An Author Looks Beyond Age Limits

From The New York Times overnight.

Three years ago James Patterson, the creator of the blockbuster best-selling Alex Cross and “Women’s Murder Club” series, began “Maximum Ride,” a series for young adults about a group of genetically mutated kids who are part human, part bird. The idea, he said, was to get children to love reading — or at least to love reading his kind of books.

Left - Two of the books in Mr. Patterson’s “Maximum Ride” series.

Of the three installments to date, there are about 4.8 million copies in print, according to the publisher, Little, Brown & Company. Despite the kind of numbers that would make most authors beam, Mr. Patterson — who has an estimated 150 million copies of his books in print worldwide, and whose adult novels typically outsell his young-adult titles by two or three to one — wants to sell more. A lot more.

Now, with a new volume, “Maximum Ride: The Final Warning,” going on sale next month, Mr. Patterson figures the best way to get young readers may be through their mothers.
“The reality is that women buy most books,” he said in a telephone interview. “The reality is that it’s easier, and a really good habit, to start to get parents when they walk into a bookstore to say, ‘You know, I should buy a book for my kid as well.’ ”

As a result, Little, Brown has asked booksellers to commit to keeping the new “Maximum Ride” book — along with “The Dangerous Days of Daniel X,” the first title in a new young-adult series, due out in July — at the front of their stores as long as Mr. Patterson’s adult titles usually stay there, in the hope of luring more adult buyers.

In the past, Mr. Patterson, who is accustomed to having his books dominate the eagerly sought display tables and shelves at the front of the store, felt that the “Maximum Ride” books (on which he works with a co-writer) were getting buried in the children’s section. The most recent book in the series, he complained, “was No. 2 in the country of all books when it came out, and then it had a tremendous drop-off because it just kind of disappeared.” (According to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, “Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports” sold 192,000 copies in hardcover, hardly a poor showing.)
In addition to wanting more young people to read the books, Mr. Patterson and Little, Brown maintain that more grown-ups would buy and read them, if only they could find them. According to market research conducted by Codex Group on behalf of Little, Brown, more than 60 percent of the readers of the “Maximum Ride” series are older than 35.

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