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Does winning a prestigious award lead to sales?  And . . .

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Will writing a really atrocious book that no one reads tank your career?

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Hello listeners.

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Welcome to I'll Probably Delete This, where I learn about book publishing and podcasting

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by telling you stories from successful authors and other notable people from the history of the publishing industry,

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including one of the most financially successful authors ever.

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As you likely know, James Patterson has built himself into a publishing machine.

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He now regularly produces multiple bestsellers every year, churning out 10 or more

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new books annually. As of April of 2025,

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Patterson had put four different books on the New York Times

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Best Seller List for the year, with each one being on that list for multiple weeks. In this episode

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and the next we are going to look at his first big financial success in publishing.

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That first big publishing success was his book Along Came a Spider released by Little, Brown in

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1993 in this first episode we're going to focus on

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the change he made to his writing as a way to produce a book

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that would have much broader appeal than his prior books had. In other words,

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How did Patterson change his writing in Along Came a Spider to make it sell?

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After he wrote it, he thought that the book was a hit or at least a potential hit and

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He was pretty bold in the ways he promoted and got his publisher to promote the book.

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Because of that [in] our next episode,

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we are going to turn our attention to how he promoted the book to ensure that it was successful. In future episodes

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we'll cover more stories from other successful

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storytellers and authors.

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Join me now as we learn about one of the major inflection points in James Patterson's very successful

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Publishing career. As I said, Little, Brown published Along Came a Spider in February of

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1993. It quickly hit the New York Times Bestsellers list. Part of the success story is one of

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promotion and marketing. But before any of that mattered, James Patterson had to write a good book. And more so

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specifically a book that a lot of people wanted to read.

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This episode looks at his approach to writing and what Patterson did to try to write a book that would sell and

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people would read. To explain how his writing changed

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We have to start with his first published book.

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He wrote The Thomas Berryman Number while working for an advertising agency when he was in his 20s.

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Little, Brown published the book in

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1976 when

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Patterson was 29. As an aside. I've seen in an interview with Patterson and in his biography

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He talks about being 26 when he published his first book, which I can't totally figure out.

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I think he might have written one when he was younger. Either that or I have the date of his birth wrong.

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Anyway, if you know the answer feel free to reach out to me and correct the record.

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That book, the first one published was a complicated

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political thriller. It was it had description. It was a bit lyrical

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He sent that book around to publishers

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To dozens of publishers and got back 31 different rejections. He had done that on his own and

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eventually, he reached out to an agent and found an agent Francis Greenberger and

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That agent found a publisher for him which ended up being a Little, Brown.

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After publication

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Patterson won for the book an Edgar Award for the best debut

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Novel from the mystery writers of America little statue of Edgar Allan Poe

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Which I think he still has on his bookshelves in his home in Florida the award

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However, didn't move sales really at all in the two years after publication

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Patterson's first book sold around

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10,000 copies

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You can find interviews of Patterson where he will say from that point forward

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He decided he was going to write books that people wanted to buy

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he wanted to write books that people wanted to read and wasn't interested in

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getting

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Positive comments from literary critics if that meant that few or no one was going to read the books that he wrote

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The Thomas Berryman number the name of his first book was about a hit man

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It was told in a nonlinear way. It was a thriller, but it had literary aspirations

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Patterson read widely and also loved literary novels

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But after Berryman Patterson dropped any literary aspirations

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He said at the time

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That I was interested in sentences not stories

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And definitely not plot

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He will also say that Berryman was his best written book on a sentence level but was not on a story level

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Just to back up a little bit before Little, Brown published the Thomas Berryman number

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Patterson had read both day of the jackal and the exorcist

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He really liked those books which he described as pacey

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Suspenseful plot heavy books and that is what he set out to write from then on

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Patterson continued to work for the advertising agency in new york j walter thompson

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He wrote in the mornings before going into the office his routine was to write from

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Five or five thirty to seven or seven thirty and then head into work

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He would also write in the evenings after work if he had time

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After his first book he continued to write and got a new book published every couple of years

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Each one was a different kind of thriller and each one struggled to find sales or an audience

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In his next book, he intentionally set out to write what he thought would be a big bestseller

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That book season of the machete was a violent action thriller and as patterson describes it today

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It was terrible

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Patterson said, "It was a derivative

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incoherent hack job and that's being kind.

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Stephen King once called me a terrible writer. I don't think that's true.

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But Season of the Machete was terrible and I definitely wrote it."

