Author of the week: James Frey

last updated 8 January 2015

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.”