5 ms·

For those unfamiliar: His books are quite generic but provide some fun for the casual reader. He has released over 200 books and sold over 400 million copies.

by hmate9 4y ago

For those unfamiliar: His books are quite generic but provide some fun for the casual reader. He has released over 200 books and sold over 400 million copies. He uses a team of ghostwriters to actually develop the books/series after he gives the detailed outlines of the characters and the stories. His success is mainly how he has been able to scale up and release so many books with his name attached.

quickthrower2 4y ago
Which is fine. It makes him a 'unicorn' in software business parlance.
- cs137 4y ago
  I would say that it's bad for writing, though. Ultimately, what he's doing exacerbates the absurdly lopsided distribution of visibility and rewards that writers experience. Most books sell horribly, and not for reasons of low quality but because discoverability is a huge problem, even in today's world of recommendation algorithms and the like. There are a good number of "famous" writers who live in poverty, because the percentage of books that sell well enough to live on is so small. Traditional publishers don't bother to invest much in a book unless they are sure it would sell without them (i.e., the author has 4,000,000 Instagram followers). The typical budget for marketing and publicity is about $300. The thing is, trad-pubs don't have to be better. They're inundated with unsolicited manuscripts ("slush") and even though very few of those are excellent, at least 5% are in a state where a competent editor could turn it into a book as good as any other commercial bestseller. They have all the power and, to them, authors are a fungible commodity. Oh, and if you think a literary agent is going to help you navigate this, well... unless you went to prep school with an agent, you won't even get _read_. You'll sit in a query pile, possibly get a glance by a 19-year-old unpaid intern, and get a form-letter rejection 18 months later. You can self-publish, but less than 1% of the population has the savings and free time to do it right. It costs $10,000, minimum--you'll have to hire an editor, a cover designer, a formatter... and while you probably won't be able to afford a publicist you'll be competing against people who can--and non-writing efforts will take up at least a hundred hours of your time--some people find the marketing aspect fun and if that's you, great, but most writers don't, which is a big part of why so many of them pursue traditional publishing even though it's abusive if you're in the bottom 99%. Allowing big-name authors to supercharge their apparent productivity by hiring teams of "co-authors" who do the actual writing exacerbates this problem. I don't see a good way to fix it, and what Patterson does probably shouldn't be outlawed, but it still sucks. The book world, in which name and "author brand" matter far more than literary quality, is already pretty moribund... and this kind of stuff doesn't help.
  - huijzer 4y ago
    > You can self-publish, but less than 1% of the population has the savings and free time to do it right. It costs $10,000, minimum--you'll have to hire an editor, a cover designer, a formatter... We wrote https://juliadatascience.io https://juliadatascience.io in a few months and have about 4k unique visitors per month (https://juliadatascience.pirsch.io/ https://juliadatascience.pirsch.io/). The cover is designed for free by ourselves via a plotting library. Yes, we’re not selling millions but we have spent only 60 dollars (on the domain name).
    - browie 4y ago
      I'm in the process of doing this free for someone I know. I got into it clueless to how any of this works and what it may cost. Reading you post $10,000 minimum and researching a few days ago on how much book editors get paid (and exactly how) slightly shocked me!
