I’ll Probably Delete This

If your publishing house won't make a TV ad for your new book, maybe you should do it
yourself.

Of course, it helps if you're already CEO of an advertising company.

Introduction

Hello listeners.

This is episode 8 where James Patterson teaches us book promotion.

My name is Will Jauquet and welcome to I'll Probably Delete This where we learn about books, book publishing, and today, marketing.

We'll do this through telling stories from successful authors and other notable people from the history of the publishing industry, including the marketing story for the book that became the building block for one of the most successful authors ever.

As you likely know, and as we began to cover in episode 7, James Patterson has built a publishing empire, sort of a business juggernaut within publishing.

He drives a significant amount of the profits for his publisher, Little Brown. Approximately 30% of all the publisher's revenue each year comes from the sale of James Patterson's books. In July of 2025, he has a book he co-wrote with former President Bill Clinton on the Best Sellers list.

He has more bestsellers than any author ever. And at one point, it was estimated that one out of every 17 books sold in the U.S. was a James Patterson book. Now, that stat may be an overestimation, but it should give you a sense of just how successful he's been and how successful his books have been.

Previously, we'd covered how he changed his writing to make Along Came a Spider a success. Join me now as we learn how Patterson and his publisher approached marketing the book.

Hit Them in the Face With a Pie

James Patterson stood at the front of a conference room in midtown Manhattan.

He was welcoming a new group of employees to J. Walter Thompson when a junior ad executive tried to sneak into the room without being noticed. His audience was distracted, but Patterson kept going until the junior ad executive hit him in the face with a pie.

Covered in pie, Patterson now had the audience's full attention.

With his nose sticking out through the crust, and crust and whipped cream falling off his face, he told his audience, that's how you make a good ad.

First, hit them in the face with a pie
and then tell them something smart.

That is all that advertising was, and particularly TV advertising. Get their attention and audience's attention and then tell them something useful or smart.

Publisher Commitment

Little Brown published Along Came a Spider in February 1993.

To that point, Patterson hadn't had much publishing success. This was his eighth book and seventh thriller. His prior books had okay sales, but certainly nothing spectacular. The question is, what changed?

First, which is the subject of episode seven, he wrote a good book, and I don't mean good in some objective literary sense. He wrote a book that a segment of readers would find compelling.

He had been trying to improve his skill in writing thrillers. He wrote a plot heavy, page-turner, full of short, tightly written chapters, and to that he added Alex Cross, a compelling, interesting, and sympathetic protagonist who was someone that women in particular would want to spend time with.

He thought he had a bestseller, and he thought that the market would agree.

Now that he had an interesting story to tell, he needed to find the right pie to use to get his potential readers' attention.

So the second thing that changed was in publicity and marketing, which is what we're going
to spend our time on today.

Importantly, the book had publisher commitment.

Little Brown and its parent company, Time Warner Books, offered Patterson a million-dollar advance for two books based on reading Along Came a Spider. To state the obvious, one million is serious money, particularly in 1993 dollars. One estimate I saw put the number of one million-dollar advances in the last year at 200 or so. There were certainly many fewer such advances in the early 90s, meaning that it should have been clear to Patterson at the time that Little Brown had made a big commitment to him and to Along Came a Spider.

That advance meant two related things that are important to our story.

One, it was a good indication of the size of the initial print run that the publishing house would order. Here they ordered a print run of 150,000 copies. This was likely 10 times bigger than any print run for any of Patterson's prior thrillers.

And the print run is important because it determines how many books are available for bookstores to sell. This is the world before Amazon, and it's before things like Print on Demand from IngramSpark.

And two, the related point is that the advance was a good indication of the amount of resources that the publishing house would put into marketing the book.

So think about the cost of the advance and the size of the initial print run. In order to recoup those costs, Little Brown needed to sell a lot of books in order to break even, let alone to turn a profit. This means they would be motivated to market the book.

Is Success Guaranteed?

