The $800 Million Writing Career Of James Patterson

In the world of fiction authors, at least during the time in which this article was written, which is 2021, JK Rowling is still the wealthiest author that is still living. She has a net worth of over a billion dollars. Second to her is James Patterson, worth: $800 million.

Though it might be hard for him to catch up with JK Rowling in terms of being the wealthiest fiction author, $800 million is no small change. Many authors, even established ones have spent their entire lives writing but are still no closer to the wealth that he attained.

But let’s not talk about money for a while, he is very famous for his thriller detective novels. His signature protagonist, Alex Cross and the novels about him have sold millions worldwide. They have even been turned to movies.

Another reason why the writing career of James Patterson needs to be studied is because he has an unorthodox writing career. He is not your average author who merely concentrates on writing and publishing a novel every now and then.

As of 2021, he is already 74 years old. He’s an American who currently lives in Palm Beach, Florida. But I’m not here to give a Wikipedia style detail of his personal life and career. If you want this kind of information, there would be more suitable sites online.

What I would rather discuss are the important things that relate to his career as an author. He graduated with degrees in English studies. He was also a former advertising executive up to the year 1996. His date of birth is March 22, 1947.

Contrary to some or many authors today who are just writing because it is an easy to get to career or business with the promise of fame and fortune, James Patterson really loves writing. Even as a junior copywriter in the agency he worked for, he has already been writing novels as a hobby.

This is one good example aspiring and even established authors can get from James Patterson. You may have a job now that is not related to being an author, but don’t get disappointed, continue writing.

Before becoming a full-time author, he already had an award winning novel at the age of 27 and a bestseller at the age of 40. What is the significance of these information? He only became a full-time author at age 47 when he was sure that he can be a full-time author.

This is another good lesson we can learn from him. Book awards and bestseller status are not enough to guarantee a career as a full-time author. There are many authors out there who would tell you that just because your book won an award, it doesn’t mean that you will earn good money with it.

As he has shown, even a bestseller status or tag in your books is not enough to guarantee that you would be able to support yourself fully by being an author. James Patterson wrote novels while working in an advertising agency. He was initially a working author.

As stated before, he only decided to become a full-time author at the age of 47. At this age, many wannabe authors would have given up already. This is the importance of having another job that can support you while you are trying to become a full-time author.

This is because being a full-time author is like being in business. Don’t make the mistake that you aren’t. Being an author like being in business requires investment in time and even probably a lot of money.

It might take a while for your author business to become profitable enough for you to leave your day job. In James Patterson’s case, it took him a full 20 years to become a full-time author. This might be a good time to ask yourself if you can wait this long.

One thing many well established authors like to advise to young authors is to be prolific. This is especially true in the age of self publishing. The probability that you need only an income from a few of your books to make you financially independent is very dismal.

Most likely, you would need hundreds of books just to make a living wage as a full-time author. Sure, there are the outliers like JK Rowling who managed to win the publishing lottery early on with her Harry Potter book series.

But as I have said, she’s an outlier. She is one of the few authors like Lee Child who managed to become famous and rich with the launch of their first novels. But even JK Rowling’s initial Harry Potter book languished for years as an unknown novel before becoming popular.

As of 2021, James Patterson has already produced more than 200 books which are mostly novels. If we were to assume that he writes the same number of books every year during his now 40 year career, it means that he writes more than 5 novels a year.

That’s approximately one novel every two months, but as time passes by, his writing output has become more and more prolific. In 2020 alone, he has written or co-wrote 25 books. This is an average of one book every fifteen days.

Based from my experience, this is almost an impossible pace if you really want to produce a well written book. This means that you would have been writing the entire year without any days off.

James Patterson has been widely criticized by a few people because as his writing career progressed, he delegated many of his writing duties to other authors. He is like an author to other authors.

He creates detailed outlines of the stories in his books and lets the author fill in the missing words. According to people who have observed his writing process. He doesn’t use a typewriter or a computer to type his stories or story outlines.

He writes using the old way. He uses pen and paper to write his stories and outlines and then asks his assistant to type his outlines in a computer. But don’t think that he’s just doing lazy work delegating.

