Three Answers: Michael Pietsch

-- Publishers Weekly, 2/26/2007

Three Answers today are from Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown and editor for James Patterson, whose Step on a Crack was published February 12.

PW: Many of Patterson's books have coauthors. How does that work—do you deal with Patterson solely, or do you deal with the other writers as well?

MP: Every manuscript I receive, I receive from James Patterson. The work that he has done with his coauthors is entirely between them. When he sends it to me, it's at a point where he has worked on it with them, usually through many, many drafts, to a point where he's satisfied with it. To me, they're all James Patterson novels. I mean, I recognize the tone. But he revises; as you know, each one starts with his idea and his outline—a very detailed outline. The coauthor then does the draft for him, and then he revises and revises and revises—tons of rewrites. Until every one, when it arrives here, needs to be a James Patterson novel. I work directly with him and him alone.

PW: What do you think is the toughest aspect of editing any "star" author?

MP: There is a huge amount of pressure, and the pressure is not from the author. It is from the publishing and business side. When an author gets to a very high level of success, they become part of the company's financial planning, basically, for the budgeting part of the month-by-month planning. So the time pressures can become much more urgent because those books are really counted on to be published at a particular moment as part of the company's highest-level strategy.

PW: Last fall a critic in the TBR's "Behind the List" column really lambasted Patterson. What was your reaction to that?

MP: My reaction was to send a letter to the editor saying that I felt that this critic quoted from another writer. It wasn't his own commentary; he quoted from a forthcoming book, a criticism of Patterson. I said that I felt that column could probably do a lot better to look at what it is that James Patterson is delivering that is so satisfying to literally millions of readers that they come back to buy his books three or four times a year—to explore what it is that he writes that people find so affecting and so moving and so entertaining—than to pick up, secondhand, someone else's criticism and retell it in that column. I thought it was a dreadful misuse of the opportunity that space provides, and part of the kind of intellectual snobbery in people looking down their noses at successful, popular fiction. Patterson is delivering something that people find very, very powerful, and I thought that was just reflecting the snobbery of the New York Times.