Books: James Patterson: The Man Who Can't Miss

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One of the things that's fascinating about Patterson is his total lack of interest in received wisdom; another is his complete confidence in his own judgment. With 1992's Along Came a Spider, the first novel in his Alex Cross series, Patterson knew he'd written a best seller--so he took control of the way it was designed and marketed. When his publisher told him it wasn't interested in running a TV campaign, he called in a few favors at J. Walter Thompson and shot the ad with his own money. He wasn't jazzed about Spider's cover, so he redesigned it. "They'd done a cover that had a kid's sneaker on it, with a little blood on it, and I went, I don't know, it didn't do anything for me. I want the reaction to be, 'I want this!'" He blew up the title into huge letters that practically shouted across the bookstore that this book was going to give thriller readers exactly what they were looking for. Spider became Patterson's first best seller. He still designs all his own covers. Harvard Business School now teaches a case study on his marketing techniques.

But Patterson still wasn't done. He wanted to re-engineer his own creative process. He's never had a problem with writer's block, but there were just too many ideas piling up in his head. So when he and journalist Peter de Jonge came up with an idea for a golf novel, Miracle on the 17th Green, he thought, Why not just write it together? "Peter's a much better stylist than I am, and I'm a much better storyteller than he is. It's another way to do things. Why not?"

Since then Patterson has co-written eight of his novels. He'll whip up a detailed outline, then ship it off to his collaborator for a first draft. "I may talk to them on a couple-week basis," he says. "And then at a certain point I'll just take it over and write as many as seven drafts. There were a couple of them that really were a mess," he adds ruefully. "At least twice it's been, 'I wish that I just started this thing myself.'" It's rare for big-name authors to use co-writers, and rarer still for them to do it openly, but readers don't seem to mind. "When he first published a book with a co-author on the cover, we watched the performance of that book very nervously," says Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch, who edits Patterson. "But the sales were great, because his name was there, and it read like a James Patterson novel."

One collaborator, Andrew Gross, used to run the sports-equipment company Head, but his dream was to write novels, and he couldn't get any traction with publishers. One day he got a call: Patterson had seen his manuscript and wanted to have breakfast. "Basically what he said was, I've got a lot of stories to tell, and nobody has the resources to tell 'em all, and would I like to talk about a project with him?" That was the beginning of a seven-year partnership, a highly educational one for Gross--he jokes that it's the equivalent of getting an M.F.A. and M.B.A. at the same time. Gross now has a three-book deal of his own.