Humazon

Two of my favorite authors growing up were Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene, authors of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. I read everything I could get my hands on from both of them. It would be decades before I learned that neither author actually exists. Both were the creation of Edward Stratemeyer, who owned Stratemeyer Syndicate, which sounds like a place that hires a lot of henchmen. What Stratemeyer recognized is that readers’ appetite did not match an author’s output. So he created a system, one of the very first content farms in publishing. And it was wildly successful. James Patterson created something similar, leveraging the skills of unsung writers to feed a single brand. These publishing schemes have been long known and given a bit of side-eye by other authors and scrupulous readers, but publishers and bookstores have been absolutely delighted. Voracious readers are the bread-and-butter of this industry. However … the efforts of the Stratemeyer’s and Patterson’s of…