Ghostwriting: Non-Fiction - The Literary Chameleon

GHOSTWRITERS NONFICTION - The Literary Chameleon

BETHANNE PATRICK:

These days it seems like everyone has a book – 

CLIP - GOOD MORNING AMERICA:

MICHELLE OBAMA: My new book is called the light we carry..

CLIP - GOOD MORNING AMERICA:

GS: Now Britney Spears’ new Memoir she writes about her marriage the

conservatorship the free Britney movement and then the book is out this morning

CLIP - 60 MINUTES:

AC: But now the 38-year-old Prince Harry is telling his own story in a new memoir coming out Tuesday called ‘Spare’ a nod to his backup role in the line of succession

BETHANNE PATRICK:

… from celebrities like Michelle Obama and Dolly Parton, Jada Pinkett Smith to Prince Harry, and of course, Britney Spears. But are all of these household names actually writing their own memoirs?

CLIP - SUNRISE NEWS:

Now the ghostwriter who helped Prince Harry write the explosive memoir ‘Spare’ has spoken out on what it was like working with the Duke in an essay for The New Yorker J.R Moehringer has detailed his close relationship with the Royal and an explosive fight that almost ended their professional relationship.

Today we’re peeling back the curtain on one of the publishing industry’s longest held secrets that’s clearly…not so secret anymore.

BETHANNE PATRICK: 

Welcome back to Missing Pages. I’m your host, literary critic and writer, Bethanne Patrick. This is the podcast where we examine some of the most surprising, industry-shaking controversies in the literary world and try to make sense of them. 

This is the first episode in a TWO-part series about a lesser known aspect of the publishing industry - ghostwriting! On today’s episode we'll be diving into all things non-fiction and next week we’ll explore the even more complicated world of fiction ghostwriting. In this episode we demystify the ghostwriting process and even the cooking process- more on that later!- but no matter the nonfiction medium, the central question is: How do you tell someone else’s story but make it authentic?  

Chapter 1 - Get Him to the Ghost

BETHANNE PATRICK: 

Let’s go back in time for a moment.

Christy Walsh was not the first ghostwriter, but he was definitely one of the first to make a thriving business of it. Originally, he was a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald, and in the 1920s, newspapers had begun devoting far more ink to sportswriting. Christy saw an opportunity in a national star… Babe Ruth.

If he could tell Ruth’s stories for him, and convince audiences that they were reading something written by Babe Ruth himself, they had a huge money-maker on their hands. 

Any baseball fan at the time was willing to fork over their cash for the sense that they were peering into the secret world of baseball fame. 

So, it became important to keep that perception alive.

Today, ghostwriting in nonfiction is becoming more popular than ever. But the idea of a ghostwriter still feels secretive, so what do ghostwriters actually do, and why does the job feel a little salacious? 

DAN GERSTEIN: The Bible was ghostwritten. We like to joke it was the Holy Ghost was behind it. 

BETHANNE PATRICK: That’s Dan Gerstein. He is long-time a ghostwriter and an ‘accidental entrepreneur.’ He started out as a speechwriter on Capitol Hill and worked for Joe Lieberman for almost 10 years. Now he’s the CEO of Gotham Ghostwriters, a writing agency that pairs clients of all kinds with seasoned ghostwriters.

BETHANNE PATRICK: How prevalent is ghostwriting? How many books do you like? If you walk into your local indie bookstore or Barnes and Noble, how many books on those shelves are ghost written? 

DAN GERSTEIN: It's a tough question to answer because it varies a lot section by section and genre by genre. a friend of mine who is a ghost writing agent

She has this estimate, which I, I don't think is scientific, but it rings true, which is that 70% of books on the bestseller list for business politics, celebrities have a ghostwriter. 

And then I have a rule of thumb that basically like any book where the author's annual income is more than a million dollars and or they're on television regularly, they use a ghost rec. Now there are some exceptions to that rule, but for the most part, that holds true.

BETHANNE PATRICK: It’s not all celebrities. The typical client might be a CEO, or a public figure getting ready to run for office…they want to release a book but they can’t do it on their own.

DAN GERSTEIN: You know, if you're, they're a lawyer billing, you know, $800 an hour, or they're CEO running a, a global conglomerate, they just can't take six months off to write a book. So they are gonna be seeking help.

BETHANNE PATRICK: That’s where the ghostwriter comes in.

DAN GERSTEIN: The important thing that I think for your audience to recognize is that we use ghost writing for, as an umbrella term, to cut all kinds of professional editorial help, right?

