Does winning a prestigious award lead to sales? And . . .
Will writing a really atrocious book that no one reads tank your career?
Hello listeners.
Welcome to I'll Probably Delete This, where I learn about book publishing and podcasting
by telling you stories from successful authors and other notable people from the history of the publishing industry,
including one of the most financially successful authors ever.
As you likely know, James Patterson has built himself into a publishing machine.
He now regularly produces multiple bestsellers every year, churning out 10 or more
new books annually. As of April of 2025,
Patterson had put four different books on the New York Times
Best Seller List for the year, with each one being on that list for multiple weeks. In this episode
and the next we are going to look at his first big financial success in publishing.
That first big publishing success was his book Along Came a Spider released by Little, Brown in
1993 in this first episode we're going to focus on
the change he made to his writing as a way to produce a book
that would have much broader appeal than his prior books had. In other words,
How did Patterson change his writing in Along Came a Spider to make it sell?
After he wrote it, he thought that the book was a hit or at least a potential hit and
He was pretty bold in the ways he promoted and got his publisher to promote the book.
Because of that [in] our next episode,
we are going to turn our attention to how he promoted the book to ensure that it was successful. In future episodes
we'll cover more stories from other successful
storytellers and authors.
Join me now as we learn about one of the major inflection points in James Patterson's very successful
Publishing career. As I said, Little, Brown published Along Came a Spider in February of
1993. It quickly hit the New York Times Bestsellers list. Part of the success story is one of
promotion and marketing. But before any of that mattered, James Patterson had to write a good book. And more so
specifically a book that a lot of people wanted to read.
This episode looks at his approach to writing and what Patterson did to try to write a book that would sell and
people would read. To explain how his writing changed
We have to start with his first published book.
He wrote The Thomas Berryman Number while working for an advertising agency when he was in his 20s.
Little, Brown published the book in
1976 when
Patterson was 29. As an aside. I've seen in an interview with Patterson and in his biography
He talks about being 26 when he published his first book, which I can't totally figure out.
I think he might have written one when he was younger. Either that or I have the date of his birth wrong.
Anyway, if you know the answer feel free to reach out to me and correct the record.
That book, the first one published was a complicated
political thriller. It was it had description. It was a bit lyrical
He sent that book around to publishers
To dozens of publishers and got back 31 different rejections. He had done that on his own and
eventually, he reached out to an agent and found an agent Francis Greenberger and
That agent found a publisher for him which ended up being a Little, Brown.
After publication
Patterson won for the book an Edgar Award for the best debut
Novel from the mystery writers of America little statue of Edgar Allan Poe
Which I think he still has on his bookshelves in his home in Florida the award
However, didn't move sales really at all in the two years after publication
Patterson's first book sold around
10,000 copies
You can find interviews of Patterson where he will say from that point forward
He decided he was going to write books that people wanted to buy
he wanted to write books that people wanted to read and wasn't interested in
getting
Positive comments from literary critics if that meant that few or no one was going to read the books that he wrote
The Thomas Berryman number the name of his first book was about a hit man
It was told in a nonlinear way. It was a thriller, but it had literary aspirations
Patterson read widely and also loved literary novels
But after Berryman Patterson dropped any literary aspirations
He said at the time
That I was interested in sentences not stories
And definitely not plot
He will also say that Berryman was his best written book on a sentence level but was not on a story level
Just to back up a little bit before Little, Brown published the Thomas Berryman number
Patterson had read both day of the jackal and the exorcist
He really liked those books which he described as pacey
Suspenseful plot heavy books and that is what he set out to write from then on
Patterson continued to work for the advertising agency in new york j walter thompson
He wrote in the mornings before going into the office his routine was to write from
Five or five thirty to seven or seven thirty and then head into work
He would also write in the evenings after work if he had time
After his first book he continued to write and got a new book published every couple of years
Each one was a different kind of thriller and each one struggled to find sales or an audience
In his next book, he intentionally set out to write what he thought would be a big bestseller
That book season of the machete was a violent action thriller and as patterson describes it today
It was terrible
Patterson said, "It was a derivative
incoherent hack job and that's being kind.
Stephen King once called me a terrible writer. I don't think that's true.