      - cs137 4y ago
        It depends on the nature of the work and also the project. You don't have to spend $10,000 if you're just looking to create a book that you can give to your friends. If you want it to have any chance of commercial or critical success, though, you're going to need a level of polish that you have to pay for.
    - cs137 4y ago
      First of all, congrats. Writing a book is difficult, and writing one that people actually enjoy reading, even more so. Second, trade and technical publishing are completely different markets. You need a literary agent to even sit at the table in trade (or traditional) publishing. You also have no chance in hell of getting one ("querying" is a waste of time) if you don't have preexisting connections or have a trendy "hook". Plus, the objective functions are different. If you write a technical book that only sells 10 copies per month (I'm assuming 0.25% of visitors buy, although that might be on the high side) but it improves your career, you win. Fiction authors, on the other hand, are trying to make enough in royalties to live on. You'll get about $3 per copy in royalties. You need to be targeting a large audience to even have a chance. Large audiences mean lots of competition; other people out there can hire publicists or somehow have the connections ("querying" agents is a waste of time) to make it in trad-pub (which is deeply flawed, but they can sell books when they get their shit together). If you sell less than 1000 copies, you're done--for good. Your name now has negative value, but no publisher (or agent) is going to touch an anonymous pen name (no platform, no photo with the family and the dog) either. In traditional publishing, you have to make it a full-time job or you will be flushed out of the system (but they don't tell you that). Most of the time isn't spent on the writing (as the quality of much of what's produced these days shows) but marketing. Your "advance" is basically your marketing budget--they can't force you, but "eating" your advance instead of spending it to market your book (the publishing house won't) is frowned upon. In self-publishing, there are no rules, but it seems that the successful self-publishers, on average, spend even more time on self-promotion, which writers famously dislike doing.
watwut 4y ago
So basically, he is not a writer, but more of manager and product owner for massive team of writers?
- suction 4y ago
  Yes, he's using SCRUM to make sure all creativity and spirit is lost to "the process".
  - toxicFork 4y ago
    Is it Agile
- routerl 4y ago
  It's not that unusual. Tom Clancy has been doing it for decades, and before that "Carolyn Keene" (the collective pseudonym of every Nancy Drew writer). It's a brand. This brand happens to be presented as a person, a single author. But, as with every brand, scratching the surface reveals more to the story.
  - nsoonhui 4y ago
    And "Franklin W. Dixon" ( Hardy Boys).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - jsmith99 4y ago
    It's quite traditional. Alexander Dumas used ghostwriters to produce a comparable number of books and many old master artists had entire workshops of apprentices producing art in their name. George Orwell published an essay claiming that the serial school stories then being published (Billy Bunter) were written in such a artificial tone that they were obviously being produced by a series of jobbing writers, provoking an indignant response from the author https://orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys https://orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys
jgalt212 4y ago
like Jeff Koons, but in print.
rk06 4y ago
I have read only one of his book. And do not find enough motivation to buy another of his book. Dunno if it is my taste, but you comment explains a lot

