Ghostwriter
A ghostwriter is a person hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are credited to another person as the author. Celebrities, executives, participants in timely news stories, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, memoirs, magazine articles, or other written material.
A ghostwriter is expected to closely replicate the writing style and voice of an author's previous works while still providing new literary content. Memoir ghostwriters in particular pride themselves on "disappearing" into the persona of the credited author as a mark of craftsmanship. In music, ghostwriters are often used to write songs, lyrics, and instrumental pieces. Screenplay authors can also use ghostwriters to either edit or rewrite their scripts to improve them. Usually, there is a confidentiality clause in the contract between the ghostwriter and the credited author that obligates the former to remain anonymous, or obligates the latter to not reveal the ghostwriter. Sometimes the ghostwriter is acknowledged by the author or publisher for their writing services, euphemistically called a "researcher" or "research assistant", but often the ghostwriter is not credited.
Ghostwriting also occurs in other creative fields. Composers have long hired ghostwriters to help them to write musical pieces and songs; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is an example of a well-known composer who was paid to ghostwrite music for wealthy patrons. Ghosting also occurs in popular music. A pop music ghostwriter writes lyrics and a melody in the style of the credited musician. In hip hop music, the increasing use of ghostwriters by high-profile hip-hop stars has led to controversy. In the visual arts, it is not uncommon in both fine art and commercial art such as comics for a number of assistants to do work on a piece that is credited to a single artist; Andy Warhol engaged in this practice, supervising an assembly line silk screen process for his artwork. However, when credit is established for the writer, the acknowledgment of their contribution is public domain and the writer in question would not be considered a ghostwriter.
Overview
A consultant or career-switcher may pay a ghostwriter to write a book on a topic in their professional area, to establish or enhance credibility as an expert in their field. Public officials and politicians employ "correspondence officers" to respond to the large volume of official correspondence. A number of papal encyclicals have been written by ghostwriters. A controversial and scientifically unethical practice is medical ghostwriting, where biotech or pharmaceutical companies pay professional writers to produce papers and then recruit other scientists or physicians to attach their names to these articles before they are published in medical or scientific journals. Some university and college students hire ghostwriters from essay mills to write entrance essays, term papers, theses, and dissertations. This is largely considered unethical unless the actual ghostwriting work is just light editing.Ghostwriters are hired for numerous reasons. In many cases, celebrities or public figures do not have the time, discipline, or writing skills to write and research a several hundred-page autobiography or "how-to" book. Even if a celebrity or public figure has the writing skills to pen a short article, they may not know how to structure and edit a several hundred-page book so that it is captivating and well-paced. In other cases, publishers use ghostwriters to increase the number of books that can be published each year under the name of well-known, highly marketable authors, or to quickly release a topical book that ties in with a recent or upcoming newsworthy event.
Remuneration and credit
Ghostwriters will often spend from several months to a full year researching, writing, and editing non-fiction and fiction works for a client, and they are paid based on a price per hour, per word, or per page, with a flat fee, a percentage of the royalties of the sales, or some combination thereof. In 2013, literary agent Madeleine Morel stated that the average ghostwriter's advance for work for major book publishers was "between $40,000 and $70,000". These benchmark prices are mirrored approximately in the film industry by the Writers Guild, where a Minimum Basic Agreement gives a starting price for the screenplay writer of $37,073.However, the recent shift into the digital age has brought some changes, by opening newer markets that bring their own opportunities for authors and writers—especially on the more affordable side of the ghostwriting business. One such market is the shorter book, best represented at the moment by Amazon's Kindle Singles imprint: texts of 30,000 words and under. Such a length would have been much harder to sell before digital reader-technologies became widely available, but is now quite acceptable. Writers on the level of Ian McEwan have celebrated this recent change, mainly for artistic reasons.
As a consequence, the shorter format makes a project potentially more affordable for the client/author. Manhattan Literary, a ghostwriting company, states that "book projects on the shorter side, tailored to new markets like the Kindle Singles imprint and others start at a cost of $15,000". And this shorter book appears to be here to stay. It was once financially impractical for publishers to produce such novella-length texts ; but this new market is, by 2015, already substantial and has been projected to be a solid part of the future of book publishing. So, with its appearance the starting price for the professional book writer has come down by about half, but only if this shorter format makes sense for the client.
