WEBVTT - James Patterson’s Authorship Operation Welcomes Viola Davis and MrBeast 0:00:01.080 --> 0:00:05.320 Along came an influencer. How America's best selling writer became 0:00:05.440 --> 0:00:09.880 Mister Beast's co author after decades top the thriller game, 0:00:10.320 --> 0:00:13.800 James Patterson is fending off waning sales by doubling down 0:00:13.880 --> 0:00:19.320 on collaborations and dabbling in romanticy io by Waheeni Vara 0:00:20.079 --> 0:00:24.759 read Aloud by Mark Leedorf. A couple of years ago, 0:00:25.079 --> 0:00:28.560 James Patterson stopped by the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, 0:00:28.880 --> 0:00:32.559 the graduate program Flannery O'Connor and Dennis Johnson once attended. 0:00:33.200 --> 0:00:35.960 Having established himself as one of the world's best selling 0:00:36.000 --> 0:00:40.440 authors while bypassing every convention of highbrow literature, Patterson had 0:00:40.520 --> 0:00:44.599 quietly become the workshop's biggest patron, helping writers attend at 0:00:44.680 --> 0:00:48.839 no cost. Lan Samantha Chang, the novelist who directs the workshop, 0:00:49.120 --> 0:00:51.839 says that without Patterson's support, the program would have to 0:00:51.920 --> 0:00:55.120 choose between drastically cutting the number of students or no 0:00:55.200 --> 0:00:59.200 longer offering equal financial aid to each. Patterson's only request 0:00:59.320 --> 0:01:01.760 was that he be saves his beneficiary's writing for his 0:01:01.840 --> 0:01:06.039 reading pleasure. An Instagram post from the visit shows him 0:01:06.040 --> 0:01:10.200 wearing rumpel jeans and a read band books, sweatshirt. He 0:01:10.280 --> 0:01:13.839 mostly cracked jokes and told stories, but he also gently 0:01:13.959 --> 0:01:17.319 urged the students to consider what their audience wanted. They 0:01:17.360 --> 0:01:21.200 responded warmly to his delight and surprise. I was at 0:01:21.240 --> 0:01:23.640 a reception where the students lined up and talked to 0:01:23.680 --> 0:01:27.400 him one on one. Chang recalls people were saying things like, 0:01:27.800 --> 0:01:28.680 my mom. 0:01:28.680 --> 0:01:29.880 Just loves your work. 0:01:30.920 --> 0:01:33.720 Patterson, who as of this spring has been publishing for 0:01:33.760 --> 0:01:37.319 a half century, built his career on an apparent paradox. 0:01:37.760 --> 0:01:40.560 He became one of the most commercially successful authors of 0:01:40.600 --> 0:01:43.400 all time, with a body of work that even fans 0:01:43.440 --> 0:01:46.679 poke fun at. It was bad, but not half as 0:01:46.680 --> 0:01:51.080 bad as I'd expected. One Reddit comet reads another skips 0:01:51.080 --> 0:01:54.840 the niceties. Patterson reads like a thirteen year old on Riddlin. 0:01:55.640 --> 0:01:58.120 Even people who have worked closely with him will announce 0:01:58.200 --> 0:02:00.880 that they don't enjoy his work, as if to avoid 0:02:01.040 --> 0:02:05.160 esthetic guilt by association. It was paint by numbers, says 0:02:05.200 --> 0:02:08.240 Sarah Crichton, his publisher from nineteen ninety six to two 0:02:08.280 --> 0:02:11.040 thousand and one at Little Brown, now a division of 0:02:11.120 --> 0:02:15.760 Hashet Book Group. But if Patterson's name is sometimes a punchline, 0:02:15.919 --> 0:02:19.160 He's been in on the joke. His innovation was always 0:02:19.240 --> 0:02:22.600 less about careful craftsmanship than about turning out a high 0:02:22.639 --> 0:02:27.200 volume of plot centric and passibly enjoyable material. Denise Roy, 0:02:27.320 --> 0:02:30.359 Patterson's editor, says, some writer friends have told her she's 0:02:30.400 --> 0:02:31.800 become a less patient. 0:02:31.520 --> 0:02:32.480 Reader over time. 0:02:33.240 --> 0:02:36.880 I'm like, yeah, well, Jim probably taught me that, She says, 0:02:37.400 --> 0:02:40.160 if you can't get right into the story, people probably 0:02:40.200 --> 0:02:44.160 aren't going to keep reading. Patterson turns seventy nine this 0:02:44.320 --> 0:02:46.760 year and still publishes a book or two a month. 0:02:47.120 --> 0:02:50.080 He maintains this pace famously with a lot of help. 0:02:50.480 --> 0:02:54.280 For most projects, he'll compose an extensive outline, sometimes running 0:02:54.280 --> 0:02:56.880 to one hundred plus pages, then turn it over to 0:02:56.919 --> 0:03:00.000 a co author who expands it into a full fledged manuscript. 