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He followed Machete

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with his third book about an international plot to bring back the Fourth Reich or or to raise up a Fourth Reich.

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His fourth book was a religious themed thriller called the Virgin that had a Virgin Mary character,

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Almost anticipating Dan Brown by more than a decade but with less of a mystery or puzzle quality.

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His fifth was a kind of financial thriller.

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And each of those three books were published by a different publishing house,

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None of which were Little, Brown.

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Importantly as I said, none of these books

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sells

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He was essentially solidly

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mid-list or less.

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In addition to Year of the Jackal, which I mentioned already Patterson was informed by Silence of the Lambs,

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Which came out in 1988. And even more by

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Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connelly which came out in

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1959.

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Silence of the Lambs was a popular thriller. The book came out in '88 and the movie followed in

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'91. The the book sold well and the movie did very well at the box office.

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And Patterson was trying to write a popular thriller in in similar veins

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The book Mrs. Bridge was different. It told the life of an upper middle class family in

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St. Louis

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But the part that so influenced Patterson's writing was that Connelly told the story of domestic life through

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117 very short chapters.

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Patterson set out to apply that approach to thriller writing.

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And in

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1989, so this is still a couple years before we get to Along Came a Spider,

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He came out with the Midnight Club, which was about a New York detective and a murder still sort of a thriller genre

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It got much closer to what would become

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James Patterson's clear style so much so that the publisher

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Would re-release the book after the Alex Cross series starts to take off

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And in that book it features short chapters

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tight plotting a focus on story and essentially a neglect of description

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And by this point you're probably thinking to yourself. Well, we've gotten there

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James patterson's style is very short tightly written plot heavy chapters

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And lots and lots of them you pick up a James Patterson book and you're going to read

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One and a half two two and a half pages

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And you're flipping and you're on to the next chapter and that's true

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But there was still a piece that was missing what seemed to still be missing was the right main character

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That and obviously a commitment from a publisher to do a big print run and to promote the book

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In Along Came a Spider,

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Patterson found his formula like midnight club. The book was light on description but heavy on pace and plot

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It had the two three and four page chapters, although in Along Came a Spider

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Some of them are are certainly longer. You might be able to find a five or six page chapter occasionally

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And I think it's notable that two and three page chapters in a way

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Ask for less commitment from the reader and make a book much more approachable

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Short chapters also mean lots of white space

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Which literally forces the reader to turn the page more often. It is designed to be a page turner

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Again, Patterson wasn't interested in sentences. He was interested in the story.

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He wanted to write in approachable colloquial language

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Sort of the same type of language you might use if you were telling a story to a friend

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And didn't care how well constructed any particular sentence was

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Back though to that missing piece

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Importantly the book also introduced DC detective Alex Cross

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He was a psychologist and a widowed father of young kids after his wife had been murdered

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As the protagonist he was a compelling and sympathetic character who tried to do the right thing

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Patterson might not have known this at the time, but I I suspect he did or at least had an idea

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But 70 percent of his readership for this book would be women

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And Alex Cross who lived with his grandmother had two young kids,

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Was not currently in a romantic relationship, but would cycle through some over the course of the books,

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Appealed to those readers or many of them. Cross was a character that readers could root for.

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He was someone that they were happy to come back to

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And to read and really took interest in him and in his family and in those relationships

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To end this part of our story

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We're going to close with the book contract for Along Came a Spider

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In Patterson's autobiography, he tells part of the story of that contract

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Patterson's agent at the time by now

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It was Richard Pine pitched the story to Little, Brown.  Larry Kershbaum and Charlie Haywood

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Read the manuscript while on a flight from New York to London. Kershbaum was head of Time Warner Book Group,

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which owned Little Brown. Hayward led Little, Brown. As Kershbaum finished parts of the manuscript,

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he passed them to Hayward sitting in the next seat. Before the flight had landed

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they had finished the book and both agreed they should acquire it. When they landed they called Freddy Freedman

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She was Patterson's editor at Little, Brown at the time. She had edited the previous book of his.

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And they settled on a million dollar offer for a two-book deal. So seven figures two books.

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And this was a clear signal to Patterson

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that he was right.

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He had written something that he could sell and it was a clear signal that the publishing house was going to be behind the book.

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For our post script to this part of the story, I have one big correction I need to make.

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I started this episode by saying that we were going to focus on Patterson's first big publishing success.

