[caption id="attachment_808" align="alignright" width="221"]
photo c. Grizelda Holderness.[/caption]
Go into a big bookstore and the odds are you’ll see some glossy titles with celebrity authors. Often the celebrity author is someone you won’t have thought of as a likely author – not the most gracefully articulate of people, or the cleverest, and yet here they are, and it turns out they can write books too.
Except more often than not, they haven’t.
There’s a process called ghost writing, in which a professional author writes a book that will go out with a celebrity’s name on the cover. It happens in fiction, and it also happens in autobiography. The celebrity gets all the kudos (assuming there is any!) and some money the publisher makes money out of the celebrity’s name and fame, and the ghost author gets paid.
Based on the small sample population of ghost authors I know personally, my impression is that no one makes a fortune ghost writing, but that it is a paying gig, and as most authors can’t make enough to live on, few of us could afford the luxury of saying no if offered ghost writing work.
Obviously it’s the same with perfume, because celebrities don’t suddenly become experienced chemists and perfumiers, they just put their name to someone else’s hard work, while the person who did the work accepts being invisible in the hopes of earning something half way decent.
If you’re buying the name on the cover, but the name on the cover didn’t really write the book, are you getting what you paid for? You might be getting a decent enough read, but if the attraction was the celebrity, and the book is ghost written... it’s worth thinking about what you are buying and why. The underpinning assumption is that people will buy the famous name and don’t really care who wrote the book.
It’s one of the reasons to love small publishing. You’re not buying a brand, or a publicity stunt, no one has been exploited to make someone else look good.
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