The publishing industry has transformed radically in the past twenty years. The keyword in the preceding sentence is industry. The business of publishing has been forced to up its game in terms of creating product and selling them to customers. Marketing is now of paramount importance.

As a result, few authors have the luxury of success based on just publishing a book every few years. Now, there is a drive to publish more books, more books, more – faster, faster, faster! The obvious problem, though, is that writing a book is by nature a long and gruelling process, and authors are people, not machines. A single author may only manage to produce a book every two years, or perhaps every year.

Some are solving this issue by released shorter works: the novella is enjoying a renaissance. Others are writing for several years before publication, so that there is a body of work ready to share fluently and quickly with the market. Still others are taking a different, and somewhat controversial, path: using a team of ghostwriters to create ‘their’ books.

James Patterson is the best-known writer following the latter course. He is wildly successful, earning some $700 million from book sales in the past decade (source: Forbes). A great deal of that success is down to the sheer volume of works he has released; his bibliography extends to 137 works. Several books are released each year with his strong branding and name on the cover, and they sell widely. But in fact, some of these are the result of what you can term ‘collaborative writing’. Basically, Patterson writes an outline, and a ghostwriter uses that as a basis to write the book. So when you read some James Patterson novels, you’re not reading his words, but his ideas. “The outlines are a lot of the imaginative work. Not all of it, but a lot of it,” he claims.

In a recent interview with Adweek, Patterson expressed surprise that so many people don’t understand his writing and publishing model. He points out that art has a long history of being collaborative: “You go around to the cathedrals of Europe and you start looking around and realise there were 20 painters working on this.”

In many ways, it’s a businesslike approach to publishing. Sam Thielman points out in Adweek that “his book series are seen not as Pulitzer hopefuls but as product lines (in a profile earlier this year, Vanity Fair called Patterson ‘the Henry Ford of books’)”.Collaborative writing allows writers like James Patterson (Tom Clancy is another example) to meet demand for books, and perhaps the readers of such books are more interested in the story in any case than the author’s unique writing style.

Certainly, the openness of writers like Patterson about their model is to be commended. Personally, I think honesty is what counts above all else. Patterson’s readers know how he ‘writes’, and his loyal fans accept that. Were he to be magically writing five books a year and claiming they are entirely his own work, we may feel differently whendiscovering his collaborative writing.

What do you think of collaborative writing? Is it the triumph of quantity over quality? Is an author an author when she or he has not written the words on the page? Do you know how widespread this means of writing is? How would you feel to discover a book you’d just read was ghostwritten? I would love to hear your thoughts.