Is James Patterson's Bill Clinton collaboration anti-artistic?
Its a question you might not expect to hear asked, but its almost the only question that tends to arise about James Patterson. When, in 2018, the writer coauthored The President Is Missing with Bill Clinton, the game was to work out which bits were Clinton and which were Patterson. The release of their second offering, The Presidents Daughter, will spark round two of that guessing game. Even before that, when Patterson has been covered in the literary pages it has been to wonder how many of his 200-plus books he actually writes. Patterson is as much a brand management system as he is an author. And well he might be: he got into the writing game after years at the J Walter Thompson ad agency. He has sold more than 425 million books from which he is reported to have made 500m in the last decade alone. Collaboration, for Patterson, is not so much the exception as the rule; hes upfront about it. I dont know if theres even a definitive list of all his coauthors. Wikipedia offers seven, excluding Clinton, but prefaces its list with the shoulder-shrugging disclaimer such as.