Here’s How Author James Patterson Writes Thirty-One Books at the Same Time

Patterson is more a brand than he is a writer

I thought that this was fairly common knowledge within the book community by now, honestly.

He comes up with an idea, sketches out a plot and hands it over to one of several ‘ghost’ writers. Most of them have their names on the covers in small print. (Though some don’t, but they’re credited inside the cover.) He reviews the final work, makes some minor changes and it gets submitted. Wham bam. He makes a small fortune, the ghost writers get paid and the publisher make a big fortune.

But as others have noted, while he makes a bundle he does get take a fair bit of his proceeds and turn that back around to support young/new writers, book organizations and such.

Hands a 50-70 page outline to a “co-writer” and expects chapters back from them every couple of weeks.

He doesn’t pretend he’s writing the books, but he’s not lazy or disorganized.

Tl dr: he doesn’t

I don’t see the point. For me, writing is telling my story.

…and the quality went to hell. This is nothing else than running a franchise business where everyone cooks whatever they want. Some of this diarrhea in book form is just garbage some is readable

Poorly. I’ve read his crappy work.

This is why his books are so bad. I’m currently reading “Run Rose Run” for a reading challenge and it’s a hot mess.

Dolly Parton’s accompanying album is good, though.

“Writes”

I’m not a fan.

I never realized how many books have his name on them until I started working at a bookstore. You can find him in basically every genre and section of the store.

I personally haven’t read anything with his name on it since Maximum Ride. That series quickly became a mess so I gave up on it.

Patterson is in his late 70s-early 80s, no? It makes sense to have a team of assistants, researchers and ghost writers. It would be hard for a man half his age to be able to keep up with his level of output.

Nora Roberts is 72, and I believe she is the only author who rivals his output but she writes all her own books. Stephen King is in his late 70s but he writes considerably less than Patterson. Both of them eclipse Patterson in terms of quality

“James Patterson” is now a brand/franchise not the writer. Good on him as he has found a way to scale and make loads from it. I have never really liked his style of books, but if you do does it really matter who exactly comes up with the words?

I must say, I’ve never read any James Patterson, but there’s no way a person can churn out books at that rate and have them be anything but cookie cutter, paint by numbers and soulless.