The British disc jockey Jimmy Savile, who then worked for Radio Luxembourg as well as BBC Television's Top Of The Pops, claims he was backstage after a show when Paul first conceived the idea for the song. John had been principal writer of the Beatles' last five singles and so it was generally agreed that it was Paul's turn to come up with something. Savile recalled John asking Paul what he was going to do because there were only a few days left before they were due to record. "Paul told him that one of his aunts had just asked if he could ever write a single that wasn't about love," remembers Savile. "With that thought obviously still in his mind, he walked around the room and noticed that Ringo was reading a book. He took one look and announced that he would write a song about a book."

Paul has said that he had always liked the sound of the words "paperback writer" and decided to build his story round them. The epistolary style of the song came to him as he drove down to Weybridge for a day's writing with John. "As soon as I arrived I told him that I wanted us to write it as if it was a letter," he said. Tony Bramwell recalls that the inspiration for much of the lyric came from an actual letter written to Paul by an aspiring novelist.

Paperbacks had caused a revolution in postwar publishing, making books available to people who would have found hardbacks too expensive to buy. The poet Royston Ellis, the first published author the Beatles met when they played music backing his poetry in 1960, is convinced that Paul latched on to the phrase "paperback writer" from his conversations with them. "Although I was writing poetry books then, if they asked me what I wanted to be I would always say 'a paperback writer' because that's what you had to be if you wanted to reach a mass market," says Ellis, who went on to become a writer of travel books and plantation novels. "My ambition was to be a writer who sold his books and made money out of it. It was my equivalent of their ambition of making a million selling single."

As with many Beatles' songs, the lyric was driven more by the sound of the words than their logic. Taken literally, it's about a paperback writer who has written a novel based on another novel, which is also about a paperback writer. The "man named Lear" is probably a reference to Edward Lear, the Victorian painter who, although he never wrote a novel, did write nonsense poems and songs which John loved. The Daily Mail gets a mention because it was John's regular newspaper and it often would be lying around the Weybridge house when they were writing. Stories from the Daily Mail would later be used as inspiration for two songs on Sgt Pepper.

The main musical innovation on Paperback Writer was the boosted bass sound. Paul was now playing a Rickenbacker and, through some studio innovations made by engineer Ken Townsend, the bass became the most prominent instrument on the track, bringing it into line with recent American recordings by Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. The harmonies were inspired by the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds.

Paperback Writer was a No 1 single in many countries including Britain, America, Germany and Australia.