0:03:00.680 --> 0:03:04.800 David Shelley, chief executive officer of Hashett, compares Patterson to 0:03:04.840 --> 0:03:08.720 the visual artists Jeff Cohons and Andy Warhol, both also 0:03:08.840 --> 0:03:11.680 known for churning out ideas and having others do much 0:03:11.680 --> 0:03:15.200 of the labor. Like Coons, a former Wall Street broker, 0:03:15.560 --> 0:03:19.120 Patterson has business roots. While starting out as an author, 0:03:19.360 --> 0:03:23.040 he made his living in advertising, eventually becoming the youngest 0:03:23.120 --> 0:03:27.280 CEO of the global agency J Walter Thompson's North American operation. 0:03:28.200 --> 0:03:30.680 One thing I love about the publishing business is that 0:03:30.720 --> 0:03:34.800 it's this intersection of creativity and commerce, and Jim is 0:03:34.840 --> 0:03:38.920 the perfect embodiment of that, Shelley says. In a way, 0:03:39.120 --> 0:03:42.160 the story of Patterson's five decade career is the story 0:03:42.200 --> 0:03:45.800 of US publishing, of tensions and trends playing out as 0:03:45.880 --> 0:03:52.120 profit driven multinationals and investment firms gradually took over traditional publishers. Hashette, 0:03:52.360 --> 0:03:55.480 part of the French conglomerate La Gardere, has itself acquired 0:03:55.480 --> 0:03:58.920 a number of smaller publishing companies in recent years. On 0:03:59.040 --> 0:04:02.600 earnings calls, the corporate parents brag about their biggest sellers, 0:04:03.000 --> 0:04:06.960 not their Pulletzer or Booker prize winners. Success in modern 0:04:07.000 --> 0:04:10.320 publishing is defined as exactly the thing at which Patterson 0:04:10.320 --> 0:04:15.720 has excelled, selling tons of copies. Patterson's nearly four hundred 0:04:15.760 --> 0:04:18.200 books have accounted for more than four hundred and twenty 0:04:18.200 --> 0:04:22.800 five million copies sold worldwide. Within the US, he's the 0:04:22.800 --> 0:04:25.560 top selling author of at least the past two decades, 0:04:25.920 --> 0:04:29.560 according to the book Scan service of market research provider Sircana. 0:04:30.160 --> 0:04:34.280 In online forums, librarians and booksellers sometimes complain that his 0:04:34.400 --> 0:04:37.919 output is so prolific it crowds out more literary work. 0:04:38.560 --> 0:04:41.560 For Patterson, the lack of high brow appeal seems like 0:04:41.600 --> 0:04:44.200 both a point of pride and a source of defensiveness. 0:04:44.760 --> 0:04:47.520 That's the thing that best selling authors do, he says, 0:04:48.080 --> 0:04:50.560 we actually get people coming into bookstores. 0:04:51.480 --> 0:04:52.680 But here's the plot twist. 0:04:53.120 --> 0:04:57.080 In recent years, Patterson's sales have dropped off, surpassed by 0:04:57.120 --> 0:05:01.880 those of Rebecca Yarro's and other younger female authors. Celebrities 0:05:01.920 --> 0:05:05.400 from outside the book world, Prince Harry, ru Paul have 0:05:05.480 --> 0:05:09.479 also put out high profile titles that overshadowed career author's 0:05:09.520 --> 0:05:12.880 work in the press and on bestseller lists. And so 0:05:13.320 --> 0:05:16.839 after pioneering a publishing ecosystem that treated authors as name 0:05:16.920 --> 0:05:21.640 brands and farmed out sentence level craft to lower profile collaborators, 0:05:21.920 --> 0:05:24.800 Patterson is doubling down on a gambit he's dabbled in 0:05:24.839 --> 0:05:27.320 for nearly a decade, teaming up with some of the 0:05:27.360 --> 0:05:30.160 biggest celebrities in the world and taking on the role 0:05:30.240 --> 0:05:34.640 of less recognized name himself. I visited Patterson at his 0:05:34.760 --> 0:05:38.480 mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, in December to learn both 0:05:38.520 --> 0:05:41.440 how he'd pulled off his decades long domination of the 0:05:41.440 --> 0:05:44.320 bestseller rankings and whether he'd be able to renew it. 0:05:45.000 --> 0:05:49.240 I'm an author, myself, an Iowa Writer's Workshop graduate. But 0:05:49.360 --> 0:05:52.440 even though my three books have gotten critical praise, one 0:05:52.520 --> 0:05:55.600 was even a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Patterson