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James Patterson was the most borrowed author from British libraries last year. I say author, but he seems more of a brand that anything, with most of the books attributed to him also having the name of the person who probably actually wrote the book in less noticeable type on the cover. As an ex-bookseller, the man’s output (which is considerable in quantity if nothing else) both amazes and annoys me. From the Guardian:

James Patterson is less a novelist than a literary factory, and it seems the British public cannot get enough of him.

The American is revealed today as the UK’s most borrowed author from libraries, coming top for the second year, after his books were taken out more than 1.5m times between July 2007 and June 2008.

Patterson and the writers he employs are happy to keep the fans happy, with the Patterson name emblazoned across at least eight books in the last year, in genres from thriller to romance to misery memoir. Other writers’ names regularly appear on the cover – often in much smaller type – but he denies that he sometimes has no involvement at all in the writing. Last year he said: "I get all this baloney about well, what does he do? Does he even look at them? Well yes, he does look at them."

Time ran an extended profile of the man a couple of years ago, in which his methods were outlined in more detail:

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."

At the end of this process, the book might have 150 chapters, comprising only two or three pages each.

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