Try as I might this weekend, I could not stop myself from dwelling on the Forbes list of the highest-paid writers, and particularly on the No. 1 man, James Patterson, who last year made $70 million:

One out of every 17 novels bought in the U.S. are authored by Patterson. Over the past two years he has made some $500 million for Hachette, his publisher.

How does he do it? With an army of co-authors culled, as the Times Magazine recently put it from "the vast sea of struggling writers":

The way it usually works, Patterson will write a detailed outline — sometimes as long as 50 pages, triple-spaced — and one of his co-authors will draft the chapters for him to read, revise and, when necessary, rewrite. When he’s first starting to work with a new collaborator, a book will typically require numerous drafts. Over time, the process invariably becomes more efficient.

It's a savvy method, one embraced previously by Alexandre Dumas, a best-selling author in his day who employed seventy-three "assistants" to help him write his swashbucklers. Here is how one of them described the job:

I used to dress his characters for him and locate them in the necessary surroundings, whether in Old Paris or in different parts of France at different periods. When he was, as often, in difficulties on some matter of archaeology, he used to send round one of his secretaries to me to demand, say, an accurate account of the appearance of the Louvre in the year 1600.... I used to revise his proofs, make corrections in historical points and sometimes write whole chapters.

This assistant was happy enough with the arrangement, but some chafed at the idea that Dumas should get all the credit. One, Auguste Maquet, who seems to have been much more fully a collaborator than the rest, took Dumas to court to sue for co-author status and royalties on several books (a film about their relationship, "L'Autre Dumas," starring Gerard Depardieu as Dumas, appeared earlier this year). The court found in favor of Dumas, essentially because, as Arthur Fitzwilliam Davidson writes in his biography of Dumas, he was the genius: "Dumas without Maquet would have been Dumas: what would Maquet have been without Dumas?"

Happily, Maquet did go on to publish several of his own novels. Here's hoping some of the Patterson elves are able to do the same.