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Along Came a Spider and that book certainly was a sales and financial success

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But it wasn't Patterson's first

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So let me cover that one now

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a year before Along Came a Spider

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Patterson co-wrote a book that also made the new york times bestsellers list

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It was Patterson's seventh book.

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And it often gets overlooked

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because it was non-fiction. But the book hit the New York Times Best Sellers list.

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It went through at least three different printings and it sold more than

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250,000 in hardcover and likely as many in paperback. The book was The Day America Told the Truth.

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Patterson from the time that he started writing or from the time he wrote his first book

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The Thomas Baryman Number that we've talked about he was working in advertising

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He was working for the J. Walter Thompson

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advertising agency and that continued through his next six books,

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Through personal tragedy of losing his girlfriend to a brain tumor,

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And continued up through the writing of Along Came a Spider. And he continued at the advertising agency for a couple more years

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even after that.

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But notably,

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In that time, he had risen from junior copy editor up to CEO

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So he advanced very quickly and was very successful.

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One of the things he will mention in his autobiography is that he was responsible for the Toys 'R' Us jingle,

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that anybody who was a kid in the late 80s or 90s surely heard and can probably sing and

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Many of you are probably singing it now.

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So he rose very quickly through the ranks became CEO of kind of the

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New York and and US office for J. Walter Thompson.

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And the reason why I went through all that is one to give you

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More of a sense of how much of an outlier Patterson is, but also to explain this book.

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The book The Day America Told the Truth

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Patterson wrote it in his role as CEO.

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The advertising firm had conducted an extensive and expensive survey, kind of a market survey,

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Of more than 2,000 americans covering

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300 or so questions.

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The designer of the survey,

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a colleague at the firm, was Peter Kim. And Kim proposed and implemented the research

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project and then persuaded Patterson that this should be turned into a book.

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Patterson organized the information and he wrote the book. Kim was his co-author.

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Patterson organized each section around an arresting stat that came out of the survey

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Like 91 percent of US lie, or seven percent of Americans would kill for 10 million dollars.

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After the book is written J. Walter Thompson then organized a marketing campaign for the book,

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designed it to get attention and press coverage.

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They sent out press releases with surprising stats from the survey and the book

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They sent press releases that were regionally targeted trying to sort of segment the market and give

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Information that particular people would be interested in.

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They also did a national campaign where they persuaded morning shows to have them on

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They divided the work so Patterson took the morning shows like Good Morning America,

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And Kim took the more policy focused newsier shows with programs like Nightline

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They also managed to get an hour on

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Oprah and so they were on the Oprah show.

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This is in 1991.

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And the book was, as I said, the book was a success.

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It sold well and it sold probably more than they expected and their promotional campaign and advertising campaign

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Was a big reason for that success.

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And the reason in part to tell that story is, one to correct the record.

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But two it is a nice bridge to what we're going to cover in the next episode. In the year before

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Little, Brown published Along Came a Spider

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Patterson, his co-author Peter Kim, and the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency

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managed and marketed and promoted a book launch.

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They were creative. They worked on segmenting the audience. And they generated buzz and then translated that buzz

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into book sales.

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In a way it acted as a dry run for what

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Patterson would do with Along Came a Spider the next year.

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For our bibliography for this episode it's James Patterson's autobiography

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Which has the, as Patterson will recognize and has recognized, the pretentious title James Patterson by James Patterson

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published by Little, Brown in

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2022

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It is entertaining. It's written in Patterson's typical style.

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But instead of

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suspenseful

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Very pacey plot driven, It's more a package of vignettes.

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So not a thriller in the same way but very similar in terms of writing style and structure. Lots of short chapters.

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It's very easy to pick up and put down

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And

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No one should doubt that Patterson is a good storyteller. He can tell a good story

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And can write compelling prose even if they aren't the most stylized, or full of description.

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And I will say that I quite enjoyed it. One thing that was a challenge is

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If you pick it up because you want to do some sort of report on Patterson or study of him,

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Using this book as a reference will be hard

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There isn't an index and it's not really written for that purpose to tell the strict details of his life.

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But very entertaining.

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And easy to pick up read for a little bit put down and pick up again later.

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So, if you're at all interested, I encourage you to try it out.

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Join me next time for another episode of I'll Probably Delete This,

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Where we'll explore more stories from authors, storytellers,

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great books, and publishing

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Including our next episode where we will learn about the marketing behind the success of Along Came a Spider.

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Thanks everybody.