has 0:05:55.600 --> 0:05:59.839 outsold me more than ten thousandfold. Standing at his door, 0:06:00.200 --> 0:06:02.800 I estimated that my house could fit comfortably on his 0:06:02.920 --> 0:06:07.560 driveway alone. When the door opened, his publicist shuttled me upstairs, 0:06:07.720 --> 0:06:11.080 passed a tower of Patterson titles and a stylized painting 0:06:11.160 --> 0:06:14.039 of a row of Patterson's spines. He met me a 0:06:14.040 --> 0:06:17.479 few minutes later in his office, overlooking the ocean. Thick 0:06:17.560 --> 0:06:20.800 stacks of paper lined the lower shelves of his bookcases, 0:06:21.279 --> 0:06:23.680 each topped by a blue sheet with the name of 0:06:23.720 --> 0:06:27.239 a published or forthcoming project, outlines and drafts. 0:06:27.279 --> 0:06:28.040 He explained. 0:06:28.600 --> 0:06:33.160 A basket labeled ideas held pages and pages covered in tiny, 0:06:33.279 --> 0:06:37.440 barely legible handwriting. Those were notes for future books, which 0:06:37.440 --> 0:06:39.960 he flashed in my direction for a few seconds, then 0:06:40.000 --> 0:06:42.919 covered up possessively. I asked if I could take a 0:06:42.960 --> 0:06:46.040 picture of a page. No, because then it'll all be 0:06:46.160 --> 0:06:48.960 out there and people will steal fifty of my ideas, 0:06:49.000 --> 0:06:52.960 he said. It wasn't clear if he was joking. People 0:06:52.960 --> 0:06:55.279 had told me about a down to earth sense of humor, 0:06:55.640 --> 0:06:59.320 but they'd also mentioned a prickly self protectiveness. Maybe the 0:06:59.360 --> 0:07:03.440 partnerships at him feeling especially invested in delivering original plots. 0:07:04.080 --> 0:07:07.719 In twenty eighteen, Patterson collaborated with Bill Clinton on the 0:07:07.720 --> 0:07:11.320 thriller The President Is Missing, which became a huge hit. 0:07:11.960 --> 0:07:15.640 Since then, he's done two more Clinton collaborations and one 0:07:15.680 --> 0:07:19.080 with Dolly Parton. When I visited, he was finishing up 0:07:19.120 --> 0:07:22.040 novels co authored with the actor Viola Davis and the 0:07:22.080 --> 0:07:26.280 influencer Mister Beast, set to publish in March and September, respectively, 0:07:26.920 --> 0:07:30.120 With line by line authorship back in Patterson's hands. He 0:07:30.200 --> 0:07:33.800 told me, perhaps strategically, that he'd renewed his attention to 0:07:33.880 --> 0:07:37.360 craft for the last couple of years. The books, I mean, 0:07:37.400 --> 0:07:39.560 they are what they are, but I think they're better, 0:07:39.760 --> 0:07:43.480 he said. He regards his novel with Davis Judge Stone 0:07:43.720 --> 0:07:46.920 out on March ninth, as his most accomplished yet. His 0:07:47.000 --> 0:07:51.080 publicist described it as a literary work. Patterson also revealed 0:07:51.080 --> 0:07:53.640 to me that he and his wife Sue had funneled 0:07:53.640 --> 0:07:56.360 more than two hundred and twenty million dollars, about a 0:07:56.400 --> 0:07:59.880 third of their wealth, into charitable giving, focusing on support 0:08:00.080 --> 0:08:05.160 for authors, readers, teachers, students, booksellers, and librarians. The Iowa 0:08:05.240 --> 0:08:08.760 Writers Workshop funding was part of that. It was as if, 0:08:09.000 --> 0:08:12.040 having spent his career outsourcing the crafting of his books, 0:08:12.360 --> 0:08:16.240 Patterson was campaigning to be recognized for his contribution to literature. 0:08:16.960 --> 0:08:19.160 One person who's worked with him and asked not to 0:08:19.160 --> 0:08:23.440 be identified to avoid professional repercussions, says he goes back 0:08:23.480 --> 0:08:26.800 and forth between dismissing literary writers as not for a 0:08:26.840 --> 0:08:29.560 popular audience and then wanting to be seen as a 0:08:29.560 --> 0:08:33.360 literary writer because he feels somewhat ghettoized as a pulp writer. 