Ghosting

If I knew last week that I couldn’t write this article but had already promised to write it then who could/would I have hired to Ghostwrite it for me? By definition the best of them are names I don’t know.

There’s a lovely story told by Liam Pieper, a professional ghost writer:
‘My therapist suggested... that I should try to live in the moment more. They mentioned a book I should read, a very good book full of kindness and wisdom which has inspired many people to live more hopeful, generous lives. I wrote it a few years back.’

Ghostwriting

Ghostwriting (or ghosting) as a term originated in the 1920s with the US agent Christy Walsh, who had a stable of 36 writers to pair with sports celebrities. There are companies in the UK today who operate in a similar way, pairing clients with professional writers. Story Terrace have 600 writers on their books and are looking for more; Book of My Life have 80. Book of My Life founder Alison Vina what she looks for in a writer. ‘All our writers are published authors or journalists. Just as important as their writing experience is their personality. It’s essential that that they are kind, patient and empathic interviewers.’

Ghost authorship also applies to the visual arts and music but I’m going to stick with the writing side of things.

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 (or in the case of  Book of My Life’s the most unusual request was for someone write the story of their dog).

James Fox (left) working on Keith Richards' (right) "Life"

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.

What will you earn? As a respected ghost writer in the world of big publishing you can expect to be paid top rate for a celebrity memoir. But as a pen for hire for an ordinary memoir, the rates are similar to those for copywriters at around £40 per hour.

As a rough guide, you might expect to spend at least 50 hours on a 20,000-word book over three or four months, from first interview to final draft. If you’re working with a package company, they will agree a project fee with you at the outset, which is a percentage of what the client pays them. If you are working with a literary agent and a big name, you may be able to negotiate a share of royalties too.

For instance 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. Surprisingly (well, to me) the average salary for a ghostwriter in the UK is £31,771 per year.

ghostwritten by Hunter Davies

Going back to my original query. What would I have to pay to someone else to write this blog? Woodbridge Publishers reckon: Blogging Ghostwriting get £0.05 - £0.30 per word. So I reckon about £60. Is this worth £60. Don’t answer.

Some information for this blog was from Jools Abrams in Mslexia.

I can’t find any serious ghost written poems. I haven’t written any for someone else. How about this one: 

Ghost-writing the Climber

That weekend there was an accident.
But this is not about where you were,
the merry-go-rope and sky crack of walnut
boulders, the sheep wool sliding in the rain –

but who washed the blood and grit from your arms,
who listened to the oh-oh story first, and heard

the cows on the far slope roll black and white, black and
white, releasing their full vocabulary of ‘no’.

                                                                       Kristina Close

(originally published in Poetry News Spring 2010, The Poetry Society)

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.