Bestselling Author James Patterson Triples Record-Breaking Ebook Sales to 3 Million in Less Than 12 Months

Press Release Source: Hachette Book Group On Thursday June 2, 2011, 10:37 am EDT

NEW YORK, June 2, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Hachette Book Group announced today that #1 bestselling author James Patterson has tripled his record-breaking ebook sales in less than a year's time. To date, Patterson has sold 3,035,713 ebook units just 11 months after becoming the first novelist ever to surpass the one million ebook unit mark (as of July 2010).

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110602/NY13052LOGO )

David Young, CEO of Hachette Book Group, said, "James Patterson thrills and entertains readers, across all formats and all ages. To surge from 1 to 3 million ebooks sold in such a short period is extraordinary. This growth indicates that Patterson is maximizing the new ways digital can connect him with his readers, be it through ebooks, his major online presence, or the Patterson app."

That major online presence includes the over 4 million visitors a year to JamesPatterson.com and Patterson's 1.6 million-plus Facebook friends (numbers which grow daily by the thousands). The James Patterson app for iPad/iPhone has been downloaded close to 14,000 times, with 80 percent of Patterson's app audience actively updated and engaged in the app's content and features. In addition to this audience, there are also hundreds of thousands of followers on book-specific Facebook pages for Patterson's young readers series such as Witch & Wizard and Maximum Ride. There is a dedicated website, an app, and interactive games for Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life, Patterson's latest title for young readers launching on June 27.

James Patterson said, "I'm delighted to see that the rise of ebooks means the rise of reading across the board. We're finding more ways to get readers hooked on great books, and nothing could make me happier."

Since his first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, won the Edgar Award in 1977, James Patterson's books have sold more than 230 million copies worldwide.? His Alex Cross series, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider, is the most popular detective series of the past

twenty-five years. ?In total, his Maximum Ride, Daniel X, and Witch & Wizard series for younger readers have spent more than 200 weeks on national bestseller lists, and all three series are in Hollywood development.? His lifelong passion for books and reading led James Patterson to launch a website, ReadKiddoRead.com, to give adults an easy way to locate the very best books for kids.? He writes full-time and lives in Florida with his family.

Hachette Book Group (HBG) is a leading trade publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the second-largest publisher in the world. HBG publishes under the divisions of Little, Brown and Company, Little Brown Books for Young Readers, Grand Central Publishing, FaithWords, Center Street, Orbit, and Hachette Digital.

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Over 1 Million People Wrote an eBook Last Year. What Are They Trying to Tell Us?

Apr. 25 2011 - 8:12 am | 891 views | 2 recommendations |  Image via Wikipedia

EBooks are a growth sector, that much we know. Kindle sales are booming, allowing new writers access to significant audience opportunities. ?Writers like Amanda Hocking are capable of earning six figure monthly salaries from $1.99 titles on Amazon. Kindle, Nook and the iBook are creating a revolution in expression, just as blogging did. However, this time round people are getting paid.?Here, for me, is the most important data point of the past year, if not the past decade in eBooks:

“An estimated 764,448 titles written by entrepreneurs and other nontraditional authors were published in the U.S. in 2009, including reprints. That’s more than double 2008’s figure and six times as many as in 2007.”

Extrapolating the trend by far in excess of 1 million people in the United States will have written a book in the past twelve months. In other words there is an aching desire on the part of a significant and growing part of the population of educated societies to communicate something unique to them.

In contrast I live and work in a world that still defers to the notion that communication and influence is a right you earn after many years of hard work (and no shortage of lucky breaks).

The world is not like that any more, even though it looked as though the decline of blogging reflected a desire on the part of part time communicators to get a quick fix through Twitter, and perhaps of readers to seek out more considered writing . The revolt against earned influence began a decade ago when blogging started. It seemed to have been weakened by tweeting and social networking. ?Indeed a little over a month ago the New York Times specifically blamed the wane of blogging on the rise of tweeting.

Maybe like me they had their eyes on the wrong target. Just as we mourned the passing of the blog, it morphed into something else, something more considered, deeper and with revenue attached. It’s what I referred to elsewhere as mass differentiation.

What I would like to see is a leadership movement in politics or business that recognises this movement in some concrete way – engages it in a debate about the new inflexion points we are facing and maybe asks questions like – what would you rather have done, what would you really have preferred to be doing when you sat down to write? What is missing in the broader mainstream that drives you to communicate?

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