He is not a tortured artist in a garret but rather presides over an atelier that produces mass popular entertainment on an astonishing scale.
ALL JAMES PATTERSON BOOKS IN ORDER SERIES
Indeed, Patterson is to publishing what Thomas Kinkade was to painting, or the television producer John Wells was to a series like E.R. He is intimately involved in designing his books and devising their marketing and advertising campaigns, with the help of a special in-house unit of half a dozen staffers at Little, Brown dedicated solely to serving the Patterson empire. He has produced a slew of books-detective series, stand-alone romances, illustrated novels for young adults and for middle-school readers-across a sea of genres, accounting, by his own estimate, for about 30 percent of Little, Brown’s total revenues. Since then-and especially since 1996, when he quit advertising to write full-time-Patterson has proved that his readers have insatiable appetites. It won the Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America, but sold only about 10,000 copies. His first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, about a Nashville newspaperman on a murderer’s trail, was rejected by 31 publishers before Little, Brown published it, in 1976. Walter Thompson, the giant international agency, where he was also creative director and led the “Aren’t You Hungry?” campaign for Burger King, while writing fiction on the side. The first 25 years of Patterson’s career were spent in advertising, culminating with his tenure as C.E.O. The family home in Palm Beach-“kind of obnoxious,” Patterson says. When I had a chance to ask Patterson about that figure, he at first said, “I don’t know,” and then followed up with “Yeah, probably.” Forbes estimates his income for the year ending last June at $90 million.
ALL JAMES PATTERSON BOOKS IN ORDER FULL
Altogether, he has produced more than 130 separate works-the “books by” page in his latest novels actually takes up three full pages.
in 2013, books by Patterson accounted for one out of every 26. Of all the hardcover fiction sold in the U.S. With 305 million copies of his books in print worldwide, Patterson is the great white shark of novelists, a relentless writing machine who has to keep swimming forward in order to feed, and who, together with his army of about two dozen credited co-writers, has been the planet’s best-selling author since 2001 (ahead of J. Perhaps no author in literary history has more seamlessly melded commerce and creepiness to create an international brand, one that has transformed a wide swath of the publishing industry and given Patterson not only a Rockefeller’s river view but a Rockefeller’s bank account to boot. The Lake House traces their adventures as they fight for their lives against scientists who want them killed thinking them to be monsters.It seems somehow fitting that James Patterson, the advertising Mad Man turned impresario of the global thriller industry, spends his summers perched high above the Hudson River in Westchester County, halfway between Don Draper’s Ossining and Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, where the Headless Horseman once roamed the roads by night. The Lake House: This one is about six children with the ability to fly after their DNAs are merged with that of birds. He is pulled off the case to investigate the kidnappings of Maggie Rose Dunne and Michael Goldberg from their exclusive private school by their math teacher Gary Soneji. On the author’s birthday, here’s looking at 7 books by him one must read:Īlong Came a Spider: The first in Patterson’s Alex Cross Series, it is about Washington DC homicide detective and forensic psychologist Alex Cross investigating the heinous murders of two black prostitutes and an infant. He also holds the record for the most number 1 bestsellers by a single author. Patterson has written 147 novels since 1976, out of which 114 are New York Times bestsellers.
It was the novels featuring his character Alex Cross that brought wider recognition to the author. The author of many a famed series, including Alex Cross, Michael Bennett and Women’s Murder Club, James Patterson celebrates his birthday on March 22.īorn in 1947, he started with advertising and began his writing career with the 1976 novel The Thomas Berryman Number.