James Frey is once again courting controversy, said Suzanne Mozes in New York. For his latest act, the author famously outed on Oprah for fabricating parts of his best-selling 2003 addiction memoir has started an assembly-line fiction factory in New York using graduate students to write serial novels for young readers. “I’m a big fan of breaking the rules,” he told students at Columbia during a recruiting pitch. “A lot of artists conceptualize a work and then collaborate with other artists to produce it,” he said. “That’s what I’m doing with literature.” Critics maintain that Frey is running a kind of literary sweatshop—paying his writers just $250 to $500 to produce complete manuscripts. Sure, he promises them a chunk of future revenues, but the writer of the outfit’s first hit, I Am Four, wound up suing Frey to win a fairer deal.
Frey denies that he’s trying to pull a fast one on his writers, said Katherine Rosman and Lauren A.E. Schuker in The Wall Street Journal. He sees his operation as being mutually beneficial: Employing a couple dozen writers allows him to develop more of the stories swimming through his head. “I have too many ideas,” he says. Meanwhile, the writers enjoy a chance to learn publishing’s ins and outs. Despite Frey’s shaky track record, major firms are working with him. I Am Four was published by HarperCollins and is currently being developed into a film. Two forthcoming books have received hefty advances. Frey’s aim is clear. “Someone is going to replace Harry Potter,” he says. “Maybe it’ll be me.”
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