The James Patterson Industry

The sales machine that is James Patterson continues in the e-book era.

NEW YORK (AP) — The Hachette Book Group announced Wednesday that e-book sales for the prolific novelist now top 5 million, with 2 million coming in just the past seven months.

Patterson hit the 1 million mark for e-books in July 2010, making him among the first authors to reach that milestone. Patterson also is thriving on paper. Hachette noted that hardcover and paperback sales for his work in 2011 topped 4.7 million copies, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan, which compiles around 75 percent of the non e-book market.

Patterson publishes several books a year and his best-sellers, many of them written with others, including "Kill Alex Cross" and "Now You See Her."

And he truly is a machine.  Not only does he have a clutch of hard-working collaborators he manages with an all-seeing eye, resulting in the production of several bestsellers a year, but he totally dominates the publishing department of Little-Brown that is dedicated to putting out and pushing the results of their combined efforts.


It would be possible to say that he has changed the face of publishing as much as Amazon.


For an interesting view of the way he operates, READ THIS