Why Ghostwriters Are Haunting The Publishing Industry Right Now

The opening scene of Disney’s hit drama Rivals is a particularly memorable one, a mile high up in the sky on the now redundant Concorde, our hero, Rupert Campbell-Black is bonking his ghostwriter in the toilets as the plane goes supersonic.

Returning to his seat afterwards, Campbell-Black makes a quip to Lord Tony Baddingham saying that he believes in ‘laying his ghost.’ Very good, although if you stick with the series, or read the original book, it turns out that Campbell-Black believes in laying… well, pretty much anyone.

At least I thought, ghostwriters got a mention, at least we have been brought out of the shadows for once, even if it is not for our writing skills but our, erm, bonking ones.

But it turns out that ghostwriters are making a little bit of a nuisance of themselves more generally recently, we are haunting the publishing industry, doing our equivalent of moving the furniture around or making pictures drop off the wall, we are, it seems, making sure that people know we exist – now that really is a horror story.

The Bookseller reported this week that ghostwriters are up in arms about the huge advances that celebrities are receiving for novels that they have never once put pen to paper to create. The publishing industry’s obsession with celebrity continues perhaps thanks to the success of people like Richard Osman and his multi-million pound book deals, and they want more and more celebrities to put their names now not just to memoir, but to fiction.

‘But I don’t even know how to write a book,’ these celebrities might (read never) protest, ‘I understand it takes an enormous amount of skill to write a novel, to come up with a cracking idea and plot twist, to sustain that within an entertaining narrative that keeps the reader gripped for three or four hundred pages. I couldn’t possibly receive a six-figure advance when I don’t know how to do any of that.’

‘No problem,’ editors tell them, ‘we know someone who can do it for you and they won’t get paid even a tenth of what you do.’

‘Oh ok, where do I sign?’ shrieks the celebrity, pound signs lighting up their eyes.

I have never ghosted fiction, only memoir, but those who are doing the heavy lifting for these celebrity ‘authors’ are saying that it is not fair that they receive a pittance for creating this bestseller while the celebrity coins in the big bucks and, they make the point, that readers deserve to know that the celebrity brand they’re buying into has perhaps had very little to do with the entire editorial process (of course this varies book to book).

I imagine the publishing industry is doing a very good job of swatting at the air at the moment as this apparition continues their bemoaning, or they might even be calling in a priest to perform a exorcism because if there is one thing that editors do not enjoy it is ghosts coming out of the shadows.

The thing is that these ghostwriters are making a good point, they are saying that the industry is choked with celebrity, that they are selling readers a lie and they deserve to know it, they are concerned that real writers – the one who make a their bread and butter living from writing books – are being squeezed out of the industry because of these shrinking payments while celebrities take the lion’s share. These book lovers are also concerned that the industry is being homogenised in the same way that the music industry has been, that the creativity is being sucked from the room and replaced with this vapid celebrity world, and as a result the writing process is being devalued. All good points.

And should the publishing world listen to them? After all, whether they like it or not, ghostwriters are the people they rely on to turn out bestselling books because, anyone who has attempted to write a book will know, it is not easy, it is indeed very hard – torturous, blood, sweat and tear inducing in fact. So is it time that the publishing industry acknowledge us ghosts as their dirty little secret?

I’m not sure they’re ready to do that.

I have never had my name on the front of a memoir that I have ghosted, though I have been offered it and I know plenty of ghostwriters who insist on it. For me, it creates a disconnect between the author and the reader, the closest I have come is my name on the title page. It was obvious, for example, in my work with Wendy Mitchell that as someone living with a complex disease in her brain, she could never have written her books alone. As Wendy said herself, she would have written the same thing on every page.

But apart from that I am happy to stand in the shadows, I realise that is part of the job, but standing in the shadows also costs money, in fact, standing still costs money at the moment, the world is increasingly expensive and unless you have a rich husband or wife paying the bills and you are ghosting for pocket money or for a hobby, it is increasingly hard to make a living in this industry.

