Let’s begin with a simple disclaimer: everyone is entitled to write a novel. Celebrity or not, influencer or not, no one should be barred from publishing a book simply because they aren’t a “real” writer. This isn’t about gatekeeping. However, when MrBeast, YouTube’s king of cash giveaways, announces a book deal with James Patterson, it isn’t literature. It’s branding. It’s stunt publishing. And more troublingly, it’s the next phase in the industrial sterilization of human imagination.
This book won’t be written to be read. It will be written to be sold. It will exist not as a story, but as a marketing asset, another product in the MrBeast empire. A glossy wrapper. A gesture. Something to sit on the same shelf, literal or digital, as Beast-branded chocolate bars, burgers, energy drinks, and hoodies.
In essence, the book will be an NFT with a spine, something to be flaunted, bought, and memed but never truly engaged with. Books once invited reflection. This one invites metrics. It will be optimized for virality, not voice. It will be built for maximum conversion, not creative risk. And when that becomes the norm, when storytelling is just another branch on the brand tree, something fundamental withers.
The novel’s premise — a billion-dollar death game across exotic locations where 100 contestants face life-threatening trials to prove their worth — is basically a high-octane remix of MrBeast’s YouTube stunts, turbocharged with Patterson’s factory-built suspense. Part Hunger Games, part Squid Game, the issue isn’t the plot. It’s what the collaboration represents: the idea that writing is just content, and content is just another funnel for merch.
It represents the migration of the publishing world into the orbit of algorithmic thinking, where the only stories worth telling are those that mirror engagement trends and demographic charts. It’s not that this book will be bad. It’s that it was designed never to matter. Its function is not literary. It’s strategic. It’s there to cross-pollinate markets, to extract value from attention. To churn the cultural soil for more product.
Patterson, for his part, has long abandoned any pretense of authorship. He’s an impresario, a publishing machine who outsources most of his books, assembling ghostwriters to churn out thrillers at a pace no human could manage alone. His name is a brand stamp, not a signature. And with every bestseller-by-committee, he’s helped normalize the idea that books are just scalable products, templates with plot twists.
As for MrBeast — who, by all accounts, seems like a decent guy — his business runs on virality, optimized for engagement at all costs. He has built a fortune on a rinse-and-repeat model, essentially creating moments not to endure but to explode on TikTok and vanish in 24 hours. Together, they are building a novel like you’d build a fast-food chain: tested, templated, monetized.
But books aren’t fries. Stories are not thumbnails. And literature, at its best, is not supposed to be engineered in the same way you engineer a giveaway video.
Even if the prose isn’t ghostwritten, the intention is. It will carry the structure of narrative without the pulse of art. A kind of literary uncanny valley: just convincing enough to simulate meaning, just empty enough to feel like marketing. When publishers now greenlight fiction based on follower counts, not literary merit, the result isn’t democratization; it’s domination. It narrows the field. It tells struggling, brilliant writers that unless they’re a brand, they’re irrelevant.
Worse, it warps reader expectations. If this sells millions, and it likely will, the signal to the market is unmistakable: story doesn’t matter; distribution does. Voice doesn’t matter; visibility does. We’re not nurturing the next Baldwin, Morrison, or Kafka. We’re reverse-engineering another MrBeast property.
Of course, this isn’t MrBeast’s fault alone. He’s doing what any savvy entrepreneur would do: leveraging his clout. The real indictment falls on HarperCollins, on publishing itself, which has become so obsessed with “relevance” that it’s lost sight of its purpose. A publishing house should be a cultural lighthouse, not a sales funnel. Its job is to elevate what might be lost, give shape to ideas before they’re fashionable, and preserve literature’s ability to surprise. But increasingly, it’s just chasing noise, high on short-term novelty and low on long-term vision. Art isn’t supposed to keep up with the algorithm. It’s supposed to outlast it — like memory, myth, something built to endure, not to be gamed or monetized.
Let MrBeast do giveaways. Let Patterson keep printing his thrillers. But let’s not pretend this book is about storytelling. It’s about salesmanship. And that should worry anyone who cares about the written word.
READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn:
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