Everything I ever learned about fame and fortune as a celebrity ghostwriter

Yes, despite their critics, all those reality stars and influencers do have something to say that's worth hearing... Now I'm telling you their secrets.

Hello! My summer of minibreaks has continued with Euro Disney, as it always will be to me: certainly not Disneyland Paris. There is something so essentially euro about all the employees trying to bound about with uncharacteristic corporate bonhomie, sometimes in Mickey Mouse ears. Which they did very well, making the trip home through Charles De Gaulle airport a hilarious journey back down to earth with a bump: the staff started passionately rowing (flirting, possibly?) as an actual robot brought out our chips. Robots robots everywhere.

I came home to this box:

My set of copies of the book I wrote in a month - from start to finish of the first draft - as a ghostwriter for a social media creator. A full post on how (not to) write a book so quickly will be coming one day, should you too also decide to cancel all social plans and spiral quietly into a manic sleepless state through work overload. The influencer herself was great to work with, however, despite our extremely tight schedule, which got me thinking. I’m not ghostwriting now - this Substack is my writing outlet these days - which has given me a bit of space to reflect on it all. Cue the nostalgic violins…

Why publishing relies on ghosts

When people hear you’ve ghostwritten for celebrities, I think they tend to imagine a memoir by Michael Caine or some other chat show veteran: a Hollywood star, maybe nearer the end of their career, whose book would get bought up and serialised by a Sunday paper. But if you think about what fame means these days, it’s no longer just about that sort of celebrity. It’s the Kardashians and krew, soaring to global prominence on the back of grid posts and reality TV slots, or any of the myriad other ways you can make yourself known now.

Likewise, the books you’re seeing prominently displayed when you walk into a high street bookshop often bear names familiar from reality TV and social media, or both. Perhaps even someone who is not even familiar to the wider public outside of their platform, but who has an absolutely enormous audience on it - so, with all those caveats, I will stick to the term celeb here. Also, these people are often young - at the start of their working lives, rather than nearing the end - which may be why their books are often not straight memoir, even if that’s part of it; often there will still be a self-help or other “guide” element.

Typically, how it works as a ghostwriter is you interview the book out of the person, termed the author - contractually, a figure is normally put on the time you get with them, of 20 hours - by turning your scrappy recorded conversations into some 60,000 or so words that flow as a narrative, to a structure that you’ve already thrashed out with their team and the publisher. Everyone will feed back with their edits and revisions, until you get to a manuscript that everyone is happy with. Simple! (Not always.) And also: that’s for non-fiction.*

As for why they don’t write their books themselves: time is a huge factor, and the desire and ability to do it. Getting a whole coherent draft out matter of months is hard: on one occasion I was brought in mid-book to take over half way through when someone (in this case, unusually, writing their own book) just could not hit the deadline. Their copy itself was great, but their time was an issue.

I know these sorts of books can, perhaps understandably, get people’s backs up. There is huge appetite for them however. Two of the books I’ve ghostwritten have been Sunday Times number one bestsellers, others have been top 10. At one point I remember going through Amazon UK’s top 20 list of bestsellers and counting at least half that I knew must been ghostwritten (a fraction that would move with the time of year, as the type of book being published changes - but I’d bet never disappears). They make up an enormous part of the publishing industry.

Finding your perfect match

If that makes the process itself sound super impersonal, it’s not. A ghostwriting project generally starts with a beauty parade where the publisher introduces various writers to the celeb to assess your chemistry, in person or via Zoom. Over the years I’ve ended up being paired with mostly young women: social media creators, reality TV stars and more traditional celebrities (if they’re at book deal status, they will often fall into more than one of those categories). Exactly why we have clicked is hard to say - but I’ve always been very clear that it’s very much their book, not mine, and asked them about their vision for it. I also spent a lot of the pandemic dicking about on TikTok, which has proved surprisingly handy.

When it’s not a fit, though, it is quite obvious. One person looking for a writer to tell their story of serious illness was just obviously not a vibe match, lovely though they were and I (tried to be) also. Hilariously, the editor in question said afterwards that they would put me forward for a former Olympian instead, who I think would have required less softly-softly handling. Sometimes-too-blunt Type As of the world unite!

But I have loved my influencers. Some more than others, naturally, but overall they’ve been great to work with. At which point, someone (sorry, but yes, it has generally been a man asking me this) will say: “But what on earth does [insert famous young woman] they have to say to the world? Why do we need a book from her?” To which I’d say: you are not her audience. And not every book in the world has to meet your criteria to exist. But, actually, young women who have self-made themselves into very lucrative businesses do actually have something to say - and I’ve personally learned from them, as I think others might. They are the opposite of nepo babies, typically from very normal backgrounds, and generating big, exciting careers and significant public profiles out of pretty much thin air.