0:08:34.320 --> 0:08:37.920 Patterson's warring qualities can be traced partly to his childhood 0:08:37.920 --> 0:08:41.120 in Newburgh, New York. His father, Charles, grew up in 0:08:41.160 --> 0:08:44.600 the basement of the local poorhouse. Charles's mother worked as 0:08:44.640 --> 0:08:48.520 its charwoman. Charles dreamed of being a writer, but instead, 0:08:48.600 --> 0:08:51.080 after college, went off to fight in World War II. 0:08:51.880 --> 0:08:55.240 When he returned, he married a devoutly Catholic school teacher 0:08:55.280 --> 0:08:59.600 and took unromantic jobs driving a bread truck, selling insurance 0:08:59.760 --> 0:09:03.800 while drinking too much. The couple had four kids, James, 0:09:04.000 --> 0:09:08.480 Jimmy back then followed by three girls. Patterson's father was 0:09:08.600 --> 0:09:11.840 harsh and competitive with his son. Once a year he 0:09:12.000 --> 0:09:15.880 challenged James to a race, always winning, until finally, James 0:09:15.960 --> 0:09:18.640 later recalled, I was going to kick his butt, and 0:09:18.720 --> 0:09:21.960 he just kind of elbowed me off the road. Both 0:09:22.000 --> 0:09:25.640 parents demanded much of him. The idea I had growing up, 0:09:25.840 --> 0:09:28.240 and I held on to it into my forties, was 0:09:28.240 --> 0:09:30.679 that my folks only cared about me as long as 0:09:30.720 --> 0:09:33.200 I was number one in my class, he writes at 0:09:33.200 --> 0:09:37.960 his memoir. James would wander the woods alone, inventing escapist 0:09:38.000 --> 0:09:41.360 war and sports stories. At one point, he learned that 0:09:41.360 --> 0:09:43.680 the founder of the New York Daily News shared his 0:09:43.800 --> 0:09:46.360 last name, and imagined the man showing up in a 0:09:46.400 --> 0:09:50.080 limousine to spirit him off to the city. Instead, he 0:09:50.120 --> 0:09:52.800 got himself to New York by winning a full scholarship 0:09:52.840 --> 0:09:57.320 to Manhattan College, where he studied English literature. During summers, 0:09:57.360 --> 0:09:59.840 he would work as an aide at McLean Hospital, a 0:10:00.240 --> 0:10:04.080 in psychiatric institution near Boston. He was captivated by the 0:10:04.120 --> 0:10:06.920 personalities he met there and by the twenty five cent 0:10:07.080 --> 0:10:10.000 used paperbacks he'd pick up in Cambridge and read during 0:10:10.040 --> 0:10:15.199 his shifts. He gravitated to serious literature James Joyce, Henry James, 0:10:15.559 --> 0:10:18.160 and began trying to write some of his own. After 0:10:18.200 --> 0:10:21.679 graduating in nineteen sixty nine, he entered an English doctoral 0:10:21.720 --> 0:10:25.360 program at Vanderbilt University, where his fiction impressed a professor 0:10:25.440 --> 0:10:29.200 named Walter Sullivan, a novelist who'd studied with Flannery O'Connor 0:10:29.240 --> 0:10:33.040 at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I needed that kind of encouragement, 0:10:33.200 --> 0:10:37.160 Patterson told me. He decided to leave Vanderbilt after a year, 0:10:37.520 --> 0:10:40.920 submitting a fiction manuscript to earn his master's degree. But 0:10:41.000 --> 0:10:44.240 when Patterson shared it with his father, Charles dismissed it 0:10:44.280 --> 0:10:47.680 as immature. It was like a boy standing next to 0:10:47.720 --> 0:10:51.040 a puddle at midnight and urinating, Charles said in a 0:10:51.040 --> 0:10:55.319 New York Magazine profile of his son. The assessment was accurate, 0:10:55.520 --> 0:11:00.280 Patterson says, but still a little cruel. The manuscript, one 0:11:00.320 --> 0:11:03.400 hundred and twenty one page collection of linked stories, sits 0:11:03.400 --> 0:11:07.600 in Vanderbilt's library archives. It's never been published or written about. 0:11:08.160 --> 0:11:10.680 Before my visit to Palm Beach, I had requested a 0:11:10.720 --> 0:11:13.520 copy and opened it, expecting to find seeds of the pulp. 0:11:13.520 --> 0:11:18.200 Writer Patterson became simple plots, familiar language characters with the 0:11:18.200 --> 0:11:23.199 complexity of stick figures. Instead, I encountered a moving and original, 0:11:23.240 --> 0:11:27.960 if slightly unpolished, work of literature. The main character, Jeffrey Candor, 0:11:28.320 --> 0:11:30.240 is a working class kid who's on the edge of 0:11:30.240 --> 0:11:33.680 adulthood and at war with himself. A former altar boy, 0:11:34.000 --> 0:11:37.319 he craves a simple life close to nature and spiritual wisdom, 0:11:37.679 --> 0:11:41.560 but his worldly ambition and an uncanny ability to manipulate 0:11:41.600 --> 0:11:45.200 people and situations in its service, as a girlfriend puts, it, 0:11:45.559 --> 0:11:49.120 keeps getting in his way. The language