Authors Electric

Well, that was an interesting month. A wise old agent once said to me, “some projects, Andrew, just seem to travel on oiled wheels”, and that seems a perfect description for the birth of my memoir, “Confessions of a Ghostwriter”, this month. The project began to show promise when the editors at Friday Project suggested almost no changes to the first draft of the manuscript. It picked up speed when their excellent public relations company, The Light Brigade, told me that Robert McCrum at the Observer had read the proofs and wanted to come to see me, followed shortly afterwards with the news that Nick Higham wanted to interview me on BBC News’s “Meet the Author” spot. Within days of publication the Observer article was up on the Guardian website, had been picked up by another Guardian journalist, Hadley Freeman, and was being widely tweeted and commented on. Even before “Meet the Author” had hit the screens favourable reviews had appeared close to home in the Telegraph , the Ti...

“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 Pro...

Once upon a time you wrote something, passed it round your friends/family, edited it, looked up a few agents and/or publishers in the Writers and Artists’ Year Book, sent it off and hoped for some interest.   It was all very simple.  But things aren’t like that any more.  Most new writers workshop their stuff on the internet and many of them will opt to become an ‘indie’ author, publishing their work as an E-book and possibly opting for a paperback with Create Space or Lulu.  They network like mad on the internet and hope for some interest.  That’s also relatively simple.  But ..... The world of independent publishing is becoming ever more complicated as traditional publishing houses realise the potential of this new ocean of talent. Some of them are trying to hoover up would-be authors, offering expensive publishing packages that have attracted a lot of criticism, others are using the E-book world as a slushpile, to cream off the top.  Harper Colli...