Patterson had a large book contract, had a big initial print run for his book, and had
a marketing budget from his publisher.

One thing savvy or experienced authors might say at this point is, isn't everything that comes next for the book inevitable from there? Isn't the book going to sell well no matter what because it has to?

I don't know the answer to that, but there is certainly some truth to the idea that once you have those things, sales success should be expected.

A couple of important caveats, though.

There are flops.

There are books that get big print runs, big advances, decent promotion, that are flops that don't sell.

Even more than that, though, there is nothing about Patterson's later writing career or the success of his later books that was guaranteed. The success of this book gave him a blueprint for much of his later sales success.

Patterson has changed publishing in important ways, and this is really his start. Also, it's helpful to look at a microcosm of a particular book to get a sense of how the industry works, and how at least one book was successful.
Let's start then with cover design.

Marketing: Cover Design

Little Brown had designed a number of covers and brought them to Patterson for his consideration,
but he rejected all of them.

He wanted his book to stand out at a bookstore.

Again, this is the early 90s, and physical bookstores were just about the only place
where you could go and buy a book. Appealing to a potential reader online wasn't yet a consideration.

Patterson would say he was focused on a cover that would get people to pick up his book, that in order to buy a book, you have to pick it up first. He wanted a cover that would grab someone's attention.

In terms of the design, he settled on a very large title that took up most of the cover,
more than two-thirds. The title is written in large silver letters. Behind those silver letters was a purple and pink sky at twilight.

Then a small spider dangled down through the letters and hovered over a small suburban house sitting towards the bottom of the cover.

At the very bottom of the page, below the huge title, below the spider, below the house, in smaller type, was his name in block letters.

Now, the art for this episode, if you look on your phone and your podcast player, is meant to mirror the cover of the book, so give that a look, or go and do a search for the actual cover of the book to get a sense of what it looked like.

This different cover design stood out, and since then, Patterson has stuck to pretty similar themes in his covers. Really large titles, minimal graphic design with a particular element highlighted, and then his name in block letters. Sometimes it's below the title, sometimes it's above.

In addition to the book cover, Patterson focused on the marketing materials. He made sure that all the marketing materials were consistent. For signs, flyers, any promotional material, that they had consistent branding and design, and that any copy, sort of the writing, the text, was hitting on the same points about the book, that it was talking about the book in a consistent way.

That idea of consistency is, in fact, pretty simple, but it's not always one that's executed
on.

Why Not a T.V. Ad?

As part of promotion for the book, Patterson asked Little Brown to do a TV commercial. Remember, this is the time before widely distributed consumer internet. TV dominated household attention.
Little Brown, though, said no. They didn't do commercials for books.

Patterson responded, fine, if you don't want to make a TV commercial, I'll make one myself.

At this time in his life, Patterson still had a day job. After a year of grad school at Vanderbilt, Patterson had been working in advertising for J. Walter Thompson. He started working for them in New York in 1971. With this, his eighth book, he was still at the firm, but had now risen to be CEO.

Among other things that Patterson did at J. Walter Thompson, in addition to getting hit in the face with pies, he ran advertising campaigns, including writing and filming TV ads. Patterson had created dozens of TV ads over the years. This meant that he was better suited than almost anyone else in publishing to create a TV ad for a book.

And he was going to do it for his own book.

Marketing: a T.V. Ad

Now Patterson didn't use a pie in the ad that he made for his book. His commercial was relatively simple. It used thrilling music to get people's attention, and then it used quotes about the book, the kind of blurbs that you would see on the back of a book jacket.

Add to that, it had a small spider scuttling across the screen.

Pretty simple.

He focused on getting across at most two points in the 15 second ad.

First and most important was the name of the book. The second goal was to help viewers remember the name of the author.

And that was it.

He did the ad for relatively cheap. It cost him around $2,000 in 1993 dollars to make the commercial, and considering the size of his advance, making the ad didn't cost him that much out of pocket.

