Authors Electric

  It’s been an interesting month to be a ghostwriter. The weekend before Prince Harry’s book was officially published, as the leaks and “exclusive” interviews piled up on both sides of the Atlantic, the media suddenly became interested in the idea of who actually did the writing and how the whole relationship with the subject works.   I had been looking forward to reading the book from the moment I heard that J.R. Moehringer was going to be writing it, already being an admirer of his previous work, particularly the ghosting job he did for Andre Agassi. But the eventual book that he and Harry produced surpassed all expectations, providing a brilliant example of just how well a ghostwriting partnership can work if the story is strong, the subject is wanting to be open and honest, and the writer is skillful . On the day Spare came out it broke all records for sales of non-fiction, shifting something like 1.4 million copies in English alone, not to mention the sixteen other l...

  What a strange and interesting world we in the media have created for ourselves, as we pick up characters and stories, some real, some fictional, and then exaggerate and distort them in order to hold the interest of our readers and viewers - or sometimes perhaps to amuse ourselves. One upon a time it was Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, then Princess Diana, Katie Price, the Beckhams, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, the Kardashians and all the others who took their turns in the media mincing machine, sometimes as heroes, sometimes as villains. At the moment, it is Harry and Meghan who have had their pretty interesting personal story twisted, inflated and turned into an intellectual property which will, no doubt, generate billions of dollars for the global media barons, before it has been sucked dry of all possible new angles, and the public has grown tired of them. (Some of us are old enough to remember a time when both Prince Charles and Prince Andrew were depicted in the media ...