Celebrity Memoirists and Their Ghost Writers

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting, behind-the-scenes look at ghost writers and their craft.

From the piece...

Midwives, collaborators, co-authors, co-writers, writers-for-hire, book doctors, ghosts—call them what you will—give aid and adjectives to athletes, politicians, movie stars, moguls, miscreants and the briefly famous who are asked to tell their stories and don't know how. "Often, when a celebrity tries to write the book himself, he'll be on page 200 and he's still only 12 years old," said Dan Strone, CEO of Trident Media Group, a literary agency.

Cover billing is a function of the publisher's wishes, the "name" author's wishes, the collaborator's wishes, prior experience, fee, prominence (big names in the field include "Iacocca" co-writer William Novak, and David Ritz, the go-to guy for musicians with a tale to tell) and level of involvement in the project. Is this helper writing every word, simply doing research and fact-checking, or perhaps organizing a pre-existing manuscript into tidy form?

The Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Ron Powers, who worked on Ted Kennedy's memoir "True Compass" but whose name went missing on the cover, is a case in point. "'True Compass' was based on years of personal journals and five years of an oral history," said a spokesman for Twelve, the book's publisher. "Ron's role as a collaborator was unique. It was more a matter of shaping text. The words were the senator's own." Because of a confidentiality agreement, Mr. Powers declined to comment.