As for why I am not naming them, though it’s far from salacious: even without NDAs (sometimes used, often not), publishing has a tradition of not shouting about who you’ve ghostwritten for, which can feel a bit odd in this sell-yourself social media age. Since I’m usually listed in the thank yous at the back of each book, the silence can feel a bit pointless - just Googling me would give away my role. Still, on a personal level, it wouldn’t feel fair to out people who are just going along with industry norms, and generally new to that world. So here goes.

The 7 habits of highly effective people creators

1. They know age ain’t nothing but a number (at least most of the time), and don’t let it hold them back. There have been funny moments, as when one household name stopped our chat to earnestly explain who her favourite musician was - “He’s a rapper, Emma” - and I felt the years between us. But generally, ghostwriting has been an absolute lesson in how much guff is talked about Gen Z as a uniform cohort, just as there has been about millennials in previous years. Those I’ve worked with in this age group have been thoughtful and motivated and insightful.

2. It should be obvious, but they know there is not only one route to success. Some of the people I’ve worked with told me how they have very much struggled at school, even as I have been struck by how poised, sharp and socially savvy they are. Which is always a reminder, albeit hopefully one that I didn’t need, that there are so many different ways to move through the world, despite all the emphasis we often experience on going a certain proscribed route, garlanded with exam successes and stiff certificates.

3. Their success is hugely down to the fact that they are consistent - and resilient. A lot of onlookers assume the people I’ve worked with have soared to overnight success on the back of their looks or luck. But even when success has come to the people I have worked with at a young age, they have usually been slogging away for years in some form. Despite getting quite a lot of flack for it, from people they know and strangers. Which leads me on to how…

4. They execute. They have all had that key ability to come up with a plan and act on it, whether that was starting a YouTube channel, committing to a gym regime (they are always in the gym), or launching a business. It didn’t have to be a complicated plan - what they did didn’t always feel massively new in itself - but they would start and commit to projects quite easily. (And now - plot twist - you can write your Substack direct from your phone, so can you.)

5. Their overwhelming attitude around all that is - maybe a bit awkwardly, for us Brits - positive. Which may seem easy, when you have success and fame, but from my conversations with these women (which would not necessarily make the final draft, given the other people involved), I learned that someone’s personal story is often a lot more complicated that a cheery public persona might suggest. Not that that is a front - just not the full story. Deep into a winter lockdowns, working on one book in particular, I would come away buoyed up by the sense of possibility I got from my chats with the well known person in question - just go and do it - even in that bleak time.

6. They are part of a creator economy that is enormous and more powerful than a lot of us still realise. With many influencers, you can basically take a guess what they are earning, and add a zero. It wouldn’t make it in to their books - got to be relatable (and I really want to write about that rule for women) - but put it this way: their spending power is more houses than handbags.

7. They have put themselves out there to get to where they are now. This is the absolute number one takeaway for me, especially as a writer. From their teenage years, typically, they have been creating across their different social media platforms or putting themselves in the public eye through whatever means it took, in the face of - and I think this has been the case for every single one I have worked with - ridicule, scorn, and a lot of online abuse. But overwhelmingly, to end on happier note - by putting themselves out there they’ve found likeminded people and literally created the lives they wanted. Which I’ve found inspiring, helping to kick myself out of my do-it-all-in-the-background-and-never-make-any-mistakes mentality engrained in me as an editor and, ironically, ghostwriter. And as might quite a few of us, I’d bet.

*And a very big P.S.

Though I’ve heard horror stories about ghostwriters having to write memoir based on newspaper cuttings, when they couldn’t get access to the celeb involved, non-fiction in my own experience always requires a big contribution from the name involved in terms of their ideas, memories and anecdotes, even if they are not physically tapping out a draft on a laptop. In contrast, ghostwriting fiction - which does happen - seems to me to be less fair to the ghostwriter in all sorts of ways, including financially, since it requires a very different type of creative input, writing to the bones of a plot that has been provided by the publisher, with the author’s input. So while I’ve been approached to do so, I haven’t done any.

So what about you - is there anything inspiring in the influencer economy for you, or is all a social media mess? And should publishing get a bit more transparent about the whole ghostwriting thing? Let me know your take in the comments…