Authors Electric

It has been an interesting month of contrasts. In London I have been attending meetings with the fast-expanding marketing team being recruited to launch the novel I have ghosted about a man called Joe, who just might be able to solve every one of the world’s current problems. It is now due for publication in the Netherlands next June and in the UK next September. The writing is 99.9% done and so I was able to enjoy the meetings knowing my responsibilities were almost fully discharged. The nucleus of the party met and stayed at “The Rookery” in Clerkenwell, a wonderful hotel which is a sister to the eccentric Hazlitt’s in Soho and feels like a rather grand country house despite being in the middle of a very buzzy bit of  London . Highly recommended and a million miles from the other story I was researching this month in  Africa . The subject of the latter book walked out of South Sudan in search of an education when he was a young boy. He had no mon...

Two of the biggest names in the world, Bill Clinton and James Patterson, are “collaborating on a novel”. But who is actually going to be sitting down and doing the typing? Will there be a ghostwriter involved? Would anyone care if there was? So where does ghostwriting end and collaboration begin? And what roles will the two “big name” editors who have been announced play in the process? I guess it all comes down to how many megawatts of star power each member of the team can muster. How far up the billing in the global media pantomime do their names appear? Bill Clinton is about as high as you can get in the international fame game. Anyone who might be a potential buyer of this thriller will know who he is. His name will give the book credibility because he actually knows what goes on behind the scenes – dare we say, he actually knows “where the bodies are buried”? He reputedly wrote every word of his autobiography, “My Life”, and unkind critics complained...

This was the month of Zoella the Vlogger, (that’s “video-blogger”, for those who haven’t been following the story.) For reasons too complicated to be bothered with, I was aware of this book’s approach before the full page article in the Sunday Times explained that it was the fastest selling new release from a debut author since the beginning of time. The article was a sort of expose, telling shocked readers that Miss Sugg, (Zoella’s wonderfully Dickensian real name), had had the help of a ghostwriter to pen her debut novel, “Girl Online.” A languidly affronted Will Self was quoted as saying that he did not regard Zoella as a writer “in the sense that I’d regard Marcel Proust or Franz Kafka as one.” The following morning my in-box was filled with requests from eminent journalists asking if I had any thoughts on the whole shocking scandal. Always eager for a bit of free publicity I stared hard, (it has also of course been a triumphant month for that greatest of all starers, Paddin...

“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...

Monocle Magazine hit the headlines a few months ago by putting Britain number one in its “soft power” league, claiming we were the “most powerful nation in the world in terms of cultural influence”. Admittedly that was in the wake of the Olympic/Jubilee euphoria, but even if you discount the hyperbole, British writers should still be feeling pretty cheerful about the future. If we cast our minds back to Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony, a huge part of the show referenced characters who originated in the minds of British writers – Messrs Potter and Bond obviously, Mary Poppins, Captain Hook, Cruella de Vil – all now cliched images certainly, but our cliches none the less. Looking back over my ghostwriting client list of the last few years I am struck by how many of them are international – India, Nigeria, China, America, Uganda, Switzerland, Greece, Cyprus, Monaco, Bermuda, Brazil, the Netherlands, Australia, the United Arab Emirates …. This seems to have come about ...

On a recent Guardian blog the literary commentator, Robert McCrum, analysed some of the "genres" in the book publishing market. One of the genres he identified was "Ghost Lit". "A surprising number of successful books," he wrote, "(bestselling memoirs especially) are written by ghost writers. But there are also ghosted novels, too. By definition these wraith-like creatures have no names and are known only to their fellow spooks – and the publishers who depend on them." It then occurred to me that “wraith-like creatures”, pretty well sums up the whole experience of being an author. Sitting in a Soho editing suite a couple of weeks ago, watching the rushes from the filming of my novel “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”, (freely available on   http://www.wattpad.com  and soon to be Kindled by its original publisher), I was struck first by the changes which the scriptwriters had made to the original story in order to make it work as an episodi...

Since Wattpad is proving to be such a fruitful source of readers, (hits for The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer are now heading towards a quarter of a million after about four months), I am now in the process of putting up a new book, one chapter at a time, (serialisation worked for Dickens after all ...) The Secrets of the Italian Gardener is set inside the palace of a dictator about to be overthrown in the Arab Spring. The story is told by a ghostwriter who, while inside the palace writing a book for the dictator, meets a wise, elderly Italian gardener who gradually unravels the story of who really holds the power and wealth in the world. He literally discovers "where the bodies are buried". As the rebels draw closer to breaching the palace walls the ghostwriter is also struggling with his own breaking heart and an overwhelming burden of guilt. The inspiration for the story comes from the times I have spent during my ghostwriting career amongs...

I was sent to Bangkok as a gift this month. I was to be presented at a party to the host, who had long said he wanted to write a book and whose family thought he would welcome the help of a ghost. The family did not ask me to go to the Orient gift-wrapped, but they did ask me to take with me a mock-up of a possible cover of the book, so that there would be something tangible to be handed over, something that would show instantly what the gift was. That got me thinking about the place for printed books now that we are all concentrating so hard on understanding the dynamic of the electronic versions. This imaginative idea of the book as a prestigious gift would not have worked so well if presented in e-book form. It would have lacked the cultural resonance of the print version. The recipient of the gift would not have been able to pick it up, turn it over in his hands and pass it round the guests who had assembled for the presentation beneath the hotel’s palm trees. E-books are undoubte...