Patterson's Co-Author Empire

A story about how James Patterson built a publishing empire by treating book writing like a business, using co-authors and a systematic approach.

"James Patterson started in advertising in New York at the Jay Thompson advertising firm. On the side in his late twenties and early thirties, he started writing novels. They did okay, not big hits, but he kept at it. At age 47, he retired from advertising to go all in on publishing novels.

He's been wildly successful - he's sold about 500 million copies of his books and at one point accounted for 6% of all hardcover novels sold in America. Since he started writing 48 years ago, he's published on average 7 books a year. Now at age 75, he's doing something like 30 books a year.

Here's how he does it: He has coauthors. He's only solely written about 20% of the books credited to his name. He pays these coauthors out of his pocket, comes up with a framework, they flesh it out, he reviews it like a movie script, writes notes in the margins, and gives it back to them. He's done it so much that now you'll see books by James Patterson with Dolly Parton, or James Patterson with Bill Clinton, and then the actual coauthor listed below.

This has been so successful that he's made something like $800 million. He owns 3-4 homes each worth $40 million and has donated about $50 million to small bookstores according to his website."