Author/reviewer Lev Grossman is a personal favorite. Whenever I read one of his articles - usually in Time - he cracks me up. I’m not sure if he always means to, but he does. This time he interviewed James Patterson. The article contains the usual and obligatory shots at Patterson - something that’s become a favorite author pastime. This one sums up the debate nicely:

Patterson is the world’s greatest best-seller factory, and depending on how you look at it, he’s either a damn good writer or the Beast of the coming literary apocalypse.

Lev seems to kind of, sort of, like Patterson…I think:

Literature is not a democracy. In the book world, being popular does not necessarily make you great. But if it were, and if it did, then the man sitting across the table from me in a canary-yellow mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., would be president-for-life of the literary universe, and Philip Roth would be a comptroller in North Dakota.

Patterson is 58 and writes 4-5 books per year. He’s sold some ridiculous number of copies like 100 million and has earned a breathtaking $40 million. He’s co-written 8 novels - see, this is why I sometimes forget he’s an author and think of him only as a corporation. According to Grossman, Patterson is “…he’s amiable, chatty and deeply unpretentious–he refers to his writing as ’scribbling’.” I met Patterson at a RWA conference and my impression was a tad different, but I’ll defer to Grossman.

On this issues of covers and artistic control, I offer this:

One of the things that’s fascinating about Patterson is his total lack of interest in received wisdom; another is his complete confidence in his own judgment. With 1992’s Along Came a Spider, the first novel in his Alex Cross series, Patterson knew he’d written a best seller–so he took control of the way it was designed and marketed. When his publisher told him it wasn’t interested in running a TV campaign, he called in a few favors at J. Walter Thompson and shot the ad with his own money. He wasn’t jazzed about Spider’s cover, so he redesigned it. “They’d done a cover that had a kid’s sneaker on it, with a little blood on it, and I went, I don’t know, it didn’t do anything for me. I want the reaction to be, ‘I want this!’” He blew up the title into huge letters that practically shouted across the bookstore that this book was going to give thriller readers exactly what they were looking for. Spider became Patterson’s first best seller. He still designs all his own covers. Harvard Business School now teaches a case study on his marketing techniques.

Money doesn’t mean respect:

Patterson probably outsells Toni Morrison 10 books to 1, but his success comes at a price. He will never get respect from the literati. Most reviewers ignore him. In a culture that values high style over storytelling, pretty prose over popularity and pulse-pounding plots, he’s at the extreme wrong end of the spectrum, and he knows it. And, yes, it irks him a little. “That’s probably my biggest frustration,” he admits. “There’s something going on here that’s significant, and it’s not easy to do. If it was easy to do, a lot of people would do it.”

Even if you dislike Patterson you have to love that quote.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 at 7:24 am and is filed under About Authors, About Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.