I agree with Terry - it does depend on what the function of the artwork is, if you like, and we've both used James Patterson as our exemplar. Arguably, it doesn't much matter who arranges the words on the page of a book whose raison d'etre is to convey a thumping good story as efficiently as possible to the widest possible number of potential readers.

But where the aesthetic value of the book is something much more complex and individual, then it's going to depend much more on an individual's mind doing the arranging. It's not, actually, surprising that those authors write fewer books and sell fewer copies, in the short term at least.

Comedy's an interesting case - I assume that one reason that even over here it tends to be written by pairs is that if comedy doesn't make you laugh then it's failed, whereas most of us would feel sad or excited by similar things: success/failure is more binary than with other forms (it's notoriously hard to sell comic fiction, for a similar reason). So having at least one other person to test stuff out on is probably the bare minimum. Mind you, I can't remember which comedy writer said that he reckoned to get 100 laughs in a 30 minute episode of ITMA, or he'd failed, but I think he wrote alone.

I'd love to watch a test case about ghosting, though: someone suing Well Known Author's Publisher, under the Trades Descriptions Act...

Edited by EmmaD at 12:51:00 on 18 November 2013

So, I guess there is the overall question of, Does it matter? If you like the book, who cares who actually wrote it? I'm interested in what Joss Whedon writes but mainly because I might be able to learn from him as a writer.

I agree with pretty much all you say, Terry, but I still think it's a different question to the original one posed. From the reader's point of view, of course it depends on whether you like the book - but you can't tell that until you've read it. It may be BETTER than one the author on the cover would have written. But (sorry for broken record) it's still fraudulent because it's purporting to be something it's not.

I think we're in fascinating and complex territory here. I would love to know how it works in publishing - whether the author comes up with the idea and the outline and 'feeds' it to a ghostwriter and reads/edits it afterwards, or whether they actually have nothing whatsoever to do with the book which is simply sold under their name.

Susiex

Crossed with you, Emma!

I agree with Terry - it does depend on what the function of the artwork is, if you like, and we've both used James Patterson as our exemplar. Arguably, it doesn't much matter who arranges the words on the page of a book whose raison d'etre is to convey a thumping good story as efficiently as possible.

I don't know about James Patterson (except that he writes war? type stuff) but is he a made-up person? Did someone called James Patterson ever write a novel, or has 'he' always been written by a group of people? I think my argument stems from the precedent that's been set. If James Patterson were a bunch of writers who came up with a novel which readers loved, and these writers have been turning out books by James Patterson ever since, that's fair enough. As Terry says, that's a 'brand' thing. But if James Patterson really wrote the initial x number of books, then it was farmed out to other writers, something seems wrong to me. With popular/successful authors, a precedent has been set and then it's been changed without informing the consumers.

Susiex

Re how ghosting works, I think it varies wildly. Very occasionally you get a celeb who hasn't even read the book - Naomi Cambpell the most notorious - but most would have a bit more input. I suspect that more genuinely believe that they did a lot of the making of it, by coming up with the ideas and discussing the story as they go along and even having input into how things are written - Jeffrey Archer being a case in point. And where, exactly, that shades into the sort of super-heavy editing in Terry's anecdote, is impossible to say.

You might enjoy Jennie Erdal's memoir about ghosting for Naim Attallah, Susie. Can't remember what it's called.

Actually, we should be glad there's ghosting work around - it keeps a lot of good writers in business with their own work, who couldn't afford it otherwise.

Crossed with you, Susie (I am SO not here, I'm working) - James Patterson wrote thrillers, first by himself, then using ghosts to keep up the output: he comes up with the storyline, they fill in the blanks. He's consistently one of the biggest-selling authors in the world. It's a bit like being a one-man equivalent of Working Partners or the other companies who manufacture category fiction and kid fic, and help a good few WriteWorders to pay the rent...

Edited by EmmaD at 12:59:00 on 18 November 2013

Tee hee, the further we go into this the more complex it gets! There's ghosting in terms of memoirs - where the ghostwriter and the celebrity have to collaborate and work together on the book (on the whole) and there's ghosting in terms of novels, where there could be no input whatsoever from the original novelist. Would anyone here have a problem if a well-known writer died (in obscurity) and a publisher commissioned a ghostwriter to continue writing their novels?

Susiex

(I'm not here either - just going out for a walk!)

Edited by susieangela at 13:03:00 on 18 November 2013

I think we're in fascinating and complex territory here. I would love to know how it works in publishing - whether the author comes up with the idea and the outline and 'feeds' it to a ghostwriter and reads/edits it afterwards, or whether they actually have nothing whatsoever to do with the book which is simply sold under their name.

Too big a question to answer! But on a related topic, perhaps - I attended a panel at World Fantasy Con a couple of weeks ago, on writing tie-in fiction. There were some big names in the field there, e.g. Christopher Golden who's written for X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc; and Nancy Holder with a similar CV. What was perhaps surprising was the passion with which they talked about what they do. All six agreed that you can't write tie-in fiction unless you love the subject matter. Another guy (whose name I've forgotten) said, for example, that the writer for the Spartacus novels (TV series, not film) had to drop out and he was given the job at the last minute. He'd never seen the series so had to watch them all in a two-day splurge. Again, he said he wouldn't/couldn't have done it if he hadn't fallen in love with the characters.

One of them talked about how what they do tends to be looked down on but he asked the question, what is the difference between someone making a movie of a book (which is completely acceptable, of course) and a writer making a book out of a movie/TV series?

Mind you . . . I'm not sure of the quality of a lot of tie-in fiction, but then I haven't read that much.


Edited by Terry Edge at 13:19:00 on 18 November 2013

it's still fraudulent because it's purporting to be something it's not

I don't think it is, in many cases, and I think the key to the problem is in the word 'it'. The 'it' - the book - isn't purporting to be anything but what it is: it can't pretend anything. It's just a book.

Would anyone here have a problem if a well-known writer died (in obscurity) and a publisher commissioned a ghostwriter to continue writing their novels?

Yes, I would have a problem with this, because the well-known writer would not have consented to it. That really would be fraudulent.

I just remembered - my last agent used to represent children's author, Lucy Daniels, who wrote the Animal Ark series. These books sold by the gazillion but Lucy Daniels didn't actually exist; she/it was a collective. Her fans thought she was real, though; and here I think we do enter the territory of the morally dubious. You might expect adults to know or at least suspect that not all James Patterson books were written by him; but kids are going to believe Lucy Daniels is a real person who all on her own wrote Aardvarks in the Alley, Ferrets in the Foreskin and all the rest of them. Tut tut. Shame on you, um, not sure who to point the finger at . . .

Yes, I've got friends who've written for Animal Ark, and others - it's the Working Partners model.

Who wrote Flowers in the Attic - it's famous that she went on writing stuff from welllllll beyond the grave.

Terry, this struck a chord- my daughter's school tried to hunt down an 'author' to come in and talk about her massively popular animals-come-alive fiction series, only to discover that the author didn't exist... even though there were loads of details about her idyllic farm lifestyle in the foreword etc. Cue crying from at least one child who had begun an imaginary friendship with said author.

"Cue crying from at least one child who had begun an imaginary friendship with said author."

Oooooh, noooooo!