In some cases it is full on ghostwriting a book. In other cases, it's, serving as a editorial advisor and strategists, coaching people through the process of writing a book. 

DANIEL PAISNER: In the middle 1980s, there were a handful, you know, there were a lot of people who did it in a one-off way. There was very often – it was a family friend who happened to be a journalist who would lend an assist or, or maybe a beat writer, uh, who covered a, a, a baseball team who had a relationship with a player and worked with him on the off season on his book.

BETHANNE PATRICK: That’s Daniel Paisner .. Yes, two of the ghostwriters we talked to for this story are named Dan.

Daniel made his start in ghostwriting in the mid-80s. Even then, he remembers it wasn’t a solidified industry so much as it was a side hustle.

DANIEL PAISNER: But now I think you find people who are true craftspeople, they're talented writers, they're able to give voice to a lived experience or a perspective that demands full attention and deserves, you know, a 300 page runway, uh, in order to share that story with a reader in a meaningful way. 

BETHANNE PATRICK: When we look at it that way - it would make sense that ghostwriters are everywhere, especially for celebrity memoirs. How else could you get Paris Hilton or Prince Harry to really put pen to paper?

JON STERNFELD: Unless they're a writer, I can't imagine how they wrote a book.

BETHANNE PATRICK: That’s Jon Sternfeld, who co-authored New York Times Bestseller “Scenes From My Life” with Michael K Williams and has worked on a whole host of non-fiction books.

JON STERNFELD: So unless you're a writer, I'm thinking like Tina Fey, right? Tina Fey wrote, a book, which was great and obviously she wrote it cuz she's a writer. 

BETHANNE PATRICK: For the rest of the memoirs out there? 

JON STERNFELD: But just because you're famous and you have a story to tell, it doesn't automatically translate.

BETHANNE PATRICK: Ghostwriters are an essential tool in the well-oiled machine of writing many celebrity nonfiction books. For many people, being able to place their greatest hardships and accomplishments onto the written page is difficult.

JON STERNFELD: It's not like these people aren't talented or smart or articulate. It's just writing a book is a very hard thing. It's a technical thing. And if you've never done it before, it's really hard to. So you have this sort of integral cog of the book world that exists for the grace of disappearing. And when the book goes to the printer, we disappear.

BETHANNE PATRICK: Unlike the name of a book editor or art director, you just have to look a little more closely to find them.

JON STERNFELD: They're everywhere and nowhere. They are an integral part of non-fiction books, in the same way agents and publicists and art directors are. But the very nature of them is that they don't seek publicity.

BETHANNE PATRICK: Some ghostwriters are starting to use the word collaborator more. It’s a more neutral term, and perhaps a better representation of the all-encompassing role that ghostwriters take on.

But in certain ways they are ghost-like, they have knowledge that often they can’t voice. They exist in a liminal space between private and public.  It is common for ghostwriters to sign NDAs – they are exposed to confidential and proprietary information about their clients. 

DAN GERSTEIN: The higher you go up in the public figure food chain, the tighter the NDA is and the demands for privacy and confidentiality.

BETHANNE PATRICK: That’s Dan number one again, Dan Gerstein. He’s found that in recent years, the need for secrecy has sort of softened.

DAN GERSTEIN: The people who are kind of clinging on the NDA, um, are I think people who are, um, just very cautious about their public persona. Uh, and in many respects the NDA is not. So much about denying the existence of the ghost writer at all. It's more about making sure that their personal details are protected.

BETHANNE PATRICK: That is so interesting because I bet many of us would assume, like you were saying at the beginning, that an NDA is so someone can say, “I wrote this all by myself.” But instead, you're saying it's about making sure, for instance, if the ghost writer is with the client and something happens in the other room, they can't talk about it.

DAN GERSTEIN: That's right. And you know, if you're, you know, uh, talking about like Mark Benioff at Salesforce, which, I know about cuz a writer we work with collaborated on his first big book. That writer, if they're in that trusted, intimate relationship, that is the norm, they're gonna get exposed to the proprietary secrets. And that's something they have to be very, very careful with. So it's not just sort of the personal details. There's often like, you know, very sensitive business information that gets shared. But then there definitely are, you know, a subset of those cautious business leaders, celebrities, public figures who are insecure and they don't want anyone to know that they had help.

BETHANNE PATRICK: But does that mean there should be stigma to the job and to hiring a ghostwriter? Jon Sternfeld hopes for a change.

