Ghostwriter
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, or reports which are officially credited to another person. --Wiktionary |
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A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other content which are officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written material. In music, ghostwriters are used in film score composition, as well as in pop music such as Top 40, country, and hip-hop. The ghostwriter is sometimes acknowledged by the author or publisher for his or her writing services.
Fiction
Ghostwriters are employed by fiction publishers for several reasons. In some cases, publishers use ghostwriters to increase the number of books that can be published each year by a well-known, highly marketable author. Ghostwriters are mostly used to pen fiction works for well-known, "name" authors in genres such as detective fiction, mysteries, and teen fiction.
Additionally, publishers use ghostwriters to write new books for established series where the 'author' is a pseudonym. For example, the purported authors of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, "Carolyn Keene" and "Franklin W. Dixon", respectively, are actually pseudonyms for a series of ghostwriters who write books in the same style using a template of basic information about the book's characters and their fictional universe (names, dates, speech patterns), and about the tone and style that are expected in the book (for more information, see the articles on pseudonyms or pen names). In addition, ghostwriters are often given copies of several of the previous books in the series to help them match the style.
The estate of romance novelist V. C. Andrews hired a ghostwriter to continue writing novels after her death, under her name and in a similar style to her original works. Many of action writer Tom Clancy's books from the 2000s bear the names of two people on their covers, with Clancy's name in larger print and the other author's name in smaller print. Various books bearing Clancy's name were written by different authors under the same pseudonym.
Sometimes famous authors will ghostwrite for other celebrities as well, such as when H. P. Lovecraft ghostwrote "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" (also known as "Under the Pyramids") for Harry Houdini in Weird Tales in the 1920s.
As a subject in movies and novels
Movies and novels about ghostwriter:
- Claude Lelouch's 2006 film Roman de gare
- Philip Roth's 1979 novel The Ghost Writer
- Alan Cumming's 2007 horror film Ghost Writer, formerly Suffering Man's Charity
- Roman Polanski's 2010 film The Ghost Writer
See also
