Can YouTuber MrBeast get Gen Z to read James Patterson’s latest novel?

NEW YORK – When Jimmy Donaldson, the American social media creator known as MrBeast, invited American novelist James Patterson to his studio in Greenville, North Carolina, in 2025, he did not intend to write a book with him.

Donaldson just wanted to meet “people that were No. 1 at something”, said Michael Cruz, head of development for MrBeast’s brand.

Donaldson, 28, has earned a record 517 million YouTube subscribers by filming outlandish competitions and stunts with exorbitant cash prizes for contestants, and is the world’s No. 1 YouTuber.

Patterson, 79, has written or collaborated on hundreds of books that have sold hundreds of millions of copies combined, and has published more No. 1 New York Times bestsellers than any other author.

They connected over their efforts to promote education and literacy.

Patterson – who was awarded a National Humanities medal, in part for his “championship of literacy” – has, according to his website, donated more than US$220 million (S$280 million) to booksellers, libraries and other literary endeavours.

Donaldson, who has admitted to thinking books were boring until his early 20s, is a prolific philanthropist who has funded, among other initiatives, a US$1 million school expansion project in Ghana.

Both of them share an entrepreneurial approach to storytelling. Their conversation about reluctant readers soon evolved into an effort to write a thriller with the breakneck pace of a MrBeast video.

The resulting novel, The Most Dangerous Games, was published on Sept 1 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. In it, 100 contestants vie for US$1 billion by participating in extreme challenges, including swimming through shark-infested waters and enduring sub-zero chill in Antarctica.

Book publishers fiercely competed to acquire the book in 2025, hoping that MrBeast’s name could draw some of his massive audience into bookstores. Now that the novel is out, it is testing whether a generation raised on sub-second video cuts can be coaxed into reading.

“I’m very excited because I think this could be the first book for millions of young people that they actually enjoy,” Donaldson told American newspaper USA Today.

“We’re not trying to preach to the choir here,” Patterson said in an interview with the Times. “We’re trying to reach out in particular to people that aren’t in the choir.”

He has collaborated with celebrities on novels before. In 2018, he began publishing novels written with A-list public figures, including former US president Bill Clinton, late singer Dolly Parton and, earlier in 2026, actress Viola Davis.

But The Most Dangerous Games is Patterson’s boldest attempt to court younger readers. Its marketing campaign even mimics the eye-catching vibrancy of a MrBeast video thumbnail.

In a promotional YouTube short, Donaldson holds up the novel from behind a glass table propped up by stacks of cash, while Patterson presses a big red button on a wall behind them, starting a fiery explosion.

A QR code on the back cover of each copy invites readers who submit a proof of purchase to compete for US$1 million in a real-life challenge. People who read the book all the way through can gain an advantage by collecting plot-related hints and Easter eggs.

The book debuted at No. 3 on the Times’ hardcover fiction bestseller list in its first week on sale.

It sold 22,646 hardcover copies that week, according to the bestseller lists released by Publishers Weekly (PW), which relies on numbers provided by publishing industry sales tracker Circana BookScan. Patterson’s collaboration with Davis sold 57,454 hardcover copies in its first week, according to PW and BookScan.

A spokesperson for MrBeast declined to give details on sales not counted by BookScan. A HarperCollins spokesperson also turned down a request for internal sales numbers.

It remains to be seen whether the book’s rapid pacing and cash incentive can woo Donaldson’s audience and make it an enduring hit.

“The people who don’t read James Patterson are not going to convert because MrBeast is on the cover,” said Kathleen Schmidt, an independent book publicist. “A big following doesn’t really convert into meaningful book sales.”

“It’s not just about whether someone has an audience, it’s also about whether that audience is made up of people that actually buy books,” Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On (2013), wrote in an e-mail to the Times.

Patterson, who worked in advertising before stepping away in 1996 to write full-time, is no stranger to savvy cross-media marketing.

For his breakout novel, Along Came A Spider (1993), he wrote, funded and produced a TV commercial after its publisher, Little, Brown, balked at the idea. The publisher agreed to share the cost of airtime after watching the advertisement.

Patterson maintains that unlike his co-author, who has used his platform to sell fans everything from chocolate bars to financial services, he does not “really think about the marketing at all”.

“I don’t have formulas,” he said. “I pretend there’s one person sitting across from me. I’m telling them the story. I don’t want them to get up until I finish.” NYTIMES