Why James Patterson’s fiction factory is lining up the ‘shots’

The prolific American novelist is to engage more readers with ‘BookShots’ – cheap, concise page-turners that can be read in one sitting

The fiction factory run by the hyperprolific American novelist James Patterson is to increase productivity, he revealed this week. The extra titles, two to four a month, will be cheap page-turners labelled BookShots, all under 150 pages and so readable in one go. “You can race through these – they’re like reading movies,” he said.

While a mixture of evangelical motives (getting non-readers reading again) and commercial ones (flogging books to them) are discernible in the initiative, its most compelling aspect is the call to revert to the principles set out by Edgar Allan Poe in a much-quoted 1846 essay on fiction composition, including rigorous plotting and not being “too long to be read at one sitting” (otherwise “unity of impression” – above all, narrative tension – is lost).

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