Inside the shadowy world of celebrity ghostwriters
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What’s the secret behind a successful celebrity tell-all? Ever since Billy Connolly’s biography Billy (written by his wife), Katie Price’s 2004 memoir Jordan and Peter Kay’s 2009 memoir The Sound of Laughter made publishing millions at the start of the millennium, celebrity memoirs have remained big business. There is a stream of famous faces wanting to tell “their side of the story”.
Data from Nielsen shows that sales of arts and sports biographies and autobiographies (which include the majority of celebrity titles) rose by 45 per cent in 2021 compared to 2019, while Britney Spears has reportedly sold her tell-all memoir to Simon & Schuster for $15 million. Even Prince Harry is cashing in on the trend, with his memoir being released by Penguin Random House later this year.
And while moving anecdotes about a difficult childhood, a rags-to-riches path to fame or a career filled with love affairs help these books fly off the shelves, many of these memoirs wouldn’t exist without a helping hand: the ghostwriter.
Britney Spears set tongues wagging over whether she would be writing her memoir herself after she posted a cryptic message on her Instagram next to a picture of a typewriter, reading: “Shall I start from the beginning?” When Prince Harry’s memoir was announced late last year, conveniently left off the press release was Pulitzer Prize-winning US journalist and star ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer, who is reportedly earning $1 million dollars for his contribution.
So with ghostwriting still such a hush-hush profession, how do people end up with the job?
Prominent ghostwriter Andrew Crofts – who has written 80 books for a range of politicians and billionaires, charging a reported six figures – was thrown in at the deep end when a business acquaintance asked for his help in writing a book, despite never having done it before.
Free from what he felt were the confines of journalism (finding good subject matter that translates to sales, sufficient time with interviewees), Crofts threw himself into ghostwriting. In the late 1980s, he took out a classified advertisement in The Bookseller that read “ghostwriter for hire” and left it running for 15 years. “I was the first person to do that, as far as I know,” he said. “I thought there must be other people ghostwriting, but it wasn’t really talked about back then, and it was a very different time in publishing when they had more money for in-house editors who could rewrite entire manuscripts if they felt it necessary. I started at the right time.”
The world may have moved on from personal print advertising, but younger writers are still finding it possible to carve out a niche for themselves in the world of ghostwriting. Shannon Kyle was a journalist on national newspapers before she was unexpectedly asked to write Jade Goody’s final memoir in 2009, which became a bestseller: following its success, she found her first agent and has been collaborating on books ever since. The pay, Kyle says, “varies widely” – she has “heard of publishers offering experienced ghostwriters just £1,500 to write a 70,000 word book” while others get “offered six-figure sums”.
Unsurprisingly, the day-to-day routine of a ghostwriter shifts depending on the extremity of their deadline. For Goody’s memoir, Kyle was given just three weeks in total to conduct all interviews and write the book, though the usual turnaround time is around three months.
It comes as little surprise that many prominent ghostwriters tend to have had successful careers as journalists; the attention to detail, interviewing skills and writing flair that act as prerequisites for reporters all lend themselves to the craft of writing books. Lyric Winik, who worked with First Lady Laura Bush and Michelle Obama, transitioned from magazine journalism to ghostwriting for more financial security following the 2008 recession: “By nature it is quite a ghostly profession, because you don’t go around hanging out business cards or anything like that. It’s much more of a word of mouth type of profession, and I myself got into it almost completely by accident.”
Once a ghostwriter makes a name for themselves, book commissions can start to number five or six a year; the more they write, and sell, the more money they get offered, although some famous ghosts have relied on the fruits of star power and clout to land multi-million dollar deals rather than sheer volume of published books. New York native Moehringer started his career on national newspapers before becoming a novelist, earning particular success with his 2005 memoir The Tender Bar, which has been adapted for the big screen by George Clooney. It is reportedly that same Hollywood star who introduced Prince Harry to Moehringer, though why the Prince chose him as his collaborator remains unknown. But his credentials – you can’t get much bigger than a Pulitzer – speak for themselves.
Defined as a “person whose job it is to write material for someone else who is the named author”, some ghostwriters become celebrities in their own right following particularly high-profile commissions, such as Moehringer or Barbara Feinman Todd, who worked with Hillary Clinton. But the majority of ghostwriters still battle the stigma that surrounds their industry, with some perceiving it as secretive or underhanded, a mark of failure on the part of the named author. Meanwhile, the writers themselves often struggle to receive proper credit and are restricted from advertising or talking about books they have worked on due to complicated NDAs.
Previously a shadow industry not understood by most of the public, ghostwriting took centre stage in Robert Harris’s 2007 political thriller The Ghost. In the novel, later adapted for the silver screen by Roman Polanski, a controversial politician reportedly based on Tony Blair (a long-term friend of Harris’s, before they fell out over the Iraq War) collaborates with a ghost to craft his autobiography.
