Ya, saying it isn’t possible to do under patent law is no understatement. Even making the patent applications possible to allow would require changes to 35 U. S. C. 112 (A, and probably also B), 35 U. S. C. 101. This all assumes that all authors would have the time and money and energy to file a patent, which even with a good attorney is analogous to is many many hours of work and filing pro se would be like writing a whole new book. After the patent is allowed the costs of continuation applications to account for changes in the process as the author learns and grows would be a hellish burden. After this comes the 20 year lifespan of a patent (assuming all maintenance fees are paid, which is quite the assumption, those are not cheap) at which point the patent protections are dead and the author needs to invent a new process to be protected. Don’t even get me started on enforcing a patent.
Patent law is fundamentally flawed to be sure but even if every author gets infinite money and time to file patents with then the changes needed to patent law to let them do so would leave patent law utterly broken for other purposes.
Using patent law for this is a good idea to bring up but for the above reasons I don’t think it is viable at all. It would be better and more realistic to have congress change copyright law than to change patent law I think. Sadly, I don’t think that is particularly likely either. :(