is as poetic 0:11:49.200 --> 0:11:52.360 as it is unpretentious. The boy was chewing on a 0:11:52.400 --> 0:11:54.920 tutsie roll and his father was sucking a cigarette he 0:11:54.960 --> 0:11:59.480 was about to light or eat. Reads one characteristically evocative line. 0:12:00.240 --> 0:12:03.439 That story has Jeffrey getting involved in a hoodlum uncle's 0:12:03.440 --> 0:12:06.400 plot to steal a piano. He's trying to shed his 0:12:06.520 --> 0:12:10.520 altar boy identity. In a modern Patterson tale, the piano 0:12:10.559 --> 0:12:14.400 theft would either succeed or be foiled. In this one, delightfully, 0:12:14.600 --> 0:12:17.960 the plot is itself a plot. The ending suggests that 0:12:18.000 --> 0:12:20.280 the uncle never planned to steal a piano at all, 0:12:20.679 --> 0:12:24.480 He just needed help buying one. Jeffrey realizes he's neither 0:12:24.520 --> 0:12:27.360 a gangster nor an altar boy, though he remains at 0:12:27.360 --> 0:12:30.720 a loss for what else to be. At Patterson's house 0:12:30.760 --> 0:12:33.720 in Palm Beach, I pulled the thesis from my back pack 0:12:33.800 --> 0:12:37.200 and slid it across the table to him. I'm curious, 0:12:37.240 --> 0:12:40.040 he said, putting a hand on it. I'd opened it 0:12:40.080 --> 0:12:43.200 to a passage I found deeply affecting about Jeffrey falling 0:12:43.200 --> 0:12:46.480 short of his mother's expectations. Patterson looked at it for 0:12:46.520 --> 0:12:49.760 a few long seconds, then pushed it back to me. No, 0:12:50.240 --> 0:12:52.880 I won't read it right now, he said, promising he 0:12:52.920 --> 0:12:53.520 would later. 0:12:53.600 --> 0:12:54.080 Instead. 0:12:54.840 --> 0:12:58.800 It's too much, I suggested, Yeah, he said, his voice 0:12:58.800 --> 0:13:02.040 a bit too loud, he deflected with a quip. So 0:13:02.160 --> 0:13:06.280 I could have been a writer. After Vanderbilt. In nineteen seventy, 0:13:06.520 --> 0:13:09.559 Patterson returned to New York, moving into a cheap hotel 0:13:09.600 --> 0:13:12.440 in Hell's Kitchen. He'd been trying to sell his fiction 0:13:12.520 --> 0:13:15.840 to magazines, but no one bit. He'd heard that writers 0:13:15.840 --> 0:13:18.760 could get work drafting copy for the advertising firm Jay 0:13:18.840 --> 0:13:21.760 Walter Thompson, so he showed up the headquarters with the 0:13:21.800 --> 0:13:25.680 portfolio he'd put together, then kept returning week after week 0:13:25.800 --> 0:13:30.200 until the firm hired him. That year, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez's 0:13:30.200 --> 0:13:34.040 One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in English. Reading it, 0:13:34.200 --> 0:13:38.120 Patterson felt both thrilled and intimidated. It occurred to me 0:13:38.200 --> 0:13:41.400 that I wouldn't I couldn't write anything this good. He 0:13:41.480 --> 0:13:44.960 told me, so, I said so. I said, well, I 0:13:45.000 --> 0:13:47.199 don't want to write a pretty good book, and I 0:13:47.240 --> 0:13:48.800 don't care about writing for snobs. 0:13:48.800 --> 0:13:49.199 Anyway. 0:13:49.880 --> 0:13:52.439 A couple of pulpier hits had come out around then, 0:13:52.840 --> 0:13:56.040 the Day of The Jackal the Exorcist, and Patterson liked 0:13:56.040 --> 0:13:59.240 them enough, so I said, maybe I could write something 0:13:59.360 --> 0:14:03.520 like that. It was decided then he'd try writing a thriller. 0:14:04.360 --> 0:14:06.720 He drafted the attempt with pencil and paper at his 0:14:06.800 --> 0:14:09.600 kitchen counter, putting in a couple of hours each morning 0:14:09.640 --> 0:14:13.200 before work and a couple more afterward. When he finished it. 0:14:13.480 --> 0:14:16.719 Thirty one publishers rejected the manuscript before Little. 0:14:16.440 --> 0:14:17.360 Brown said yes. 0:14:18.040 --> 0:14:21.720 The Thomas Berryman Number, published in nineteen seventy six, won 0:14:21.760 --> 0:14:24.960 an Edgar Award, the highest American honor for mystery and 0:14:25.000 --> 0:14:30.000 crime writing, but didn't sell particularly well. After that, Patterson 0:14:30.000 --> 0:14:32.520 told me, I said, oh, I think I'll try to 0:14:32.520 --> 0:14:33.680 go make a lot of money. 0:14:34.240 --> 0:14:36.120 I asked if he meant that again. 