by hmate9 4y ago

quickthrower2 4y ago

Which is fine. It makes him a 'unicorn' in software business parlance.

cs137 4y ago
I would say that it's bad for writing, though. Ultimately, what he's doing exacerbates the absurdly lopsided distribution of visibility and rewards that writers experience. Most books sell horribly, and not for reasons of low quality but because discoverability is a huge problem, even in today's world of recommendation algorithms and the like. There are a good number of "famous" writers who live in poverty, because the percentage of books that sell well enough to live on is so small. Traditional publishers don't bother to invest much in a book unless they are sure it would sell without them (i.e., the author has 4,000,000 Instagram followers). The typical budget for marketing and publicity is about $300. The thing is, trad-pubs don't have to be better. They're inundated with unsolicited manuscripts ("slush") and even though very few of those are excellent, at least 5% are in a state where a competent editor could turn it into a book as good as any other commercial bestseller. They have all the power and, to them, authors are a fungible commodity. Oh, and if you think a literary agent is going to help you navigate this, well... unless you went to prep school with an agent, you won't even get _read_. You'll sit in a query pile, possibly get a glance by a 19-year-old unpaid intern, and get a form-letter rejection 18 months later. You can self-publish, but less than 1% of the population has the savings and free time to do it right. It costs $10,000, minimum--you'll have to hire an editor, a cover designer, a formatter... and while you probably won't be able to afford a publicist you'll be competing against people who can--and non-writing efforts will take up at least a hundred hours of your time--some people find the marketing aspect fun and if that's you, great, but most writers don't, which is a big part of why so many of them pursue traditional publishing even though it's abusive if you're in the bottom 99%. Allowing big-name authors to supercharge their apparent productivity by hiring teams of "co-authors" who do the actual writing exacerbates this problem. I don't see a good way to fix it, and what Patterson does probably shouldn't be outlawed, but it still sucks. The book world, in which name and "author brand" matter far more than literary quality, is already pretty moribund... and this kind of stuff doesn't help.
- huijzer 4y ago
  > You can self-publish, but less than 1% of the population has the savings and free time to do it right. It costs $10,000, minimum--you'll have to hire an editor, a cover designer, a formatter... We wrote https://juliadatascience.io https://juliadatascience.io in a few months and have about 4k unique visitors per month (https://juliadatascience.pirsch.io/ https://juliadatascience.pirsch.io/). The cover is designed for free by ourselves via a plotting library. Yes, we’re not selling millions but we have spent only 60 dollars (on the domain name).
  - browie 4y ago
    I'm in the process of doing this free for someone I know. I got into it clueless to how any of this works and what it may cost. Reading you post $10,000 minimum and researching a few days ago on how much book editors get paid (and exactly how) slightly shocked me!
    - cs137 4y ago
      It depends on the nature of the work and also the project. You don't have to spend $10,000 if you're just looking to create a book that you can give to your friends. If you want it to have any chance of commercial or critical success, though, you're going to need a level of polish that you have to pay for.
  - cs137 4y ago
    First of all, congrats. Writing a book is difficult, and writing one that people actually enjoy reading, even more so. Second, trade and technical publishing are completely different markets. You need a literary agent to even sit at the table in trade (or traditional) publishing. You also have no chance in hell of getting one ("querying" is a waste of time) if you don't have preexisting connections or have a trendy "hook". Plus, the objective functions are different. If you write a technical book that only sells 10 copies per month (I'm assuming 0.25% of visitors buy, although that might be on the high side) but it improves your career, you win. Fiction authors, on the other hand, are trying to make enough in royalties to live on. You'll get about $3 per copy in royalties. You need to be targeting a large audience to even have a chance. Large audiences mean lots of competition; other people out there can hire publicists or somehow have the connections ("querying" agents is a waste of time) to make it in trad-pub (which is deeply flawed, but they can sell books when they get their shit together). If you sell less than 1000 copies, you're done--for good. Your name now has negative value, but no publisher (or agent) is going to touch an anonymous pen name (no platform, no photo with the family and the dog) either. In traditional publishing, you have to make it a full-time job or you will be flushed out of the system (but they don't tell you that). Most of the time isn't spent on the writing (as the quality of much of what's produced these days shows) but marketing. Your "advance" is basically your marketing budget--they can't force you, but "eating" your advance instead of spending it to market your book (the publishing house won't) is frowned upon. In self-publishing, there are no rules, but it seems that the successful self-publishers, on average, spend even more time on self-promotion, which writers famously dislike doing.

watwut 4y ago

So basically, he is not a writer, but more of manager and product owner for massive team of writers?

suction 4y ago
Yes, he's using SCRUM to make sure all creativity and spirit is lost to "the process".
- toxicFork 4y ago
  Is it Agile
routerl 4y ago
It's not that unusual. Tom Clancy has been doing it for decades, and before that "Carolyn Keene" (the collective pseudonym of every Nancy Drew writer). It's a brand. This brand happens to be presented as a person, a single author. But, as with every brand, scratching the surface reveals more to the story.
- nsoonhui 4y ago
  And "Franklin W. Dixon" ( Hardy Boys).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jsmith99 4y ago
  It's quite traditional. Alexander Dumas used ghostwriters to produce a comparable number of books and many old master artists had entire workshops of apprentices producing art in their name. George Orwell published an essay claiming that the serial school stories then being published (Billy Bunter) were written in such a artificial tone that they were obviously being produced by a series of jobbing writers, provoking an indignant response from the author https://orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys https://orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys

jgalt212 4y ago

like Jeff Koons, but in print.

rk06 4y ago

I have read only one of his book. And do not find enough motivation to buy another of his book. Dunno if it is my taste, but you comment explains a lot