Okay, so I admit this post has arrived somewhat quicker than usual, but it's on a subject I would like to address. The recent news that YouTube star Zoe Sugg's debut novel, Girl Online, may have been written by a ghostwriter has sparked debate about the practice of ghosting and the level of deception involved. I'm not going to talk much about Zoe Sugg's case in this post, but instead about the idea of ghosting in general and its place in the wider world of writing.
Ghosting has been in practice for the last century, and ghostwriters are still in demand to write books for politicians, celebrities and musicians. Most often a ghostwriter is used when the celebrity in question has an idea for a book but can't write it down, or because they are so busy that they have no time to write anything. In every bookstore is at least one celebrity autobiography which you can tell has been ghost-written on first reading. For writers who take the time and effort to research, write and assemble books, the fact that ghostwriters hardly receive any credit for their work can sometimes be contentious.
Publishers also have a hand in the ghosting trade at a managerial level. It may well be the case that some publishes choose ghostwriters to write books for marketable authors. Many of Tom Clancy's later works were written by other writers, no doubt to keep the brand going, even while Tom Clancy himself was still alive and mostly still at work. Therefore, ghostwriters have an active hand in whether or not a franchise will continue to be successful, even if the original author is still capable of continuing it themselves.
As someone who has written several manuscripts with fairly high word counts, I can attest to the fact that writing a book is no easy feat. It requires research, commitment, attention to detail, discipline, and above all else a lot of hard work. There is nothing inherently wrong about lacking these things; indeed, I myself can hardly talk about discipline when I have a tendency to be thoroughly careless. Therefore, ghostwriters can be incredibly helpful for someone who has fantastic ideas but has difficulty writing them down. However, the question of how much credit is awarded to ghostwriters is still an important issue.
It may appear to some that ghostwriters are completely deprived of any credit. I'd imagine that it can't be great to have written a hundred thousand word book and see it sold with someone else's name emblazoned on it. Still, it's all part of the job. Ghostwriters must go into a contract to write a book for somebody in the knowledge that they are unlikely to gain much credit for it unless they are revealed by the supposed author or the publisher. They also enter into it knowing that they will probably be paid a far lesser sum than the profits the 'author' will make from the sales. Whether or not the ghostwriters themselves will be satisfied by the deal is entirely up to them, but it certainly can't be easy to have written so much and be relatively unnoticed.
The issue of whether ghosting deceives readers is one that crops up from time to time. It's one thing if the ghostwriter is acknowledged in some form by the publishers, maybe at the beginning or the end of the book, but it's another when a publisher sticks just the supposed author's name on it to further the illusion of sole authorship. A total lack of acknowledgement is something which most people would not put up with unless they expressed an explicit desire not to be credited. In that sense, it is a form of deception on the publishers' part, but not on the part of the supposed author and the ghostwriter.
So, what does the acknowledgement of ghostwriters mean for the people like Zoe Sugg? This latest incident should make ghosting the main topic of debate for the next few days at least, and it has at the least inspired discussion. Ghostwriters are so often unnoticed in the literary world, so it's nice that their work is being talked about in the public sphere. If nothing else results from this, then that in itself makes the whole thing worthwhile.
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