0:14:36.240 --> 0:14:39.040 I couldn't tell if he was kidding f Yes, he 0:14:39.120 --> 0:14:42.720 said he'd wanted a ticket out of advertising. He wrote 0:14:42.760 --> 0:14:45.680 three more novels in the next four years, all far 0:14:45.760 --> 0:14:49.600 pulpier than the first, but those two didn't sell many copies. 0:14:50.480 --> 0:14:53.200 Patterson's girl friend at the time was a generous, upbeat 0:14:53.240 --> 0:14:57.080 woman named Jane Blanchard, who helped him see himself after 0:14:57.120 --> 0:14:59.240 a childhood marked by his father's harshness. 0:14:59.560 --> 0:15:02.880 As were worthy of love. Jane totally saved me. 0:15:03.120 --> 0:15:07.120 Patterson writes in his memoir, She turned me around. One 0:15:07.200 --> 0:15:09.480 day they were at the post office when Blanchard had 0:15:09.480 --> 0:15:14.040 a seizure. Doctors found a malignant brain tumor. Patterson began 0:15:14.160 --> 0:15:17.560 helping care for her, but her cancer couldn't be cured. 0:15:18.200 --> 0:15:19.800 He was at work when he got a call from 0:15:19.840 --> 0:15:23.280 Blanchard's sister telling him the end seemed near. He rushed 0:15:23.280 --> 0:15:25.840 to the hospital, a scene he recalls in the most 0:15:25.880 --> 0:15:29.479 affecting section of his memoir. When she heard me whispering 0:15:29.600 --> 0:15:33.320 up against her cheek, she squeezed my hand twice, he writes, 0:15:34.080 --> 0:15:38.160 then she was gone. Ten minutes had passed since he arrived. 0:15:39.080 --> 0:15:42.880 For a year after Blanchard's death, Patterson couldn't write. He 0:15:42.960 --> 0:15:46.960 threw himself into advertising instead, racing up his agency's ranks. 0:15:47.440 --> 0:15:50.240 In nineteen eighty eight, he became the North American. 0:15:49.920 --> 0:15:50.720 CEO of J. 0:15:50.880 --> 0:15:54.240 Walter Thompson, having helped compose lyrics for several of the 0:15:54.240 --> 0:15:57.880 most famous jingles of the nineteen eighties, including I'm a 0:15:57.920 --> 0:16:01.280 Toys r us Kid and Aren't You Hungry for Burger King, 0:16:02.160 --> 0:16:05.680 but novels remained his calling. He soon put out another 0:16:05.680 --> 0:16:09.280 couple of pulpy thrillers with underwhelming sales, along with a 0:16:09.320 --> 0:16:13.280 co written non fiction book about public opinion. Then he 0:16:13.360 --> 0:16:16.800 decided to start approaching publishing the way he'd approached advertising 0:16:17.360 --> 0:16:21.120 as a business. More or less, We'll be right back 0:16:21.160 --> 0:16:25.120 with Along Came an Influencer. How America's best selling writer 0:16:25.280 --> 0:16:32.360 became mister Beast's co author Welcome Back to Along Came 0:16:32.400 --> 0:16:36.280 an influencer. How America's best selling writer became mister Beast's 0:16:36.320 --> 0:16:40.600 co author. With his next novel, Along Came a Spider, 0:16:41.000 --> 0:16:44.040 Patterson put pressure on Little Brown by getting his agent 0:16:44.080 --> 0:16:47.600 to first drum up excitement in Hollywood. The following week, 0:16:47.840 --> 0:16:51.320 he had bids from four parties. Little Brown won out 0:16:51.400 --> 0:16:53.480 with a one million dollar offer for the book and 0:16:53.560 --> 0:16:57.600 a sequel. Patterson took over marketing for the novel, too, 0:16:57.640 --> 0:17:00.320 getting designers at Jay Walter Thompson to create ate the 0:17:00.360 --> 0:17:03.920 cover a spider dangling from the title over a lonely 0:17:03.960 --> 0:17:07.000 looking house, and persuading Little Brown to run a two 0:17:07.040 --> 0:17:11.160 week TV ad campaign, whose copy he wrote himself. When 0:17:11.160 --> 0:17:13.840 the book came out in nineteen ninety three, it landed 0:17:13.840 --> 0:17:16.520 at number nine on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction 0:17:16.680 --> 0:17:21.040 bestseller List. It would evolve into Patterson's perpetually best selling 0:17:21.119 --> 0:17:25.919 Alex Cross Detective series. In nineteen ninety six, after a 0:17:25.920 --> 0:17:29.240 few more novels, Patterson quit his day job to write 0:17:29.320 --> 0:17:32.480 and promote his books full time. He would have really 0:17:32.640 --> 0:17:36.080 tacky book. Jackets Crichton, his publisher at the time, recalls, 0:17:36.720 --> 0:17:39.520 I was such a snob. I would say, uugh, this 0:17:39.720 --> 0:17:42.520 is the worst thing I've ever seen. But if it's 0:17:42.560 --> 0:17:45.000 in the airport and people are looking for a fast, 0:17:45.040 --> 0:17:47.960 wild ride on their airplane ride, they would pick it up. 0:17:48.720 --> 0:17:52.400 Crichton remembers Patterson as demanding, asking for a full time 0:17:52.480 --> 0:17:55.320 staff for his books at Little Brown, and shouting at 0:17:55.359 --> 0:17:59.760 junior publicist and marketers, mostly young women, in apparent frustration. 