Filled with intrigue, suspense and double-crossing, the protagonist, a ghostwriter (played in the film by Ewan McGregor) grapples with what truth the politician is willing to give up to make the book a success – and what he’s willing to do to hide the darker parts of his past. Admittedly more dramatic than the usual day-to-day responsibilities of an ordinary ghost, the film catapulted the industry into the public consciousness.
Crofts, already established within the publishing industry, became a bestseller under his own byline with 2014’s Confessions of a Ghostwriter, where he said the opportunity to interact with – and write for — interesting people from a diverse range of backgrounds was too good to pass up. In the book, he explains the allure of ghostwriting: “Hiding behind the title of ghostwriter I could converse with kings and billionaires as easily as wh**** and the homeless; go backstage with rock stars and actors and descend into the bowels of the earth with miners and engineers. I could stick my nose into everyone else’s business and ask all the important questions I wanted to. At the same time I could also live the pleasant life of a writer, my days unencumbered by hours of crowded commuting or unnecessary meetings in bleakly lit offices with people who were of no interest”.
However, the public is not always thrilled to discover that their favourite celebrity used a ghostwriter to pen their story, especially if done in secret; Crofts thinks stars would be much better off being honest about any collaborators from the outset to protect their own back. Back in 2014, the popular YouTuber Zoella sparked fury for failing to state explicitly that children’s author Siobhan Curham had helped with her debut novel Girl Online. “If fans think somebody is lying to them, if their hero is lying to them, then they would care,” Crofts says. “But if publishers are open from the beginning and say we’ve got a writer in to help, I don’t think people would mind. The fans would much rather have a nice, readable book than something that’s a real struggle to get through.”
Molly-Mae Hague, the 22-year-old Love Island star, has joined the legions of reality stars before her (Charlotte Crosby, Joey Essex, Pete Bennett, the Kardashians) in announcing her first book, set to be released with Penguin this summer. Titled Becoming Molly-Mae, an apparently unconscious nod to Michelle Obama’s New York Times bestselling 2018 memoir, it will cover “the moments, relationships and life lessons that have made her who she is. From the energetic child who loved Irish dancing and pageants, to the teenager holding down a job at Boots whilst building her dreams at fashion school, her journey to Love Island and how she copes with fame today.”
As fans of Hague’s vlogs and Instagram stories will know, she does not appear to be an avid reader, nor writer, preferring hauls of cleaning products and Balenciaga shoes to the collected works of the Bronte sisters. Her decision to pen her life’s story seems more tailored to profit than literary aspiration – that is, if she wrote the story herself. Penguin has yet to confirm whether Hague worked with a ghostwriter or specific editor, and many have taken their silence as a form of admission.
Critics on social media also suggested that publishers rushing to commission celebrities like Hague would prevent real writers from getting their shot. It is a futile comparison, says Crofts. “Publishing these types of celebrity memoirs doesn’t mean other, more academic or literary books aren’t getting written – they don’t suck up all the money. They’re different markets: people don’t stand in bookshops and think ‘should I buy Harari’s Sapiens or Becoming Jordan’. People that criticise them for taking money away from ‘proper’ writers are not comparing like with like.”
But outdated stigma about the act of hiring a ghostwriter can prevent people from declaring it, fearing it diminishes their accomplishments or makes them appear unable. Lisa Dickey, who collaborated with Hollywood actors Patrick Swayze and Jane Lynch on their respective memoirs, believes such concerns are unfounded and outdated. Dickey said: “If there were anything I could change about this work, it would be the sort of stigma that exists, because it doesn't make any sense. If you look at someone who's at the top of their profession, they obviously have an incredible skill set that got them to where they are. Why do they have to be able to have this other skill set? It's really difficult to write a book. It's really, really difficult to write a good book.”
Kyle thinks it futile to focus attention on who wrote the book, rather than the story set out within it. For celebrities who do not double up as professional writers, it seems preferable to have a qualified collaborator crafting an engaging and readable body of work to working alone, tirelessly, on a manuscript doomed to fail because of inexperience and busy schedules. “Most celebrities are extremely busy people with packed schedules”, she said. “To write a 70,000 word manuscript takes around three months of 8-12 hour days. Celebrities simply don’t have time or in most cases the skill sets to put together a professionally written manuscript.”
Some writers have taken to shedding the ghostwriter title completely, disliking its connotations of secrecy and underhandedness. Winik, who collaborated with former First Lady Laura Bush on her acclaimed memoir Spoken From The Heart, said neither the title ghostwriter or collaborator properly encapsulates her day-to-day work. Instead, she said, it is time “for somebody to invent a new word. I like the term ‘writing partner’, because partnerships are structured in a lot of different ways and I think this job is a creative partnership in the best sense of the word.” Fellow US writer Michelle Burford labels her work with Cicely Tyson and Alicia Keys “co-authoring”; her website describes her as a “story architect”.
People looking to add a new wing to their house would not feel embarrassed about hiring an architect because they had no building experience, Dickey adds, so “why would you be embarrassed that you’ve hired a person whose profession is to shepherd books such as yours into the world?”
