Stepping into The Spotlight - Andrew Crofts

“So, when are you going to write your own memoir?” people ask whenever I tell stories from my many, many years of ghostwriting.

“Never,” I have always assured them. “I can’t because of all the confidentiality agreements I have signed, all the relationships of trust I have built up with clients over the years.”

Well, now I have done it. Not every story can be told, of course, but for those that can, names have been changed, stories and locations mixed and matched, permissions sought and surprisingly readily given. In the days when I started ghosting, around thirty years ago, secrecy was everything. No one ever admitted they used ghostwriters, no ghostwriters were ever credited or talked about in polite publishing circles. That seems to have changed and most people now get the fact that books need to be written by professionals, edited by professionals and published by professionals.

So on August 14th, “Confessions of a Ghostwriter” will be coming out from Friday Project, an imprint within HarperCollins which started life finding material for books from blogs and other electronic media, (one or two of the stories have appeared before on this website). The cover sports a cartoon of me looking extremely bookish, (my family tell me it is a good likeness), and I must now ready myself to stand by my own words and my own stories after hiding behind more famous and more commercial names for most of my career. It’s exciting, but a little scary.