On the upper end of the spectrum, with celebrities that can all but guarantee a publisher large sales, the fees can be much higher. In 2001, The New York Times stated that the fee that the ghostwriter for Hillary Clinton's memoirs would receive was probably about $500,000 of her book's $8 million advance, which "is near the top of flat fees paid to collaborators".
A recent availability also exists, of outsourcing many kinds of jobs, including ghostwriting, to offshore locations like India, China, and the Philippines where the customer can save money. The true tests of credibility—the writer's track record, and samples of their craft—become even more important in these instances, when the writer comes from a culture and first language that are entirely different from the client's.
In some cases, ghostwriters are allowed to share credit. For example, a common method is to put the client/author's name on a book cover as the main byline and then to put the ghostwriter's name underneath it. Sometimes this is done in lieu of pay or to decrease the amount of payment to the book ghostwriter for whom the credit has its own intrinsic value. Also, the ghostwriter can be cited as a co-author of a book, or listed in the movie or film credits when having ghostwritten the script or screenplay for film production.
For nonfiction books, the ghostwriter may be credited as a "contributor" or a "research assistant". In other cases, the ghostwriter receives no official credit for writing a book or article; in cases where the credited author or the publisher or both wish to conceal the ghostwriter's role, the ghostwriter may be asked to sign a nondisclosure contract that legally forbids any mention of the writer's role in a project. Some have made the distinction between "author" and "writer", as ghostwriter Kevin Anderson explains in a Washington Post interview: "A ghostwriter is an interpreter and a translator, not an author, which is why our clients deserve full credit for authoring their books."
Ghostwriting by field
Nonfiction
Ghostwriters are widely used by celebrities and public figures who wish to publish their autobiographies or memoirs. The degree of involvement of the ghostwriter in nonfiction writing projects ranges from minor to substantial. In some cases, a ghostwriter may be called in just to clean up, edit, and polish a rough draft of an autobiography or a "how-to" book. In other cases, the ghostwriter will write an entire book or article based on information, stories, notes, an outline, or interview sessions with the celebrity or public figure. The credited author also indicates to the ghostwriter what type of style, tone, or "voice" they want in the book.In some cases, such as with some "how-to" books, diet guides, or cookbooks, a book will be entirely written by a ghostwriter, and the celebrity will be credited as author. Publishing companies use this strategy to increase the marketability of a book by associating it with a celebrity or well-known figure. In several countries before elections, candidates commission ghostwriters to produce autobiographies for them so as to gain visibility and exposure. One of John F. Kennedy's books is almost entirely credited to ghostwriters. Donald Trump's autobiography Trump: The Art of the Deal was produced by a ghostwriter. Several of Hillary Clinton's books were produced by ghostwriters. Nelson Mandela's autobiography was also produced by a ghostwriter.
A consultant or career-switcher may pay to have a book ghostwritten on a topic in their professional area, to establish or enhance their credibility as an "expert" in their field. For example, a successful salesperson hoping to become a motivational speaker on selling may pay a ghostwriter to write a book on sales techniques. Often this type of book is published by a self-publishing press, which means that the author is paying to have the book published. This type of book is typically given away to prospective clients as a promotional tool, rather than being sold in bookstores.
Fiction
Ghostwriters are employed by fiction publishers for several reasons. In some cases, publishers use ghostwriters to increase the number of books that can be published each year by a well-known, highly marketable author. Ghostwriters mostly pen fictional works for well-known "name" authors in genres such as detective fiction, mysteries, and teen fiction.Additionally, publishers use ghostwriters to write new books for established series where the "author" is a pseudonym. For example, the purported authors of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, "Carolyn Keene" and "Franklin W. Dixon", respectively, are actually pseudonyms for a series of ghostwriters who write books in the same style using a template of basic information about the book's characters and their fictional universe, and about the tone and style that are expected in the book. In addition, ghostwriters are often given copies of several of the previous books in the series to help them match the style.
The estate of gothic novelist V. C. Andrews hired ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman to continue writing novels after her death, under her name and in a similar style to her original works. Many of action writer Tom Clancy's books from the 2000s bear the names of two people on their covers, with Clancy's name in larger print and the other author's name in smaller print. Various books bearing Clancy's name were written by different authors under the same pseudonym. The first two books in the Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell franchise were written by Raymond Benson under the pseudonym David Michaels.
Sometimes famous authors will ghostwrite for other celebrities, such as when H. P. Lovecraft ghostwrote "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" for Harry Houdini in Weird Tales in the 1920s.