0:18:00.520 --> 0:18:04.040 Patterson says he doesn't remember insisting on a staff, and 0:18:04.119 --> 0:18:09.000 yet Crichton acknowledges Patterson's business instincts were impeccable. In the 0:18:09.080 --> 0:18:12.000 late nineties, he proposed writing more than one book a 0:18:12.119 --> 0:18:16.240 year to expand his audience. Crichton argued that he'd cannibalize 0:18:16.240 --> 0:18:20.080 his own sales. Michael Peach, Patterson's editor at the time, 0:18:20.359 --> 0:18:23.640 recalls Patterson countering, Michael, when you put down a book 0:18:23.640 --> 0:18:26.159 that you just liked, you don't say, oh good, I 0:18:26.200 --> 0:18:28.200 get to wait a year until I read the next book. 0:18:28.640 --> 0:18:31.199 You want to read the next book right away. They 0:18:31.280 --> 0:18:35.480 tried it and sales rose. Later, facing weak sales with 0:18:35.560 --> 0:18:39.880 women and West Coast readers, Crichton recalls Patterson proposed Women's 0:18:39.960 --> 0:18:44.159 Murder Club, a series set in San Francisco with female protagonists. 0:18:44.480 --> 0:18:48.199 Patterson remembers it somewhat differently. He says he chose San 0:18:48.240 --> 0:18:51.320 Francisco not in response to sales, but because he thought 0:18:51.320 --> 0:18:54.240 it would be fun. Crichton says She thought the move 0:18:54.280 --> 0:18:58.520 would come across as two orchestrated, but eventually relented again. 0:18:58.920 --> 0:19:02.560 Sales rose I was wrong, she says, he was right. 0:19:03.240 --> 0:19:06.080 In two thousand and one, Peach replaced Crichton as the 0:19:06.119 --> 0:19:10.159 imprint's publisher. He and Patterson were friends by then. Peach 0:19:10.240 --> 0:19:14.440 trusted Patterson's business instincts and appreciated his unyielding self reliance. 0:19:15.000 --> 0:19:18.359 He's someone who built his own success completely, Peach says, 0:19:18.720 --> 0:19:22.960 he didn't start with anything. Patterson's timing had also been good, 0:19:23.320 --> 0:19:25.720 with his sales benefiting from the rise of Barnes and 0:19:25.720 --> 0:19:29.880 Noble and Borders. Those chains filled their entryways with tables 0:19:29.960 --> 0:19:34.520 stacked with best sellers, charging publishers for the privilege. Publishers, 0:19:34.760 --> 0:19:37.960 not wanting to make bad bets, increasingly relied on the 0:19:38.000 --> 0:19:41.840 known names in their catalogs. Under Peach, Patterson got a 0:19:41.880 --> 0:19:45.679 dedicated team and began negotiating the profit sharing contracts that 0:19:45.720 --> 0:19:49.160 are typical for best selling authors instead of standard royalties. 0:19:49.800 --> 0:19:52.760 The size of his business was greater and greater. He 0:19:52.840 --> 0:19:56.280 became a larger part of Haschet's revenue and profits. Peach says, 0:19:56.840 --> 0:19:59.800 so he had a lot of leverage with his publisher's 0:20:00.600 --> 0:20:04.159 Patterson sought to expand his market even more aggressively. In 0:20:04.240 --> 0:20:08.399 nineteen ninety six, he'd experimented with collaboration, publishing a novel 0:20:08.440 --> 0:20:10.959 with a co author drawn from the copywriting ranks at 0:20:11.000 --> 0:20:14.439 Jay Walter Thompson, and he'd launched Women's Murder Club with 0:20:14.520 --> 0:20:18.800 another co author from his advertising circle, Maxine Petro. Now 0:20:18.840 --> 0:20:21.480 he recruited a whole stable of writing partners to help 0:20:21.560 --> 0:20:26.560 him increase his output. Patterson also diversified beyond fictional thrillers 0:20:26.560 --> 0:20:30.680 for adults. In two thousand five, after Stephanie Meyer's Twilight 0:20:30.760 --> 0:20:35.080 took off, he started his own young adult series, Maximum Ride. 0:20:35.440 --> 0:20:38.800 In two thousand nine, when a major traveling exhibit inspired 0:20:38.800 --> 0:20:42.439 