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Ghostwriting the Ghosts

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Early Friday morning, a reader dropped this comment in a thread about ghostwriting:

Second, I don’t know how concerned the publishing industry really is about the sanctity of authorship. There are new Jason Bourne and Hitchhiker’s Guide books coming out and the original authors are dead.

I honestly wasn’t surprised to hear that these authors and their works were being recycled by their respective estates. Whatever loyalty an author’s relatives or heirs might have to the author’s original material, and whatever reverence they might have for an author’s original voice, it’s awfully hard to leave a vein of gold in the ground. And particularly so if the person you might be insulting is already dead.  [ Read more ]

Ghostwriting Is Not Benign

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As a reader reminded me yesterday in a comment to my post on ghostwriting, ghostwriters were widely used by the drug company Wyeth to promote hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women. While the resulting fraud succeeded in creating a market into which Wyeth and other companies were able to market their drugs, the long-term consequences were not benign:

But the seeming consensus fell apart in 2002 when a huge federal study on hormone therapy was stopped after researchers found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke. A later study found that hormones increased the risk of dementia in older patients.

The drug companies wanted a scientific image for their products, so they created one by paying ghostwriters to create the appearance of broad-based research support for their drugs. As a result, they ended up killing human beings who would not otherwise have died.

Because ghostwritten celebrity bios don’t usually lead to death, and because the effect of such authorial fraud is difficult to detect, there’s a tendency to believe that the hiring of a ghostwriter is benign and that an example like the Wyeth case is an outlier. But lying about authorship in order to create a brand image for a drug and lying about authorship to create an image for a performer or politician involves exactly the same intent and execution. While there is clearly a range of possible negative outcomes in these examples, the frauds themselves are identical.

Looking at the outcome of a particular fraud also fails to reveal another kind of damage done by ghostwriting. Less apparent, but more widespread, is the erosion of confidence that ghostwriting creates:

“It’s almost like steroids and baseball,” said Dr. Joseph S. Ross, an assistant professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who has conducted research on ghostwriting. “You don’t know who was using and who wasn’t; you don’t know which articles are tainted and which aren’t.”

And that really goes to the heart of the post I put up yesterday. I understand that everybody does it. I understand that politicians on both sides of the aisle are liars. I get it. Believe me.

If celebrity ghostwriting doesn’t cause physical cancer it’s still a social cancer which erodes our confidence in the things we read and the things that experts and culturally-prominent people tell us. My specific concern on this blog is that it erodes confidence in the idea of authorship, which means it erodes your confidence in me.

— Mark Barrett

Giving Up the Ghost

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Ten days ago, in a post titled Why I’m Opting Out, I wrote this:

Today when I hear a publisher complaining about how books are sacred and how we need to protect the publishing industry, I’m reminded of the same talk from news executives about how critical hard news and investigative journalism are to the health of our democracy. Yet in both instances these are often the same people who are putting crap on the front page or front shelf, making crap physical products, and marketing the most sensationalistic crap they can get their hands on in the desperate hope that it can compete favorably with the crap on TV and the crap on the internet.

In the middle of writing that rant, however, I had a nagging feeling there was something else I didn’t respect about publishing. Yesterday, after running across this story, I remembered what it was:

Less than three months after resigning as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, the onetime vice presidential candidate, has completed her memoir.

HarperCollins Publishers, which signed a multi-million dollar deal with Ms. Palin in May, said in a statement on Tuesday that it had moved up the publication date from the spring of 2010 to Nov. 17 of this year.

The book will be titled “Going Rogue: An American Life”; the publisher has announced a first-print run of 1.5 million copies. Ms. Palin worked with a collaborator, Lynn Vincent, the editor of World, an evangelical magazine.

To the publishing industry’s determined self-abuses please add: lying about authorship, devaluing authorship and generally treating authorship like a rented mule. Because I can think of no other industry where the practice of lying about authorship is so completely codified and accepted as it is in the publishing world — which, you might think, would be the last place that would tolerate such a thing.  [ Read more ]

A Ghostwriter Speaks

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A few weeks ago I went on a three–post rant against ghostwriting as an industry practice. I didn’t comment much on ghostwriters themselves because a job is a job.

(And we don’t have to wade into sex-trade analogies here, or references to slavery. I’ve been paid to write a lot of stuff that didn’t have my name on it, but there was no lie attached. In the publishing industry, it’s the goal of willful audience deception that perverts the honorable practice of writing for money into a for-profit lie.)

Today I ran across a new blog (via LisaCollierCool) called Ghostwriting Revealed, and it delivers on the premise:

5.Can you really make a living doing that?

Yes.

6.How do you get paid?

That’s the questions I often get next because nobody quite believes me when I say I make a living as a ghostwriter (and I do.) Often, I am paid directly by the author/expert (that would be the person whose name appears in big type on the book cover.) Sometimes, I negotiate for a slice of the royalties, but not always. Generally, the bulk of my payment is made before the book even hits the shelves.

Writer-for-hire agreements are common. Somebody pays you X dollars, you write Y words, they own the copyright when you’re done. There’s nothing wrong with it, or with ghostwriting as a concept.

Everything has a dark side, however, and it seems to me that a job that conspires to profit by paid-for silence probably has more than a few dark alleys. I’ll be interested to see if the blog author addresses the inevitable shenanigans, or the broader ethical issues that are of concern to me.

