The Salt In A Publishing Star

If you're a bestselling author who has sold tens of millions of copies of more than 260 titles, and whose titles often feature in the New York Times bestsellers lists, would you be salty if your latest title ends up at a lower ranking on an NYT list than you thought?

If you're James Patterson, you probably would be.

At Slate, Laura Miller drops her two cents about this, pointing out that the NYT bestsellers lists are not reliable yardsticks for a book's popularity because they "are the product of a lot of math, but also a good deal of art." And there are ways of getting onto those lists that can be considered unethical.

However, Miller suggests that the "disdain" heaped upon Patterson's oeuvre has made him thin-skinned. She also notes that...

Publishers Weekly magazine has declared Patterson the best-selling author of the preceding 17 years. Yet in the same magazine’s list of the 150 bestselling books since 2004, not a single title out of Patterson’s hundreds of books appears. Patterson sells boatloads of books; he just hasn’t sold boatloads of any particular book. He makes up for the difference in volume.

So she suspects that "Patterson can’t help but be nettled by the fact that for all his dozens of bestsellers, no single one of them has had the iconic staying power of, say, The Stand or The Hunger Games."

I get that some authors want to be remembered for certain things, and a pile of negative reviews on the likes of Goodreads is not one of them. By now I would think someone like Patterson has outgrown the need for bestsellers lists. At least he's still in the news, and doing better than Dan Brown, John Grisham and, uh ... EL James?

As a publishing titan, he can contribute by nurturing more writers. Doesn't he have an online masterclass in writing? He could also provide something of a boost to other writers, particularly the lesser-known co-authors of some of his works. "I wrote this with James Patterson" might elicit a raised eyebrow or a snooty snort, but at least it gets one's attention. That is a vital first step in the publishing world.

And considering how competitive the book industry is, being able to strike gold as an author is a huge deal. I think Patterson should come to terms with the fact that he's making big bank churning out "boilerplate thrillers that snoots love to look down on" and he's doing well out of that, compared to many others.

The guy's pushing eighty. He should just roll with it and ignore the snobs. Too much sodium is bad for one's health.