a King Tut craze, he published his first non fiction thriller, 0:20:42.760 --> 0:20:46.000 The Murder of King Tut. In twenty twelve, at the 0:20:46.040 --> 0:20:48.840 height of the Diary of a Whimpy Kid franchise, he 0:20:48.880 --> 0:20:52.760 started a middle grade series, I Funny with another former 0:20:52.840 --> 0:20:57.119 j Walter Thompson Knight, Chris Gravenstein, that grew in twenty 0:20:57.160 --> 0:21:01.199 sixteen into a children's imprint called Jimmy Patterson, selling mostly 0:21:01.280 --> 0:21:06.639 work that he co authored. Patterson's productivity ballooned accordingly, having 0:21:06.640 --> 0:21:09.520 published fewer than a dozen books in the nineties, he 0:21:09.560 --> 0:21:12.520 more than quadrupled his output in the two thousands. In 0:21:12.560 --> 0:21:15.679 the twenty tens, he started regularly writing or co writing 0:21:15.720 --> 0:21:19.360 a dozen plus books a year. Peach, who became CEO 0:21:19.480 --> 0:21:22.439 of Hashet in twenty thirteen, continued to pitch in on 0:21:22.640 --> 0:21:25.639 editing him around a title a year. By the middle 0:21:25.680 --> 0:21:29.359 of the decade, the Patterson operation employed sixteen people, not 0:21:29.560 --> 0:21:32.840 counting all the co authors. Patterson shared credit by that 0:21:32.920 --> 0:21:35.600 point on most of his books, with the Alex Cross 0:21:35.600 --> 0:21:36.960 series a notable exception. 0:21:37.840 --> 0:21:39.440 Patterson was in his sixties. 0:21:39.480 --> 0:21:42.520 By then, he'd married in his late thirties and raised 0:21:42.520 --> 0:21:45.600 a son, and people had seen his anger soften somewhat 0:21:45.680 --> 0:21:48.960 since the early years. Patterson writes in his memoir that 0:21:49.040 --> 0:21:51.600 he came to terms with it in therapy, seeing its 0:21:51.680 --> 0:21:54.600 roots in his father's own anger and feeling his resentment 0:21:54.640 --> 0:21:58.280 of his father's subside in the process. The emotional shift 0:21:58.400 --> 0:22:01.360 helped his image, so did his team's efforts to remake 0:22:01.440 --> 0:22:04.720 him as a kind of elder statesman. Something we worked 0:22:04.760 --> 0:22:08.159 on all the way along was his reputation, says ned Rust, 0:22:08.480 --> 0:22:12.840 the former publisher of the Patterson business, Patterson's contributions to 0:22:12.880 --> 0:22:16.760 book related charities and activism helped. He started a children's 0:22:16.760 --> 0:22:20.240 reading program, took out ads urging the Obama administration to 0:22:20.280 --> 0:22:24.040 bail out the publishing industry, and donated millions of dollars. 0:22:23.680 --> 0:22:26.120 To booksellers, public schools, and universities. 0:22:26.960 --> 0:22:29.840 Accepting an award from the National Book Foundation in twenty 0:22:29.920 --> 0:22:33.520 fifteen for public service, he told the audience, I feel 0:22:33.600 --> 0:22:37.080 uncomfortable because well, I am the elephant in the room, 0:22:37.359 --> 0:22:39.720 the bull in the China shop, the stranger in a 0:22:39.760 --> 0:22:44.200 strange land, the big mac at Cipriani. In twenty nineteen, 0:22:44.640 --> 0:22:49.040 Donald Trump awarded him a National Humanities Medal. Looking back, 0:22:49.160 --> 0:22:52.000 rust says that was his decade. That was when he 0:22:52.119 --> 0:22:55.879 was completely on top. Then, in twenty twenty two, on 0:22:55.960 --> 0:22:58.960 a press tour for his newly released memoir, Patterson made 0:22:58.960 --> 0:23:02.240 a rare public misas step. In an interview with London's 0:23:02.240 --> 0:23:05.800 Times newspaper, he referred to a form of racism against 0:23:05.800 --> 0:23:09.240 white men in publishing in media, it's even harder for 0:23:09.359 --> 0:23:12.520 older writers, he added, you don't meet many fifty two 0:23:12.600 --> 0:23:16.679 year old white males. The backlash was swift and intense, 0:23:17.119 --> 0:23:20.280 as people pointed out that white men remained overrepresented in 0:23:20.280 --> 0:23:25.960 publishing and Hollywood. Some revived the old insults James Patterson 0:23:26.000 --> 0:23:29.680 of all people, The author Roxanne Gay tweeted, first of all, 0:23:29.880 --> 0:23:33.160 Reich your own books, pal, My first novel had come 0:23:33.200 --> 0:23:34.280 out the previous month. 0:23:34.720 --> 0:23:35.640