May 7, 2025 - 1:15pm
The publishing industry doesn’t mind disgracing itself; and authors far downstream of the churn of philistine mass-market books can only be grateful for the subsidy we receive from bestsellers. There is no general or common reader in the sense that Virginia Woolf referred to; we have consumerist readers who must pick from brightly-coloured, similar IRL-clickbait-bookish items. This is the general law of publishing in this decade and, largely, this century.
The unholy alliance, announced this week — and covered breathlessly by the New York Times — between YouTuber Mr Beast (otherwise known as Jimmy Donaldson) and author James Patterson is not only a vivid reminder of how stupid books have to be to sell. It’s also a reminder of the larger move by the Big Five publishers to recapture the attention of male readers, who have stopped buying books, ironically, in favour of video content like Mr Beast’s.
What Mr Beast and James Patterson share, even more tellingly, is a preoccupation with understanding the cognitive mechanics of attention, and the storytelling algorithms which capture attention. Patterson is to thrillers what Mr Beast is to YouTube: they are masters of mental meth, of the dopamine hit. It is not surprising that, according to the New York Times, Patterson is one of Donaldson’s favourite writers (where does Chaucer land in the Beast literary canon?).
The Beast click-machine will pay editors’ salaries, even if his fee is rumoured to be around the eight-figure mark. And yet those resources will be funnelled into giant swings and misses on advances for other mega-sellers as the industry gambles with its house money. The Beast-Patterson windfall will not, I suspect, encourage HarperCollins editors and their corporate publisher overlords to invest in young or overlooked writers, in translations of difficult international masters — let alone the under-published genres of poetry, drama or philosophy.
Mr Beast could do more for literature if he told his online audience to read difficult, serious books, old and new. The honourable thing would be to spend the attention-capital he’s accrued by developing a science of attention-hacking and spend it on what’s left of intelligent culture. Like a land developer who has razed a row of old houses in a dying town, Mr Beast could offer to save those that remain. So could Patterson. But, of course, that’s not how things work.
The degree to which Mr Beast’s young click-addict audience will transfer to books is, as the NYT notes, unclear; but if even a fraction of his 500 million followers buy his book, it will be a major windfall for a large corporate publisher like HarperCollins. The Leviathan works best at scale.
For adults who still idealise the possibilities of the book, who still live on a dying star in the Gutenberg Galaxy, who still imagine that a book might edify, inform, imbue with wisdom, hone the mind’s wit, the only possible — and dignified — response is scorn. Spiritual rebellion against slop and attention-hacking is in order. If you’re reading this, if you’ve read other press about the Unholy Alliance, buy a different book, from a different kind of publisher, for the sake both of your cultural soul and the culture itself.
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