Patterson is the undisputed king of the digital publishing age, but he remains an analog kind of guy. A small Lucite frame on his office table holds this instruction: “How to Google: Press Safari icon at bottom of your iPad.” He speaks in stop-and-start sentences, as if racing to keep pace with his own thoughts. And he can be touchy about his reputation for mass production. When an interviewer for the Catholic-themed Eternal Word Television Network asked him last spring about his process of “churning out” books, he interrupted with a steely glint in his eye, saying, “You mean crafting?” His work is akin to that of a TV “show-runner,” who sets a series in motion and guides its tone and pace, no matter who else might write individual episodes. “And they don’t take shit like I do,” he says of someone such as Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad. “They go, ‘Gilligan! This guy’s great!’ ”

“My Way or the Highway”

For someone who says he “never cared for” the ad game, Patterson was awfully good at it. He insists today that his first profession has limited relevance to his second, but the record strongly suggests otherwise.

In the 1930s, J. Walter Thompson wrote the ads that made the grilled-cheese sandwich into a national staple, all to boost the sales of its client, Kraft Foods, a maker of processed cheese. Patterson has done something similar: he has built a powerhouse brand, then spread it wider and wider. The story behind Along Came a Spider, the tale of Alex Cross, a widowed, jazz-playing, African-American detective with a degree in forensic psychology, which became his first blockbuster success, in 1993, is by now the stuff of publishing-industry lore. Patterson believed the surest path to success was to use television advertising, a strategy then all but unheard of in publishing because of the high cost. Little, Brown balked, but Patterson knew the tricks of his trade: he created and shot his own commercial. After seeing the finished product, the publisher agreed to share the cost of broadcasting it in three markets—New York, Chicago, and Washington—cities where (Patterson had determined) thrillers sold briskly. The book started out at No. 9 on the New York Times best-seller list, eventually climbing to No. 2 in paperback. With more than five million copies in print, it is still Patterson’s single most successful work.

Patterson built the Cross franchise into a successful series, then branched out into stand-alone books. In 1996, he proposed trying something more radical: publishing multiple titles a year. Little, Brown objected, fearing that Patterson would diminish his overall sales, but he prevailed: sales soared.

When Patterson’s only son, Jack, now 16 and a student at Hotchkiss, was in grade school and proving to be a reluctant reader, Patterson decided to take aim at a new demographic. As he put it when we spoke, “I can write for these little creeps.” Patterson launched a multi-series line of young-adult and children’s novels—“Maximum Ride,” “Witch & Wizard,” “Treasure Hunters,” and “I Funny”—that fill not only the shelves of every Barnes & Noble but those of your local grocery store too. Now Patterson produces a dozen titles a year, and there seems to be no upward limit to his overall sales.

Over time, Patterson has built a reputation for not suffering fools, and for demanding from Little, Brown’s marketing team more rigorous research and analysis of the sort he was used to on Madison Avenue. He works publicists hard on book tours. In a “What I’ve Learned” video he recorded for the Literary Guild, Patterson declared, “I know what I want in all my books. It’s my way or the highway. I know who my readers are and how to engage them, how to scare them, how to get people to feel for the characters, how to make my readers laugh.” Bill Robinson, co-president at James Patterson Entertainment, the company dedicated to promoting Patterson’s efforts for film and television, recounted an exchange with his boss. “The other day we were discussing notes on a project, and I suggested something contrary to his impulse, and he said, ‘I’m sorry, Bill, did you recently write an international best-seller that I’m not aware of?’ ”