The other day I had a call with an agent who had approached me on behalf of her client about 18 months ago. She was a great admirer of my work and wanted me to create a brilliant book proposal to bag her client a book deal. I was excited by the project, so excited in fact that I waived the usual fee and agreed to write a proposal for much less than I would usually charge. This agent approached me in July, she said she needed the proposal for September to take to the Frankfurt Book Fair, she would pay half the fee for me to get going, secure the deal in October, and I figured I could write the whole book by Christmas and move onto other projects in the new year. Easy.

The reality was that I didn’t receive the first payment for the proposal until almost December, and she didn’t put out the proposal until late January. It didn’t get a deal until May and when it did, it wasn’t enough for me to live on and so I simply couldn’t afford to write the book because, I don’t write for a hobby but to pay my bills. I knew that the ‘author’ would think I was being greedy, I knew even the agent might think that, but it is not a matter of greed, it is a matter of having enough to survive on to buy you time to write because that’s all I want to be able to do, the job I love whilst paying my bills. I don’t need a flashy car, I don’t need expensive holidays, just the basics, you know a roof over my head, food in my child’s belly.

When I explained this to that agent the other day, the fact that I had been left high and dry by that experience, she sighed and said: ‘Hmmm, yes, that is suboptimal.’ She said she hadn’t thought of it like that.

Suboptimal?! It’s devastating, it’s the reason that people like me will be forced to leave the industry and who will ghostwrite the books then? I saw the same thing happen in newspapers, and look at the quality of those now.

Six months before Wendy died in February this year, she wrote an email to me which started: “I was talking to the girls about what I could leave you and nothing came to mind, and then I thought write a book in your own name about our friendship, about how we met and what we achieved…”

It was the biggest compliment that she could have paid me, to have the confidence in me to write about her in her absence, to give me her blessing to do that, and so, this summer, I wrote a proposal about all of these things, about the intimate relationship between a ghostwriter and her subject, so intimate in fact that Wendy had asked me to sign her Dignitas paperwork (as you might know she eventually ended her life by voluntary stopping eating and drinking - VSED). This proposal went out on submission and it has failed to get any interest which makes me sad, mostly for Wendy as she felt she was bestowing a gift to me by giving me her blessing. I was told editors didn’t like the ghostwriter angle, and all I can take from that is this hunch that they simply don’t like to acknowledge we exist.

I think it’s a little different in the States, where ghostwriters also command much higher fees, and this simply must be a sign that the industry values them more highly than it does in this country – sadly money is the best way of letting us know this.

Another agent told me last week that publishers are handing out their ghosting jobs to their old friends in the industry rather than us professionals, and so it feels we’re being squeezed in every way.

This worries me for the future of book publishing, where does this all lead? I am not suggesting that ghostwriters should suddenly find their names emblazoned on the front of books, but I do think there should be more transparency for ghosts, that their name should be somewhere, that it should be clear that these novels have been written by someone else, otherwise isn’t it false advertising? And doesn’t it risk eroding trust in the celebrity brand – no wonder that we are kept secret.

I also think ghostwriters should be paid fairly for their work, and perhaps the suggestion to celebrities that ghosts receive an equal 50/50 share for the writing might make both the celebrity, the industry and the reader recognise the efforts and talent of the writer, or at least that could be a starting point for contracts, and the celebrity can argue from there why they should receive more based on their contribution.

In The Bookseller article last week, Penny Batchelor spoke to many ghostwriters about how they feel about this, and Trevor Wood, winner of the CrimeFest Specsavers Crime Fiction Debut Award, had a good suggestion:

“If a celebrity really thinks they can write a book and genuinely wants it judged on its merits then why not try submitting it under a pseudonym and see if it gets picked up then? Now that I could respect."

After all, if JK Rowling could do this with her Robert Galbraith books, why not some Strictly celeb? Now that might even things up a bit.

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