United Ghostwriters

“Where did you get that word from?”

May 22, 2019May 28, 2019
by Simon Rae

When a friend asked the other day ‘How’s the ghostwriting going?’ I just said, ‘Fine.’ As you do when someone asks ‘How are you?’ They really don’t want to know about the ingrowing toenail, that recurrent chest pain you get when you run for the bus, or anything else that may be intermittently worrying you. I certainly didn’t want to know how the accountancy was going. Maybe I was too casual, because my friend went on to tell me that a number of ghosted footballers’ memoirs read as though they were simply transcribed from interviews. In other words, a bit

May 17, 2019May 17, 2019
by Martin Toseland

Last week was quite a week for ghostwriters breaking cover. After the New York Times revealed that Donald Trump lost over $1billion in the decade from 1985-1994, Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal, suggested that Random House either take the book out of print or re-classify it as fiction. If the book is to remain available, Schwartz went on to say, it should be re-titled The Sociopath. Ouch. Meanwhile, revelations by another of the president’s ghosts, Charles Leerhsen, took us directly into the deal-maker-in-chief’s office. Leerhsen wrote Surviving at the Top in 1990 — a point

May 8, 2019May 9, 2019
by PhilipWhiteley

I have two live projects at the moment: ghostwriting a book on teamwork in modern businesses, and doing the development edits for my third novel, to be published by Unbound in late 2019 (I would give the title a plug, but that’s currently under discussion …). They appear to be very different projects, but one issue is common to both: finding the right voice. On the ghostwriting side, the style obviously has to be my client’s, not mine; an early chapter draft was not quite there – which is to be expected. To this end, we make sure we chat

May 2, 2019May 2, 2019
by Teena Lyons

We’ve all done it. There you are, telling your friends one of your favourite anecdotes and somewhere along the way the story changes. We conveniently forget some bits that might make us look a bit foolish, while talking up the parts where we seem more interesting/funny/unusual. And that’s all fine when you are sitting around a table in a social situation, having fun. It makes for a great evening and, after all, everyone instinctively knows that there is often an element of exaggeration in any storytelling. These embellishments are not done in a malicious or deliberately misleading way. But,

April 23, 2019April 23, 2019
by ChrisWest

Getting the right endorsements is an important part of a book’s success. There’s something of a debate about exactly how important: I don’t think a perfect endorsement will rescue a mediocre book, but it can certainly make an already good one a lot more noticeable. The perfect endorsement is from someone greatly respected by the book’s target readership. It is, of course, positive, but more than that, it ‘positions’ the book in the way you want it to. In the real world, however, you probably have to compromise. Suppose you have a mediocre quote from a respected source, versus a

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