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Biography of James Patterson

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Par   •  5 Novembre 2019  •  Fiche  •  715 Mots (3 Pages)  •  602 Vues

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STUDY : JAMES PATTESON

From his Florida mansion, James Patterson invents stories in gusts. Deciphering the methods of this American novelist, who is better paid than the NBA stars.

You probably don't know his name. Yet this writer made $84 million with his novels last year. No, we didn't forget a comma and you read it right: $84 million! What's the name of that billionaire feather man? James Patterson. Thanks to his thrillers, his hero Alex Cross, his Women's Murder Club and a few youth series, which are bursting into all the world's bookstores, "Mr. James" has risen to the top of Forbes magazine's ranking of the world's best-paid authors. Patterson crushed the competition. On the second step of the podium, Danielle Steel, the steamy queen of the pink novel, points to "only" $35 million, followed by Stephen King and his $28 million. Who said literature doesn't pay?  

The overwhelming majority of the "mega best-sellers" are of Anglo-Saxon origin. According to Frédéric Rouvillois, author of a recent History of Best Sellers (Flammarion), of the 80 books sold for more than 10 million copies since 1950, only a few Japanese and Chinese works escape this "dictatorship", three in Spanish, one or two Swedish thrillers (Millennium), one in Portuguese (The Alchemist) and... zero in French. Our successful authors are indeed far, very far from the Patterson scores. Moreover, figures are a taboo subject in the world of Parisian literature. We will therefore only risk estimates, based on sales recorded by the Edistat Institute and copyright generally granted to pen stars (15% on the price excluding tax in large format, 5 or 6% in pocket). The biggest sellers in 2010, Marc Levy and Katherine Pancol, would each have received around €1.8 million (approximately $2.4 million). Then followed Guillaume Musso, Tatiana de Rosnay, Anna Gavalda, Amélie Nothomb, Jean-Christophe Grangé or Fred Vargas. Thanks to La Carte et le territoire (Flammarion), Prix Goncourt 2010, 520,000 copies of which have been sold to date, Michel Houellebecq should receive approximately €1.3 million for the French edition alone. Largely enough to disappear for many months, even years....  

Far from the image of the cursed poet writing by candlelight, Patterson loves to pose in front of his colonial mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. Without any complexes, in the "biography" section of his personal website, this former J. Walter Thompson advertising agency advertiser, now 67 years old, aligns the figures: 220 million copies sold (1 novel out of 17 sold in the United States is by Patterson!), 38 titles n° 1 in the famous New York Times ranking, high digital scores, translations in almost every country in the world. A literary critic of L'Express still remembers seeing him take out of his pocket a diagram of the vertiginous curve of his sales in the middle of an interview! It is therefore not surprising that the Hachette Group in the United States secured the exclusivity of 17 books between 2009 and 2012, via a contract of... $150 million! World record. But perhaps the greatest pride of "James the Billionaire" is to have made an appearance in an episode of The Simpsons - supreme consecration, as we know...

"He's a massive man with the slow gestures of a cowboy, but he doesn't behave like a star," says one of his French publishers, Laurent Laffont, Lattès' editorial director. One day, he told me: if a TV series succeeds in attracting people every week, I don't see why novels can't do it. His goal, by publishing nine or ten novels a year, is to create a kind of "Patterson series" that never stops." Notice to "addicts": you can already pre-order your next seven (!) opuses on the Jamespatterson.com website.  

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