JON STERNFELD: So it would be nice if people accepted ghost writers as sort of a necessary cog.

BETHANNE PATRICK: To me I can't really think of much of a distinction between a ghostwriter for a celebrity and say a stylist or make up artist. Despite their Instagram captions…most celebs probably did not “wake up like this…”

JON STERNFELD: I think a stylist was an interesting comparison that you made that, you know, some people like the mystery of thinking their favorite celebrities walked outta bed looking like that. But some of them are kind of curious how it actually works.

BETHANNE PATRICK: So maybe ghostwriting should be seen as just a normal part of the process. I mean publishing a book is always a team sport. 

JON STERNFELD: At the end of the day, If you don't use a ghostwriter, you're still using an editor, a production editor, a copy editor, an artist to do the cover, a layout designer.

So it's not like you created the book outta whole cloth. So it seems weird that we draw this arbitrary line, but if anybody actually helped you with the writing, that's different. I don't really think it is.

BETHANNE PATRICK: Celebrity stylists aren’t going away any time soon. And neither are ghostwriters. So what’s it like to be the ghost behind some of the best selling memoirs? That's after the break.

Chapter 2 - The Literary Chameleon

BETHANNE PATRICK: How many books have you worked on in this way? And can you tell us about some of your clients? 

DANIEL PAISNER: Um, I've decided that it's probably not cool to count when I get to, when I got to this level.

BETHANNE PATRICK: That’s Daniel Paisner once again. He writes novels and hosts a podcast that is all about ghostwriters. It’s called As Told To. He hears from a lot of ghostwriters… and he’s a pretty seasoned ghostwriter himself.

DANIEL PAISNER: Uh, so I stopped counting a while ago, the last time I updated my website, but I think it's around 70 books. Wow. Um, not all those are 70 books of mine, so maybe 60 or so are in collaboration with other folks. 

BETHANNE PATRICK: He’s written a book with Ray Lewis, and politicians like John Kasik, Ed Kotch, George Pataki.

DANIEL PAISNER: Pioneers, influencers, business leaders, people like Daymond John. I've done a bunch of books with Daymond who's now on Shark Tank, making a bunch of noise there. And it's been an interesting ride. 

BETHANNE PATRICK: And he’s written for the GOAT. 

DANIEL PAISNER: And I've written for a variety of people ranging from athletes like Serena Williams

BETHANNE PATRICK: Um, you're not a black woman? I'm pretty sure. 

DANIEL PAISNER: I'm pretty sure I am not, I don't know if there's a video to accompany this on, on your YouTube platform, but as your listeners and viewers can see, I am not a black woman…

BETHANNE PATRICK: Serena Williams’ book My Life: Queen of the Court came out in 2010. And Paisner’s name is on the cover, alongside that of Williams.

From Paisner’s perspective, being a good ghost is all about the craft of embodying the voice of your client – THAT is what makes ghostwriting so important for bringing a good book to life.

DANIEL PAISNER: I came to the conclusion early on that in these types of books, if this is the story that this person wants to put out into the world, my job is to help him or her. 

BETHANNE PATRICK: Paisner told the New York Times that he knows celebrity memoirs will sell like hotcakes and then most will end up ‘in the bin’ - or the one dollar discount cart at your favorite used book store.

DANIEL PAISNER: But this is part of the transaction. It's how I make a living. I'm, I'm trying to extract a living from this skill that I stumbled upon. And if I have a hole in my schedule and the winner of the first season of the apprentice calls and wants me to write his. Which I did Bill Rancic, lovely guy, but nobody's caring about that book.

Now in the moment, it became a Times bestseller. That's a good example of one of those books that we had to get out quickly while his star was shining bright. We had to get that book onto shelves, and I knew nobody was gonna read that in a year or two years. But that doesn't mean I couldn't make it as good as it could possibly be.

BETHANNE PATRICK: What, how does it feel about those books that wind up in the dust bin? Is that difficult or is that just part of the cycle of book publishing? 

DANIEL PAISNER: You know, it's part of the transaction. I wouldn't be doing this for 30, 35 years. I've lost count. If I had an ego, or if I worried so much about posterity, you know, if I look on my bookshelf, there are probably 15 or 20 books that I'm enormously proud of that I think will be read 15 or 20 years from now.

DANIEL PAISNER: And I approach those 15 minutes of fame books just as eagerly and enthusiastically and determined to do a good job as I do with these books that I hope will be read for a long, long time.

