Tuesdays with Markus (and James Patterson)

from James Grippando

Me again. Filling in for Jackie. She’s in NYC singing and dancing on Broadway (Okay, she’s probably holed up in her hotel room, writing and on deadline). Anyway, she asked if I had anything to say in her absence, and it turns out that I don’t. Luckily, James Patterson does. Or at least he did on Tuesday. Here’s some of what he had to say.

To bring you up to speed, this week was the Direct Marketing Association’s Leadership Forum. It’s a three day conference not strictly for the book industry, but for executives all over the world whose companies market directly to consumers—everyone from MajorLeagueBaseball.com, AOL and Yahoo! to Burger King, Eastman Kodak, Xerox and others. Even Publishers Clearing House attends. I asked for my check. No go.

On Tuesday the forum had a special session called “Conversations with the Authors.” It was put together by Markus Wilhelm, CEO of Bookspan, a company that knows a thing or two about direct marketing; Bookspan owns the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club and Book of the Month Club. James Patterson and I were the authors on the panel, and so was John A. Deighton. John is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, whose specialty is—you guessed it—direct marketing. What’s interesting to us naked authors—and to everyone else who is still trying to figure out why one book explodes onto the charts and an equally entertaining book flops—is the fact that John did a very detailed study called “Marketing James Patterson.” That study was the topic of discussion for our panel.

First off, I heard some interesting numbers that I’ll share with you. Did you know, for example, that from November 2002 to the end of 2003 (the year of John’s study), James Patterson’s 6,005,000 hardcover sales on his 9 titles exceeded the combined sales of Tom Clancy (2 titles, 1,984,000 sales), Patricia Cornwell (2 titles, 1,045,000 sales), Stephen King (4 titles, 2,664,000 sales) and Dean Koontz (4 titles, 981,000 sales)? And here’s something else that surprised me. Can you name the two main outlets for hardcover bestsellers? Are you guessing Barnes and Noble and Borders? Wrong. It’s Costco and Walmart. The key to my question is the word bestsellers. Costco and Walmart sell fewer titles, but they sell more bestsellers. Their share of the book market overall, says Deighton, is 12%, but their share of the “bestseller” market is 34%. Here’s something else I found interesting: In 2004 Amazon.com had only a 2% share of the bestseller market—a number that Deighton regards as “relatively insignificant.” I wonder what it is now, but I’m suspecting that it is less than I thought it was.

One of the reasons that Deighton found Patterson to be such an interesting “market study” is the fact that his increased productivity has not hurt his “per-title” sales. Many authors have, in essence, cannibalized their own sales by producing more than one or two books a year—their overall sales increase, but if you look at the number of units sold per title, their sales are down. Patterson is now up to 6 books a year, and the per-title sales for each of his books continue to grow. Deighton wanted to know: why is this?

I wish I could share the answer with you, but it was right about this point that the marketing geniuses in the room started throwing around industry terms like “long tail,” and since I know nothing about marketing, and being a man, I zoned out and started to think about sex. But here are some things I came away with. Patterson created a look, a brand for his books. He developed a consistently entertaining style of writing—short paragraphs, lean prose, short chapters that broke at points of tension in the narrative. But more than anything else, it seemed to me that Patterson is different because he has taken control of every aspect, both creative and marketing, of his books.

I could give plenty of examples of what I mean by this, but I think this personal story sums it up. I shared it with the group at the conference, and they laughed, but it is one of those humorous stories that tells you a lot about James Patterson.

The first time I gained any insight into Jim’s marketing and creative genius was in December 1991, when I made my first trip to New York to meet with my literary agent, Artie Pine. Artie was anything but flashy. He had simple offices at 250 West 57th Street, but the collage on the wall told at least part of the story: A colorful scattering of hardcover book jackets --- bestsellers, books-to-movies, and a huge blow-up of the NEW YORK TIMES list with James Patterson's "Along Came a Spider" at #1. Patterson was Artie’s client, and on seeing the blow up I said, “I didn’t know ‘Along Came a Spider' hit number one.” Actually, it hadn’t. Not yet. Patterson made the blow-up to help his agent visualize the goal. "Patterson will be huge someday," Artie told me.

Perhaps there are a few writers out there reading this post. Maybe you have a manuscript sitting in a drawer somewhere next to your underwear and socks. Maybe your novel is not even written yet, and it's just an idea bouncing around inside your head. Whatever shape your novel may be in, my advice is to think like Patterson. Visualize your goal. Do what it takes to make those around you visualize it as well. And go for it.

All the best, James Grippando
P.S. Normally I enjoy parktaking in the banter after my posts, but today I'll be heading for the Denver airport at 8:30 a.m. Denver time. I'll catch y'all when I'm back in Miami this evening!