But Season of the Machete was terrible and I definitely wrote it."
He followed Machete
with his third book about an international plot to bring back the Fourth Reich or or to raise up a Fourth Reich.
His fourth book was a religious themed thriller called the Virgin that had a Virgin Mary character,
Almost anticipating Dan Brown by more than a decade but with less of a mystery or puzzle quality.
His fifth was a kind of financial thriller.
And each of those three books were published by a different publishing house,
None of which were Little, Brown.
Importantly as I said, none of these books
sells
He was essentially solidly
mid-list or less.
In addition to Year of the Jackal, which I mentioned already Patterson was informed by Silence of the Lambs,
Which came out in 1988. And even more by
Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connelly which came out in
1959.
Silence of the Lambs was a popular thriller. The book came out in '88 and the movie followed in
'91. The the book sold well and the movie did very well at the box office.
And Patterson was trying to write a popular thriller in in similar veins
The book Mrs. Bridge was different. It told the life of an upper middle class family in
St. Louis
But the part that so influenced Patterson's writing was that Connelly told the story of domestic life through
117 very short chapters.
Patterson set out to apply that approach to thriller writing.
And in
1989, so this is still a couple years before we get to Along Came a Spider,
He came out with the Midnight Club, which was about a New York detective and a murder still sort of a thriller genre
It got much closer to what would become
James Patterson's clear style so much so that the publisher
Would re-release the book after the Alex Cross series starts to take off
And in that book it features short chapters
tight plotting a focus on story and essentially a neglect of description
And by this point you're probably thinking to yourself. Well, we've gotten there
James patterson's style is very short tightly written plot heavy chapters
And lots and lots of them you pick up a James Patterson book and you're going to read
One and a half two two and a half pages
And you're flipping and you're on to the next chapter and that's true
But there was still a piece that was missing what seemed to still be missing was the right main character
That and obviously a commitment from a publisher to do a big print run and to promote the book
In Along Came a Spider,
Patterson found his formula like midnight club. The book was light on description but heavy on pace and plot
It had the two three and four page chapters, although in Along Came a Spider
Some of them are are certainly longer. You might be able to find a five or six page chapter occasionally
And I think it's notable that two and three page chapters in a way
Ask for less commitment from the reader and make a book much more approachable
Short chapters also mean lots of white space
Which literally forces the reader to turn the page more often. It is designed to be a page turner
Again, Patterson wasn't interested in sentences. He was interested in the story.
He wanted to write in approachable colloquial language
Sort of the same type of language you might use if you were telling a story to a friend
And didn't care how well constructed any particular sentence was
Back though to that missing piece
Importantly the book also introduced DC detective Alex Cross
He was a psychologist and a widowed father of young kids after his wife had been murdered
As the protagonist he was a compelling and sympathetic character who tried to do the right thing
Patterson might not have known this at the time, but I I suspect he did or at least had an idea
But 70 percent of his readership for this book would be women
And Alex Cross who lived with his grandmother had two young kids,
Was not currently in a romantic relationship, but would cycle through some over the course of the books,
Appealed to those readers or many of them. Cross was a character that readers could root for.
He was someone that they were happy to come back to
And to read and really took interest in him and in his family and in those relationships
To end this part of our story
We're going to close with the book contract for Along Came a Spider
In Patterson's autobiography, he tells part of the story of that contract
Patterson's agent at the time by now
It was Richard Pine pitched the story to Little, Brown. Larry Kershbaum and Charlie Haywood
Read the manuscript while on a flight from New York to London. Kershbaum was head of Time Warner Book Group,
which owned Little Brown. Hayward led Little, Brown. As Kershbaum finished parts of the manuscript,
he passed them to Hayward sitting in the next seat. Before the flight had landed
they had finished the book and both agreed they should acquire it. When they landed they called Freddy Freedman
She was Patterson's editor at Little, Brown at the time. She had edited the previous book of his.
And they settled on a million dollar offer for a two-book deal. So seven figures two books.
And this was a clear signal to Patterson
that he was right.
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.
For our post script to this part of the story, I have one big correction I need to make.
I started this episode by saying that we were going to focus on Patterson's first big publishing success.
