1: it runs all decisions by Patterson, and that while disagreements
Speaker 1: sometimes arise, they worked together with trust and good faith.
Speaker 1: Design might have been a sore spot because it was
Speaker 1: one of Patterson's specialties from the start. Earlier, I'd pulled
Speaker 1: up an image on my phone of my most recent book,
Speaker 1: Searches Selfhood in the Digital Age. The book critiques the
Speaker 1: rhetoric embedded in tech products, so the designers had created
Speaker 1: a cover with hard to read and misleading text generated
Speaker 1: by artificial intelligence. I fought for a very obscure cover,
Speaker 1: I explained, as he peered at the phone. I wanted
Speaker 1: a book that would be that was sort of like
Speaker 1: that nobody would buy. He deadpanned. So cool, there's an esthetic.
Speaker 1: There's an argument you mean with no title in all that,
Speaker 1: he asked, now, seeming genuinely perplexed. There's a title, I said,
Speaker 1: You just can't read it unless you put your phone
Speaker 1: really close up to your face, I asked, suddenly, a
Speaker 1: little insecure. If he hated it, yeah, he said, Then
Speaker 1: self corrected, I mean.
Speaker 2: What's your objective?
Speaker 1: If your objective is to be read, then you need
Speaker 1: to put stuff out there that people will like. After
Speaker 1: my visit to Palm Beach, Patterson's publicist shared an early
Speaker 1: copy of Judge Stone with me. By then I dipped
Speaker 1: into much of Patterson's canon, the Thrillers, the self help book,
Speaker 1: the series for middle graders. Contrary to the publicist's pitch,
Speaker 1: this new novel read to me as a relatively standard
Speaker 1: courtroom drama, not particularly literary, but its attention to the
Speaker 1: internal states of the main characters went deeper than what
Speaker 1: I'd encountered in much of Patterson's work. The dialogue felt
Speaker 1: at least as realistic as what I'd seen in movies.
Speaker 1: I found myself invested in both the characters and the
Speaker 1: broader social and political stakes. The ending struck me as affecting,
Speaker 1: if a little hokey. Reviewers were also impressed. The trade
Speaker 1: publication Kirkus gave Judge Stone a rare starred review, praising
Speaker 1: its first class courtroom drama, small town excitement, and strong characters,
Speaker 1: all wrapped in a moral dilemma. Booklist gave it a
Speaker 1: starred review as well, calling it wonderfully satisfying. When I
Speaker 1: mentioned the write ups to Patterson over Zoom soon afterward,
Speaker 1: he was circumspect. He'd gotten some truly awful reviews in
Speaker 1: his long career. I think if you're going to ignore
Speaker 1: the bad ones, then you can't go too crazy about
Speaker 1: the good ones, he said. You go, yay, that's nice.
Speaker 1: There had been another development, too, Patterson had chosen Lee
Speaker 1: Mister beasts A on the book deal to represent him.
Speaker 1: The goal for Lee is to capitalize on the changes
Speaker 1: in how people discover books and introduce more of them
Speaker 1: to Patterson. As everyone knows, you must constantly be cultivating
Speaker 1: new audiences, Lee says. Since my visit, Patterson had also
Speaker 1: started reading his master's thesis. He'd enjoyed it somewhat. There
Speaker 1: is some style here which didn't shock me, he allowed,
Speaker 1: but not enough to keep turning the pages. He'd set
Speaker 1: it down after reading about a third, I don't even
Speaker 1: know why I thought I could become a novelist, to
Speaker 1: be honest with you, he said. I didn't have any courses,
Speaker 1: I didn't have anybody encouraging me. I just started writing.
Speaker 1: But I just loved doing it. I loved telling the stories.
Speaker 1: I mean growing up, especially in the beginning in the woods,
Speaker 1: when I was a little kid and there was nobody
Speaker 1: to play with. Because there was nobody around, I would
Speaker 1: just wander through the woods telling myself stories. And then
Speaker 1: it took me a while to sort of get my
Speaker 1: act together, he added, I mean, I'm still trying to
Speaker 1: get my act together.
Speaker 2: I ventured to ask.
Speaker 1: About his hopes for the next phase of his career,
Speaker 1: with five decades behind him.
Speaker 2: I don't care.
Speaker 1: About legacy, he told me flatly. I've said many times
Speaker 1: I'll be dead.
Speaker 2: What do I care?
Speaker 1: Instead, he said, He'll keep pursuing one idea at a time,
Speaker 1: informed by what people.
Speaker 2: Seem interested in. Do I want to do it?
Speaker 1: He'll ask himself, and then do I think it can
Speaker 1: be good? I had always assumed Patterson's genius was in
Speaker 1: attracting readers, but it occurred to me, considering his response,
Speaker 1: that it actually lay in large part in a radical
Speaker 1: willingness to chase readers wherever they'd gone. At one point
Speaker 1: during my visit, I'd casually asked Patterson what he thought
Speaker 1: of romanticies, and he'd revealed that he was working on
Speaker 1: one himself after reading Yarrows's work and thinking he could
Speaker 1: do something similar. Now over Zoom, I begged Patterson to
Speaker 1: tell me more about the novel, which is expected to
Speaker 1: publish next year. He said I'd have to wait and
Speaker 1: find out. Presumably he had a release plan as usual
Speaker 1: and it didn't involve sales killing spoilers, but after we
Speaker 1: moved on to other topics, he couldn't resist adding a teaser.
Speaker 1: I will say I have an absolutely spectacular love scene
Speaker 1: with a mermaid