BETHANNE PATRICK: What distinguishes the books bound for the bin and the long time re-shelvers? Well, for one, is someone enjoying their 15 minutes of fame- ala a reality tv contestant, or do they have staying power. But it goes beyond that. If the book is the story of a big time celebrity or influencer, the success of the book depends on how deep they want to go. 

DANIEL PAISNER: You know, I'm only as good, I'm only able to be as good as my subject is, is able to allow and by that I mean if they're not willing to go there, I can't go there on their behalf. If they're not insightful or reflective. I can't be insightful or reflective If they can't really put me in their frame of mind when some critical thing happened in their life, I can't do that. For them. The example I often cite just to bring up Serena Williams again, and, and, and please, your listeners should know this is not a knock on Serena at all. She was a delight to work with. Um, and she's the goat, right? But right. Her book came out the very same year that Andre Agassi's book came out. 

BETHANNE PATRICK: Andre Agassi is an eight-time major champion and an Olympic gold medalist, as well as a runner-up in seven other majors. He is widely considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time. His book was ghostwritten – or collaborated on – with JR Moehringer, the same writer who worked with Prince Harry.

DANIEL PAISNER: Agassi's book, 10 years on, 12 years on, is still considered one of the greatest sports memoirs of the last 20 years. It's, it's raw, it's brave, it's ugly, it's emotional.

CLIP: THE ELLEN SHOW: It's amazing what you're revealing in this book you talk about so many things that you talk about hating tennis you talk about that you you've hated the sport which is shocking to people that you hated it yeah well it is it was shocking to me you know when I retired I turned a hard lens on myself and realized that you know tennis was never something I chose 

DANIEL PAISNER: And he bled on that page he worked with JR Moehringer, who got a lot of press this season, uh, for having worked with Prince Harry quite famously. Um, That Agassi book was much better than the book I wrote with Serena. Is that because JR Moehringer is a better ghost writer than I am? Maybe, that's possible. He has a Pulitzer Prize. I don't… but what's more likely and what I choose to believe is the case is he was working with a subject who was willing to take risks. 

You know, Serena was a brand. She'd been a brand since she was 6, 7, 8 years old. She'd told the same story over and over again since she was 6, 7, 8 years old. She was upholding a family legacy. She wasn't just writing for herself. She had people who were reading over her shoulder. Agassi was willing to torch all of that, you know, he was willing to throw his father under the bus. He was willing to throw the sport of tennis under the bus. And at the other end, he had a book that was, was searing and strong and memorable. 

And it stands the test of time a little bit better than the book I wrote with Serena. So it's a two-way street. I think you have to operate as, as a reader and as a publisher, you know, when you're or an editor, when you're choosing a, a collaborator, you have to operate from the place of assumption. You gotta assume that anybody who's done this a time or two knows what the hell they're doing. And the key is finding a good match. You know, can this person get this celebrity subject to relax and to open up and to trust him or her with the story? Because if they can't, the book is never gonna be as good as it could be.

BETHANNE PATRICK: So the art of collaborating or ghostwriting a memoir is really about getting the right ingredients and executing the recipe right. And the same goes with collaborators on cookbooks. That’s after the break. 

CHAPTER 3 - Credit Where Credit Is Due

JJ GOODE: I do, sometimes get credit on the covers of the book or Inside of the book. I think when you have a good relationship with the chef and they appreciate the work you, you do, that in my experience, at least, have been eager to, to give me credit or to thank me and the acknowledgements or, you know, there's, it's not exactly a ghost job. I'm not invisible.

BETHANNE PATRICK: This is JJ Goode, he specializes in cookbook ghostwriting. Yes, cookbooks have ghostwriters too. In his two decade career so far he’s helped write about two dozen cookbooks. He’s worked with big shots across the industry, names like April Bloomfield, Masaharu Morimoto, and Gregory Gourdet. And those are just a few.

So what does it take to be the top chef of cook book writing? 

His answer surprised me.

JJ GOODE: Cookbooks, of course, are such a personal document. When you buy a cookbook, you wanna feel like the chef is in your kitchen, they're telling you their stories as they, saute and grill.

BETHANNE PATRICK: So the secret sauce to cookbook ghost writing is similar to coaxing a good memoir out of a celebrity or politician. But of course it involves different tools. 

JJ GOODE: George Saunders is a fiction writer, and he wrote this book about storytelling, called a Swim in the Pond in the Rain. And I actually have this quote and I think it applies to recipe writing too. In a strange way, that's the whole skill to be able to lapse into a reasonable impersonation of yourself reading as if the pros in front of you, which you've already read a million times, was entirely new to you.