Along Came a Spider and that book certainly was a sales and financial success
But it wasn't Patterson's first
So let me cover that one now
a year before Along Came a Spider
Patterson co-wrote a book that also made the new york times bestsellers list
It was Patterson's seventh book.
And it often gets overlooked
because it was non-fiction. But the book hit the New York Times Best Sellers list.
It went through at least three different printings and it sold more than
250,000 in hardcover and likely as many in paperback. The book was The Day America Told the Truth.
Patterson from the time that he started writing or from the time he wrote his first book
The Thomas Baryman Number that we've talked about he was working in advertising
He was working for the J. Walter Thompson
advertising agency and that continued through his next six books,
Through personal tragedy of losing his girlfriend to a brain tumor,
And continued up through the writing of Along Came a Spider. And he continued at the advertising agency for a couple more years
even after that.
But notably,
In that time, he had risen from junior copy editor up to CEO
So he advanced very quickly and was very successful.
One of the things he will mention in his autobiography is that he was responsible for the Toys 'R' Us jingle,
that anybody who was a kid in the late 80s or 90s surely heard and can probably sing and
Many of you are probably singing it now.
So he rose very quickly through the ranks became CEO of kind of the
New York and and US office for J. Walter Thompson.
And the reason why I went through all that is one to give you
More of a sense of how much of an outlier Patterson is, but also to explain this book.
The book The Day America Told the Truth
Patterson wrote it in his role as CEO.
The advertising firm had conducted an extensive and expensive survey, kind of a market survey,
Of more than 2,000 americans covering
300 or so questions.
The designer of the survey,
a colleague at the firm, was Peter Kim. And Kim proposed and implemented the research
project and then persuaded Patterson that this should be turned into a book.
Patterson organized the information and he wrote the book. Kim was his co-author.
Patterson organized each section around an arresting stat that came out of the survey
Like 91 percent of US lie, or seven percent of Americans would kill for 10 million dollars.
After the book is written J. Walter Thompson then organized a marketing campaign for the book,
designed it to get attention and press coverage.
They sent out press releases with surprising stats from the survey and the book
They sent press releases that were regionally targeted trying to sort of segment the market and give
Information that particular people would be interested in.
They also did a national campaign where they persuaded morning shows to have them on
They divided the work so Patterson took the morning shows like Good Morning America,
And Kim took the more policy focused newsier shows with programs like Nightline
They also managed to get an hour on
Oprah and so they were on the Oprah show.
This is in 1991.
And the book was, as I said, the book was a success.
It sold well and it sold probably more than they expected and their promotional campaign and advertising campaign
Was a big reason for that success.
And the reason in part to tell that story is, one to correct the record.
But two it is a nice bridge to what we're going to cover in the next episode. In the year before
Little, Brown published Along Came a Spider
Patterson, his co-author Peter Kim, and the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency
managed and marketed and promoted a book launch.
They were creative. They worked on segmenting the audience. And they generated buzz and then translated that buzz
into book sales.
In a way it acted as a dry run for what
Patterson would do with Along Came a Spider the next year.
For our bibliography for this episode it's James Patterson's autobiography
Which has the, as Patterson will recognize and has recognized, the pretentious title James Patterson by James Patterson
published by Little, Brown in
2022
It is entertaining. It's written in Patterson's typical style.
But instead of
suspenseful
Very pacey plot driven, It's more a package of vignettes.
So not a thriller in the same way but very similar in terms of writing style and structure. Lots of short chapters.
It's very easy to pick up and put down
And
No one should doubt that Patterson is a good storyteller. He can tell a good story
And can write compelling prose even if they aren't the most stylized, or full of description.
And I will say that I quite enjoyed it. One thing that was a challenge is
If you pick it up because you want to do some sort of report on Patterson or study of him,
Using this book as a reference will be hard
There isn't an index and it's not really written for that purpose to tell the strict details of his life.
But very entertaining.
And easy to pick up read for a little bit put down and pick up again later.
So, if you're at all interested, I encourage you to try it out.
Join me next time for another episode of I'll Probably Delete This,
Where we'll explore more stories from authors, storytellers,
great books, and publishing
Including our next episode where we will learn about the marketing behind the success of Along Came a Spider.
Thanks everybody.