William Patrick co-wrote Sidney Poitier's #1 New York Times bestseller The Measure of a Man as well as Susan David's #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Emotional Agility. He edited the #1 New York Times bestseller 10% Happier by ABC TV's Dan Harris as well as Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, a New York Times bestseller that won the National Book Award. Other co-writing credits include Sukey Forbes' Boston Globe bestseller The Angel in My Pocket; Washington Post bestseller The Right Kind of Crazy, by JPL rocket scientist Adam Steltzner; Better, by Good Morning America News Anchor Amy Robach; In My Shoes, by Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon; Dr. Ali Khan's The Next Pandemic; Paul Zak's The Moral Molecule; Colonel Matthew Bogdanos' Thieves of Baghdad; Hit Hard, a memoir by Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer; It's Alive, a business book by Chris Meyer and Stan Davis; Frameworks by orthopedic surgeon Dr. Nicolas DiNubile; and The Price of Government by David Osborne.

Along with John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago he is co-author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, which has been translated into a dozen languages, and was chosen as one of Library Journal's Best Science Books of The Year.

During his career at Little, Brown, Harvard University Press, and Henry Holt, he edited works by Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner E. O. Wilson, two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene, the Atlantic's Jack Beatty, Jane Goodall, Stephen Jay Gould, National Book Award winning poet Robert Bly, business gurus Kevin Kelly, Warren Bennis, and Michael Treacy, as well as basketball legend Earvin "Magic" Johnson. He developed bestsellers in categories ranging from business, politics, medical self-help, science, and technology, to psychology and spirituality (including Iron John, which spent 13 weeks at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list).

As a freelancer he has improved manuscripts for a diverse clientele that includes World Wide Web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Google's Mo Gawdat, sociologist Barry Schwartz, cancer specialist Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, psychologist Anna Salter, federal judge Nancy Gertner, narrative journalist Alex Prud'homme, Rolling Stone writer Claire Hoffman, folksinger Liam Clancy, University of Toronto School of Management Dean Roger Martin, Harvard child psychiatrist Dr. William Beardslee, literary biographer Fred Kaplan, naturalist Bernd Heinrich, geopolitical consultant George Friedman, and FBI Chief Hostage Negotiator Gary Noesner. The Wall Street Journal compared his novel Blood Winter to "the fresh early best of Graham Greene and John le Carre," while the Sunday Times of London called it "moving, dryly funny, macabre, enthralling."