Once he had the ad finished, he showed it to Little Brown, and Little Brown liked it, and they were enthusiastic.
They agreed to pay for some of the ad purchases that Patterson wanted to do to promote the book. Patterson and Little Brown agreed to split the cost of the ad buys.

Patterson also decided to forgo doing any sort of book tour, and instead used any of that money to buy additional TV advertising.

Marketing: Ad Placement

The question then was where to place the TV ads.

One thing they weren't going to do was buy national ads. Patterson thought that a national TV ad buy would be too expensive.

Instead, they targeted specific cities where they thought there was already a good market
of readers interested in thrillers. They identified three markets to target, New York, Chicago, and D.C. It obviously helped that Along Came a Spider took place in D.C.

Once they decided where to buy the ads, the question was for which programs?

They mostly chose daytime TV slots. This meant that they had decided they were targeting adult women as potential readers.

Why women, you might ask?

As we mentioned in episode 7, even for thrillers, women were the majority of readers. Patterson and Little Brown knew this or should have had a pretty good idea that this was true, and some 70% or so of Patterson's readers would end up being women.

In episode 5, we covered advice from editor Robert Gottlieb, and I think it's pretty
applicable here.

Gottlieb said,

"Every book has its own potential readership.
Figure out what it is and reach for it.
Don't try to sell every book to everyone."

Patterson understood this intuitively. He was trying to find the right audience for his book and to market the book to them. The idea was to generate buzz in a handful of important markets and use the buzz to generate sales and momentum for the book.

Importantly, the three cities each had a number of stores that reported to the New York Times for the creation of the newspaper's Best Seller list. So if the book could generate enough sales and momentum in those cities, it was likely to convert to a placement on the New York Times list.

Keeping the focus limited and trying to target an audience of people more likely to buy thrillers
was a way to kickstart the buzz in a more concentrated and cost-effective way.

Marketing Results: The Book Launch

So what happened after the book debuted?

You've got a design that takes a new approach to book covers. You've got a TV ad that was something, if not unique, was pretty new and done on a different scale. Then there's Patterson's decision not to do a book tour but instead to focus on TV advertising. And you've got the marketing targeting at potential women readers in a limited number of cities to build momentum and sales.

How did it work?

Well, the book debuted well. It debuted at number 9 on the New York Times Best Sellers List for February 7th of 1993. After this, they continued to push the book, increasing the ad purchase, the ad buy, andeventually airing the TV spot in other cities around the country. Over the next several weeks, Along Came a Spider climbed its way up the charts, moving from number 9 to 8 to 7. Eventually it climbed up to number 4 on the hardcover charts. It managed to hang on the New York Times Best Sellers List for 10 weeks.

Pretty impressive sales for someone previously who had been a middling author.

The Competition

I thought it might be interesting to cover briefly the competition that Along Came a Spider faced at the time.

The competition was pretty stiff. When it debuted, Patterson's book was competing against The Bridges of Madison County, which had stayed at number 1 or number 2 on the Best Sellers list for more than a year, and is still one
of the bestselling books of all time.

It also faced competition from John Grisham in his book The Client, which stayed at the top of the sales charts for most of that year, for most of 1993, usually at number 2, but occasionally changing spots with Bridges of Madison County.

So pretty stiff competition in the hardcover fiction category. Along Came a Spider sold through its initial print run, and the hardcover sales generated more than $1.6 million in revenue.

Like Michael Crichton experienced with Jurassic Park, the paperback sold even better. But unlike Crichton, Patterson's paperback sales took off long before there was any movie adaptation.

The paperback copy that I have of the book was printed in December of 1993. Across the top of the book's cover are the words, "over 2 million copies in print" and "number 1 bestseller." The book immediately sold well in paperback and has sold millions of copies since its debut in early 1993.

It was clear by the end of that year that Little Brown's big bet on Patterson and Along Came a Spider had paid off. They likely more than covered the costs, including all of the advance before the end of the calendar year and well before the second book had come out. Little Brown should have been quite happy with how sales went and with the expenses that they incurred to promote the book.

