Today's
New York Times Magazine has a
long piece about thriller potboiler author
James Patterson. Patterson, who started out as a major mover and shaker in advertising at J Walter Thompson, has been transforming an old established publishing house like Little Brown. I do admire his insight that people buy the name (like Crest toothpaste or dog food), and buy it more often than the older houses assumed. It's also interesting and unusual that he works closely with the publisher in branding his books and approving design and cover. His stable of "co-authors" (who fleshout his detailed plot summaries and who he in turn revises) sounds like grist for scholarly mills some day. And yet, I found it all quite disturbing--how the new head of Little is nearly sychopantic towards him, how one of the people there compares him (implicitly) to Dickens (!).
And then I did some research on the Times's website.
Image via Wikipedia