It's a little bit of world building, but for George Saunders, he's working with, you know, satin and velvet, and I'm working with plastic and sticks.

BETHANNE PATRICK: But unlike say a celebrity’s life story, celebrity chefs actually cook, so why would they need help copying down a recipe? 

JJ GOODE: People are sometimes confused by the idea that chefs might need someone to help them write their books, especially the recipe portion of the books because you might assume that the chef is the one who's a great cook and can clearly communicate what they do in the kitchen to someone who might not be such a great cook. But it turns out they can't or they can't always do it themselves without help. And part of my job is to sort of be that bridge between. The person who is really good at cooking and the person who may not be. A big part of my job is asking the chef all sorts of dumb questions about what they're doing and why they do it in the kitchen and I also help them tell their stories as well.

BETHANNE PATRICK: And for Goode, the process of communicating a recipe is storytelling.

JJ GOODE: You have to put yourself in the mind of someone who's not the writer, right? In some cases I've seen the chef make the dish. The best cookbooks are the, the ones that are the most fun are the ones where I get to like stand next to the chef while they're cooking because that's fun. And then I get to eat what, what they make. But then I also have to write the recipe as if I had not seen them, fold the dumpling wrapper in a particular way, you have to really really imagine someone who, who has never seen a dish being made. So in that sense, I think there's a similarity there.

BETHANNE PATRICK: But like a collaborator on a memoir, Goode wants to make sure he’s still representing the chef. Forgive one more food pun, the ingredients need to be proportional. 

JJ GOODE: I think there are some projects where the ghost writer does much more than I do. I think they do sort of recipe development in that the food looks like it's from the person whose name is biggest on the cover. But I think that the food is being developed and designed by the collaborator. I think you can tell, the majority of the work is not being done by the person who's booked out ostensibly is. When a cookbook really hits and it really feels right and readers are loving the food. I think it's because either it's because the chef is particularly good at communicating what they do or that the relationship with the co-writer or ghost writer is a particularly good one. So I think it's about the quality of the product.

BETHANNE PATRICK: Whether it’s the most personal details of someone’s life or the recipe for a cake that takes you on a journey and delivers you to a delicious conclusion, the collaborator or ghostwriter’s job is a balancing act. 

They need to represent the authentic experience of the chef or reality tv star and, all the while, the ghostwriter needs to put themselves in the shoes of the reader who wants to be entertained and provided for with clear prose. 

It’s a topic that’s been taboo in publishing for years but I hope this episode in the smallest way moves us towards understanding that nearly all works are acts of collaboration. 

Artists like Michaelangelo and Rembrant relied heavily on assistants to do their work. How could they have completed such masterworks otherwise? Collaboration in art continues to this day. In 2023, the New Yorker peeled back the curtain on painter Kahinde Wiley, the legendary artist who completed the portrait of Barack Obama. Wiley relies on studio assistants to do a lot of the groundwork for his paintings AND it’s a core part of his business plan. How else could he produce the amount of work to meet the demands for his art?

Does that mean the work isn’t solely his – or that audiences shouldn’t see it that way? The closer you look at the idea…the lines get, blurry, almost like beautiful oils on a canvas…

This is just part one of our two part series on ghostwriting! In the next episode – we get the inside scoop on all things fiction ghostwriting. We talk to one of the most prominent fiction ghosts out there, and find something unexpected about the business world of ghostwriting. That’s next on Missing Pages.

Missing Pages is a Podglomerate Original, Produced, mixed, and mastered by Chris Boniello with additional production and editing by Jordan Aaron.

This episode was produced by Claire Tighe.

This episode was written by Lauren Delisle and Claire Tighe.

Fact checking by Douglas Weissman

Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Vannessa Ullman, and Annabella Pena. 

Art by Tom Grillo. 

Produced and Hosted by me, Bethanne Patrick. 

Original music composed and performed by Hashem Assadullahi, additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. 

Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate.

Special thanks to Dan Christo, Matt Keeley, Grant Irving, Daniel Paisner, Madeleine Morel, Daniel Gerstein, Jon Sternfeld, JJ Goode, and Andrew Crofts

You can learn more about Missing Pages at the podglomerate dot com, on twitter at miss pages pod and on Instagram at missing pages pod, or you can email us at missing pages at the podglomerate dot com. If you liked what you heard today, please let your friends and family know and suggest an episode for them to listen to.