For every book he publishes, he writes about an 80 page outline. This is astounding considering many authors usually don’t spend a lot of time outlining their books. It’s clear that he’s an architect as opposed to being a gardener when it comes to creating his stories.

I don’t know if he also gives full credits to the authors who write his books. But one thing is clear, He has given some authors the opportunity to do what they want which is to write while earning as well.

Besides delegating, he also collaborates with other authors. Many of his more recent books have been written in collaboration with other authors. He has also given them recognition by adding their names in his books.

Many of his critics like to point out that he seems to be more of a businessman now than an author. This is because according to them, he doesn’t really write anymore, he just leaves the writing to other authors.

But what he’s doing is not new in the publishing business. Many authors use other authors to ghostwrite their books. These authors just give an idea of what their ghostwriters should write. Sometimes they might even give an outline to their ghostwriters if they feel like doing it.

If Indeed James Patterson’s books are now being ghostwritten, at least he gives a detailed outline to the authors and even gives them credit in his books. In a way, he’s better than most authors who just have their books ghostwritten.

In a way, James Patterson is really a businessman. But as I have said, being a full-time author is a real business. And one thing businesses do when they want to grow is to expand. James Patterson has precisely done this.

Though he is best known for his detective thrillers, he has branched out to other story genres. He expanded his detective thriller series’ offering by creating women and children protagonists. He ventured into romance, children’s books and others.

But he didn’t do this until he was sure that his trademark genre was firmly established, which was thriller suspense. He leveraged the recognizability of his name among readers to venture out into other genres.

At the expense of being called a sellout, another lesson we can learn from James Patterson is this: make a series of novels if your first novel in the series becomes successful. Many professional authors in fact advise this to other authors.

This practice is so common in the publishing industry that no famous or financially successful author is without one. James Patterson for example has no less than 28 novels in his Alex Cross series of novels.

I’m not saying that everytime you write a book it should be the beginning of a series of books. All I’m saying is that it’s very hard for authors to write a book whose characters the readers would want to read about more.

If your writing luck comes and you’ve written one such book, it would be wise to take all the opportunity you can get with that book character or characters. Not many authors are lucky enough to have this luck.

As we have known, James Patterson spent a good deal of his working life working in an advertising agency. From a junior copywriter, he progressed to become an advertising executive.

He is in short, very experienced in the field of advertising. And he did leverage his knowledge of advertising to make his books more known to readers. He for example encouraged the use of television advertising to market his books.

He also did formal studies like surveys to gauge who his readers were and how they react to his books. He is known to tailor his stories based on what his readers want to read. He has actually changed parts of his finished books just to cater to his reader’s reading wants.

Other authors such as Lee Child who is a former television executive has also used the knowledge he gained from his previous job to assess what his readers would probably want from his book.

In case you don’t know Lee Child, he’s the famous author behind the bestselling Jack Reacher action thriller novel series. This is the character famous Hollywood actor Tom Cruise played in a few movies.

Another example I can give is Neil Gaiman who prior to becoming a successful full-time author worked first as a journalist specializing in the publishing industry. According to him, he owes a part of his success to his prior job as a journalist specializing in publishing.

In case you don’t know him, a few of his famous books and comics writings are: Coraline, The Sandman comics series, Good Omens, American Gods, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean At The End Of The Lane and many others.

James Patterson is the face of what being an author will be in the coming years and this is happening already. Many authors today are prolific, collaborate, have their books ghostwritten and use a lot of marketing techniques as well.

These book publishing practices and strategies as we have discussed, has already been long implemented by James Patterson and more. He has not only expanded into other genres but also leveraged his advertising knowledge just like many authors.

If you are an author, especially if you are just beginning, it’s advisable that you read about James Patterson and his writing career. Not only is his writing career an inspiration, but his techniques are also worth studying.

There is no need to guess if he has a great writing career or a writing business if you prefer it this way. His financial success and the popularity of his books is enough proof that he’s an author worthy to be studied.

Don’t Strictly Write A Book From The Heart, Write For An Audience As Well