Postscript 1: HBR Case study Marketing James Paterson

For the postscript, I have two items I want to cover.

The first, I want to touch on the Harvard Business School's case study on James Patterson. Professor John Deighton authored the case study. Deighton is now an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, where he focused on digital marketing among other areas.

The case study focused on Patterson's promotion and sales in the late 90s and early 2000s. So not the time period that we were looking at, the early 90s, when Patterson's publishing career had its big inflection point.

Along Came a Spider really was a significant inflection point. Following that book, Patterson's successive books each generated at least a million in revenue just on hardcover sales and his books from 1997 through 2003 exceeded at least five million in revenue.

The time period Deighton looked at was before Patterson leaned heavily into co-writers like former President Clinton, and before Amazon and internet sales had started to dominate book selling. By this time, Patterson had quit advertising, had published 18 books over nine years.

And the case study was in part focused on the use of book clubs, covering sort of the tradeoff that an author had to make between the exposure and the expanded audience that a book club could provide.

I recently finished a book about a startup publishing house that had to consider the same tradeoffs related to selling books to book clubs. That one will likely show up in a future episode.

Patterson, it seems though, thought book clubs weren't worth the tradeoff.

Most notable to me is a Deighton quote that I uncovered while I was doing research for
this episode.

Deighton was at a meeting of the Direct Marketing Association and he heard Patterson speak.

In reaction to Patterson's talk, Deighton said,

"I'd never actually heard a product speak.
It was like listening to a can of Coca-Cola, explain how it would like to be marketed."

And that encounter with Patterson inspired Deighton to write the case study called "Marketing James Patterson."

Postscript 2: Paterson Quits Advertising

The second postscript is Patterson quitting J. Walter Thompson.

As we covered, Patterson had a very successful advertising career.

He advanced from starting as an entry-level copy editor in 1971 to becoming the youngest creative director in the firm's history and then to becoming CEO of J. Walter Thompson, North America.

Even though he was CEO, he had room to advance because the firm was international and he could become CEO of the global corporation. He was being groomed to become that global CEO, but he didn't think he wanted to stick around in advertising.

Interesting to me, after the success of Along Came a Spider, Patterson hung on for a couple more years. He wrote four best-selling Alex Cross books and kept working in advertising.

It took a highway epiphany to get him to quit.

Patterson will describe it, and he writes this up in his memoir, that one weekend driving back from the Jersey Shore to head into the city for a meeting, he sat stuck in traffic.

Cars zoomed by in the other direction and he realized that he was in the wrong lane, he was meant to be in the other lane, joining them going on the other side, traveling in the other direction.

Not long after this epiphany, while stuck in traffic, Patterson's boss, Burt Manning, met with him for dinner.
Manning told him, Jim, you could do anything you want in advertising, and implicitly was offering him the CEO role of the global company. Patterson said he didn't think he had a future in advertising and told Manning,

"Burt, I can't afford to work for Thompson anymore."

Patterson understood that he was one of the lucky few to get paid to do what he loved to do, which is to tell stories.

From the time he left advertising in 1996, he has been telling stories and trying to find ways to tell more of them each year.

Bibliography

I don't have a book for our bibliography today.

In the last episode, we already covered his memoir, James Patterson by James Patterson.

I wanted to highlight something else, and this one's not a book.

In terms of learning about the business of his writing, you can find dozens of articles about James Patterson, and if interested, you can find many dozens of interviews with him. But in terms of sources, I found no better resource than a 2002 article by Jeff Zelsky in Publishers Weekly.

That article is titled, The James Patterson Business, with a subtitle of, Selling Entertainment
Without Apologies.

It's really well done. It may cost a subscription, but if you're in publishing, I certainly recommend that you look it up.

Closing

Join me next time for another episode of I'll Probably Delete This, where we'll explore
more stories of authors, storytellers, great books, and publishing.

Happy reading.

Thanks, everybody.