— Mark Barrett

Palin’s Profit (or Loss)

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At the beginning of October, in a post gnawing at the subject of ghostwriting, I wrote:

Will Palin’s book include shared credit with her collaborator? I don’t know, but I hope so.

The answer, apparently, is no:

Lynn Vincent, a senior writer for Christian World, is widely reported to have done the gruntwork on Going Rogue — proving so efficient that Palin’s manuscript was delivered early and allowed HarperCollins to move the publication date from spring 2010.

Vincent is not getting a byline on Going Rogue, and she’s not disclosing her fee.

My concern about ghostwriting, as previously noted, is that it is lying. In some cases these lies are killing people. I also don’t think it helps our political process to allow people to be credited with things they did not do, and I would say that about any candidate.

Regarding HarperCollins’ deal for Palin’s book, it looks like all the high-flying cynicism displayed in the production and marketing of her book may be for naught:

For Going Rogue, no publication has publicly stepped up to claim first serial rights — running the juiciest excerpts before the book comes out, which either kindles or extinguishes public anticipation for it. Such an excerpt deal may have been struck for The Oprah Winfrey Show, which features Palin in an interview the day before the book’s release; the public will find out on Monday.

…

Of course, the stars could still align in Palin’s favor. She could produce the hit she and her publisher are looking for. But the math suggests that it may be the readers who go rogue on Palin — and on HarperCollins’s plans to right the wrongs of its dismal book sales.

If the book stalls, I would like to think that the brute-force mockery of the authorial process had something to do with it, but I know that’s naive. It’s the recession.

— Mark Barrett

A Writer Muses on Marketing and Sales: Finis

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From the moment of conception until you present your work to the market, every decision you make — whether conscious or not, whether active or passive — is a marketing decision. This relationship is inherent in the process, not an affectation. People who study marketing with seriousness are not attempting to impose a theory on the process of production and sales, they are attempting to reveal how each decision at each step in the production process relates to sales.

The biggest problem with marketing theory and practice is in proving the causality of a particular choice or decision. As with stock prices it’s always easier to draw compelling conclusions from results than it is to make profitable predictions. In publishing such past-performance generalizations are useful to the marketing department and critic, but to the creator they have limited utility.

Why? Because at the molecular level every key press is a marketing decision. Every verb you use (or don’t), every comma you use (or don’t), every paragraph you write (or don’t), has a theoretical impact on the market’s acceptance of your work. At the same time it should be obvious that trying to understand and control these causal relationships can lead only to madness. As a practicing writer you must accept that there’s only so far marketing can take you, even if you devote yourself to it completely.  [ Read more ]

Lying With Oprah

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As regular readers know, I think ghostwriting should always be acknowledged. If you have a ghostwriter help you with your book and you don’t admit you had a ghostwriter help you you’re a liar. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve accomplished, which political party you belong to or which deity or god you worship.

Which brings me to Sarah Palin’s appearance on Oprah today, and the fact that — apparently — Oprah Winfrey decided not to ask Sarah Palin about her ghostwriter, or if anyone helped her write Going Rogue, which bears only Palin’s name as author. In fact, the only remotely relevant portion of the interview that I’ve been able to find is a clip posted on Winfrey’s website which did not air in the broadcast interview.

At the 1:44 mark in a clip titled Sarah Palin Explains Why She Wrote Her Book, the following exchange takes place after Palin explains that she has written and kept personal journals for much of her life:

Winfrey — “So when you started to write this book — cause I was wondering how you could remember in such detail, you know…specific events, but that — understood.

Palin — “Yeah, I have detailed prayers that I had prayed over the years, um…different episodes in my life, and — so, logistically speaking, practically speaking, it wasn’t a really difficult exercise to write the book.”

Again, I understand that this is how the publishing business works. If you’re a celebrity and you want a book written, you hire a ghostwriter to write you a book with the understanding that the ghostwriter will not take credit. It’s no different than when you hire a chef to create those easy-to-heat, old-family-recipe meals that impress all your society friends. It’s what busy, wealthy, important people do because there are only so many hours in the day.  [ Read more ]

Publishing is for Professionals

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When we last checked in on the tattered integrity of the publishing industry, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Review of Books, was reminding us that good writers will never need to self-publish:

Our thinking, which may be old-fashioned, is that with so great a volume of books being published each year by traditional publishers, and with so many imprints available, every book of merit is almost certain to find a home at one or another of those presses.

It would be a fallacy to suggest that all books published by mainstream publishers are works of merit, and someone with Sam Tanenhaus’s privileged industry access would never suggest otherwise. Rather, he’s simply asserting that there are no self-published works of merit anywhere in the known universe, and never will be.

I was reminded of this bit of expert analysis recently while reading about the first novel written by the Kardashian sisters, apparently in tag-team fashion:

“As wild as our real lives may seem on TV, just wait to read what we’ve dreamed up to deliver between the covers of our first novel,” Kourtney, Kim and Khloé said in a statement last week, announcing that William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, would publish a novel they had written.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s unlikely anyone who wrote a train-wreck sentence like that is capable of writing an entire book. But you might also be thinking it’s a bit unfair that the Kardashian sisters have a book deal with HarperCollins, while Sam Tanenhaus is crapping all over your writing life by summarily defining you as a failure because your mother didn’t pimp you out for a TV series.  [ Read more ]