James Patterson has authored or co-authored hundreds of books over his career, spanning genres, sparking best sellers and creating a slew of TV and film adaptations thanks to franchises like Alex Cross , Maximum Ride and Middle School .
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So why is the world’s most prolific writer launching a Substack with a heavy emphasis on video and opinion?
“Like most writers — even in my situation — you’re always at the beck and call of editors,” Patterson tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “With Substack, we’re totally free, we get to do whatever the hell we want to do. So I can write opinion pieces. I can write whatever the hell I want to write, and that’s liberating.”
Patterson recalls a favorite quote of his: “My time here is short. What can I do most beautifully?”
“I love that as a motivator, as something to focus on,” he says. “I thought this would be kind of fun to do this Substack thing and and mix up the forms, do some of it on film, and some of it written.”
Patterson’s new Substack, Hungry Dogs (it’s named after a saying from his grandmother “hungry dogs run faster”), is likely not what avid readers of Patterson’s books are expecting. Sure, there will be some fan service, with Patterson explaining why he was so interested in doing more non-fiction writing, and showing one of his fiction book outlines for the first time “so people can see how that works, what my outlines look like, and if they want to read the book they can see what happens between the outline and the book.”
He’s also planning to give away some of the pencils he has used to outline his works.
But he also plans to get very opinionated with what he is calling a “stop the insanity” column, taking on book banning, “haters” (“just haters out in the world, on the internet,” he says) and, yes, the lucrative but frustrating entertainment business, where Patterson’s sympathies lie squarely with the writers.
“Sometimes I’ll sit in on Zoom meetings — and they don’t know I’m on the meeting but its about books of mine that are being adapted for TV or film — and I kind of listen to the screenwriters getting these rapid flyer notes from everybody even remotely involved with the project: The studio, the producers, the executive producers, and nobody seems bashful about sharing their opinions,” Patterson says. “And usually after about 10 minutes or so, I have to get off the zoom. The screenwriters usually stay pretty cordial, but I start feeling ill and sick to my stomach and depressed.”
“It goes back a little bit to me for the old days the Hollywood system, when you had these crazy people running the studios and they would go ‘people love circuses, people love cowboys, give me a movie about circuses and cowboys, give me 10 writers.’ You know, that kind of thing,” he adds. “And it’s still that on some level.”
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Hollywood, to hear Patterson explain it, is a different beast than the world of publishing.
“I remember going on the shoot for Kiss the Girls , one of the Alex Cross movies,” Patterson recalls. “Everybody was very nice to me, but I soon found out that the novelist rates somewhere below the caterer, but they know why the caterer is there.”
Substack has had success in attracting high-profile names from the world of journalism as well. Also on Tuesday the service announced that Tina Brown, the venerable magazine editor, would launch a Substack called “Fresh Hell,” and social media reporter Taylor Lorenz left The Washington Post to launch her own magazine.
And Patterson will have weekly video interviews, with confirmed guests that include Bill Clinton, Elin Hilderbrand, Kwame Alexander, David Baldacci and TJ Newman, and others in the works (Patterson mentions Dolly Parton, with whom he co-rote the 2022 novel Run, Rose, Run ).
Patterson frames the interviews as being “human to human.”
“It ain’t CNN or MSNBC or Fox, It’s just sort of a different spirit of the things. There won’t be any politics. I’m not throwing any sliders or curveballs,” Patterson says of the interviews. “They’re kind of fresh and fun, and you’re gonna find out stuff that you’re not used to, and they’re filmed so you can either watch it or or read it.”
Patterson’s Hungry Dogs joins a growing number of Substacks that expand beyond text to include more video and multimedia content. Earlier this month the CNN commentator Van Jones launched a Substack with a video focus, as the company built on newsletters thinks of ways to reach consumers that get most of their content via podcasts, YouTube or TikTok.
Even James Patterson, who is one of the most well-known writers in the world, is intrigued by the possibilities of video, though he notes that he is no stranger to video: “I know a thing or two about that,” he quips.
Except this time the video will be on his terms, with guests of his choosing. The writers front and center.
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