Harlan Coben: 'Every successful author still has to treat it as a job'

“I’m in a self-hatred mode right now, actually,” the New York Times-bestselling author Harlan Coben tells me on the phone. “I’m writing a little slower than I want to be writing.”

It’s odd to hear this from a man whose biography is studded with the kind of numbers that torture the more penurious sort of writers. He’s written 27 novels, seven of them New York Times No 1 bestsellers. He has 60m books in print in 41 languages, and his advances are well into seven figures. He’s won the big three in mystery awards – the Edgar, the Shamus and the Anthony. The blockbuster French film based on his novel, Tell No One, was nominated for nine Cesars.

In short, Harlan Coben has more readers, and makes more money, than every writer I follow on Twitter combined.

Readers first fell in love with Coben in the 1990s through Myron Bolitar, a hapless former basketball star who solves mysteries with a waspy sociopath named Win. Coben’s atmospheric, twist-laden stand-alone novels cemented his popularity and earned him an annual spot at the top of the bestseller lists. The latest of these, The Stranger, which comes out in the United States and United Kingdom today, documents desperate acts in a serene suburban hamlet populated with lacrosse moms, and grapples with technological and moral dilemmas taken straight from the headlines.

Coben’s gregarious and voluble personality stands in a direct contrast to his occasionally grim books. The Stranger deals with internet monitoring; his novels, which often draw upon the tools of surveillance, have become inadvertent time capsules of technology over the years. Coben says he intentionally draws upon life in his own town in northern New Jersey for his novels. “I like to set my novels in places that are seemingly placid, places that are the fruition of the American dream– house, 2.4 kids, two-car garage – and show how fragile that is.” But he also wants readers to recognize the Starbucks and dad jeans, “to maybe laugh a little about their own lives”.

Coben himself seems to be living as close to this dream as it’s possible to get. The really important numbers in Coben’s life are on the home front – one wife, four children, and two dogs. I ask him how he manages the logistics. He and his wife, a pediatrician, split domestic duties (he does more ferrying of children; she does more cooking). “The day that my fourth child was born, was the first day I hit the NYT bestseller list. We had a newborn, a two-year-old, a four-year-old and a six-year-old, so it was crazy for a while.”

With a crowded household, Coben makes his office in some unlikely spots around New Jersey strip malls. “For a while I was working at a coffee shop that was located in an A&P supermarket, right by the deli counter.” Home is full of pitfalls, even now that his children are beginning to leave the nest, and Coben doesn’t like to write there: “When you’re in your house you’re like, ‘Maybe I’ll put aluminum siding on.’” Other than writing and his family, Coben claims not to have much going on, other than a relatively recent and lackluster golf habit: “I should have just broken a glass and jammed it in my eye.”

His current bout of self-hatred notwithstanding, Coben sticks to a punishing schedule that typically has him beginning a book in January and finishing it in November or December. This year, he’s also busy at work on his first television projects, The Five for Sky in the UK and No Second Chance for the French network PF-1.

Not unlike The Walking Dead, which he watches every week with his son, Coben is not afraid of bleak endings or of killing off important characters. I ask him how he balances his authorial choices with his legions of fans, whether he has found himself in Misery territory. He protests against the designation “fan”, a word that makes him cringe. “Bruce Springsteen has fans. Football players have fans. I still don’t feel like I have fans. I call them readers.”

When I ask him about changes in the publishing business, Coben is more bashful. “If I was good at business, I would have a real job,” he tells me. “I don’t want a real job; that’s why I became a writer.” The anxieties, he says, change from year to year –first it was Barnes and Noble, then it was Amazon, or the e-reader. It’s hard for him to keep up. “All I know is if I put my head down and write the best book I can, I’m putting myself in the best position I can to succeed.”

He does, however, make me reconsider my habit of hanging out on Twitter with so many griping underpublished writers. Coben points out that “people waste a lot of time doing the marketing and networking rather than trying to write the best book that they can”. When people ask him how to go about growing their Twitter or Facebook presence, he cites Gillian Flynn, a friend and the author of the breakout hit Gone Girl, who avoids Twitter and Facebook: “I’m sure someone will find exceptions, but I haven’t really seen that many authors who have completely broken out because of their wonderful social media skills.”

What does make a career go, then? I ask Coben. “Every successful author I’ve ever known still has to treat it as a job. You have to get your butt in the chair and do the work. If you go into it thinking that the muse is going to come whisper in your ear every morning, that’s the kind of nonsense that drives me batty, and it’s just not true. And that’s true for the most commercial writer and the most critically acclaimed writer.”

Coben numbers both sorts of writers among his friends, in droves. His college neighbor was David Foster Wallace and he is fraternity brothers with Dan Brown. Anna Quindlen is Coben’s main reader, after his family and his editors, and he and Mary Higgins Clark rap about her complicated plots. Many of his writer friends, he tells me, understand the very specific “champagne problems” of the business of being a bestselling author, which he hastens to assure me are not really problems at all.

He and his cohort, he says, are “living the dream”. “It’s not that hard to sit at a table and have people ask for your autograph and tell you how wonderful you are,” says. “I recognize every day how lucky I am to have this job. How grateful I am and how much responsibility I have. When my reader is going to spend money to buy The Stranger, and not just money, but time, I can’t really think of anything more flattering. I can be as cynical as you want, but that’s the heart of the matter. This is the greatest gig in the world.”