The Economics of Everyday Things - 54. Ghostwriters

0:03Dan Paisner has lived many lives. He's been an international tennis star, an Academy Award-winning actor. One time, he was even the governor of Ohio. But you've probably never heard of him. I don't think anybody's coming through the bookshelves in Barnes & Noble and saying, oh, this is a Daniel Paisner book. I should buy it. They're buying it because of the celebrity name that's on the spine. Paisner is a ghost writer. He's written 70 books.

0:36including 17 New York Times bestsellers. His clients have included Serena Williams, Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, and Ivanka Trump. His job is to get inside the heads of people who tend to be very careful about what they reveal. You know, you push people to reflect and reconsider the stuff of their lives for public consumption. It's a very sort of naked and personal and intimate transaction that happens between a ghostwriter.

1:05and his subjects. That intimate relationship may not earn Payson or credit on the spine of a book, but it pays his bills. A few years ago, I would say to somebody, oh, 100,000 for my writer, and I'd be sort of crossing my fingers and thinking, oh, my God, I've never got to get away with this. But now it's like, oh, 100,000. Of course. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, Ghostwriters. The practice of writing material for publication under someone else's name goes back thousands of years. But the word ghostwriter took hold in the 1920s. It was used by sports agent Christie Walsh. He started a syndicate to produce sports articles under the names of professional athletes. But Dan Paisner says the modern ghostwriting business really kicked off in 1984. That's when William Novak

2:07collaborated with Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca on Iacocca in autobiography. The book was a real juggernaut. I think it was the number one best-selling book in the country for two consecutive years. So he kind of hit that out of the park. And on the back of that success, he became sort of the go-to ghostwriter for every big name, 15 minutes of fame headline book that emerged from the mid-80s to the mid-90s.

2:37Paster was working as a freelance entertainment reporter when he was offered a chance to follow in Novak's footsteps. He ended up ghostwriting a book for the TV presenter, Willard Scott. So this was a gig that was going to run like six months. It was going to pay me sort of a year's salary. And I figured, great, this is a nice sort of refresher or a palette cleanser. There was still, I think, a little bit of a taint or a stigma to the idea of ghostwriting. It was, you know, some people might have disregarded it as hack work.

3:06So I don't know that a lot of people were coming out of journalism school throwing their hats in this particular ring saying, hey, this is something I want to do with my life. It was more of a fallback position. And for myself, it wasn't until I was four or five books into this gig that I thought, OK, this is a career that I've stepped into. Over the past 30 years, he's worked with A-list actors, musicians, politicians, and business leaders. For many celebrities, getting a book deal is easy.

3:36But writing the book is a different story. And that's where Pacener comes in. You know, we are a DIY culture, but if you can't DIY, then you hire some schmuck like me to help you. And that's kind of how it works. If you can write, if you can string two words together, and if you could help somebody be a more effective communicator, then why not put those skills to work on their behalf? Regardless of who the subject is, The general process of collecting information to ghostwriter book is usually the same. What happens in the early going for me is I'll spend some time with somebody a period of days. Sometimes I stay at their houses. I have dinners with their families. I'm with them in their workplace. I need to sort of understand them. I need to walk around in their shoes a little bit. When I'm firing on all cylinders, what I can do is help somebody see themselves better.

4:32It's like therapy, really. Pacener is often working with people who don't have a lot of time to spare. When he was writing a memoir for the DJ and producer Steve Aoki, he joined the musician on the road in a tour bus. This guy does hundreds of shows a year, and he just couldn't possibly sit still to do a book. So I rode on his tour bus with his crew and his roadies.

4:57for a week or so through middle America. And the only times we really could find a work is when we're barreling between Cincinnati and Milwaukee and Chicago at four in the morning and running a tape while the rest of his crew slept in these bunks in the back of the bus. But what I got to see during this experience was how he lived, what it's like to not go on until midnight and to then have to work your way through an after party and wind down at three or four in the morning.

5:25And it sort of just put me in the right frame of mind to be able to write on his behalf. For his book with Ohio Governor John Kasich, he attended Bible study meetings. He would travel back from Washington when he was a congressman and go to Columbus, Ohio every other Monday and sit with his Bible study guys. And they would discuss scripture. So of course I would go every other Monday to Columbus, Ohio.

5:52Not quite as fun as, you know, blazing with a rock star, but it'll do. I'm guessing no dubies with John Kasich. There were no dubies, but we did have a couple of nice bottles of wine along the way. Ghost writers have to glean as much information as they can from a source in as little time as possible. Sometimes they'll only have a few weeks with a subject. It's like you parachute drop into somebody's life.

6:22and you have to be as authentically yourself as possible or they don't trust you. It's a very intense period of time, like maybe six months, that you are in their orbit and working closely with them. And then the project ends and you move on to the next world that you are inhabiting. Valerie Frankel has worked as a ghostwriter for 17 years. Her first collaboration was with the comedian Joan Rivers.

6:52entering Joan's world was just pretty crazy. I mean, you walk into her house and it's this incredible mansion. One of our first meetings, I was led into a room and told to wait. And then she walked in like in a Schmada, like a house dress that was unzipped in the back. And she turned around and said, can you zip me up? And I'm like, oh my God, this is like our first interaction. It was very intimate. And I'm sure she did that intentionally, looking back.

7:20but I was completely charmed by it. Frankel wrote Omarosa Manigault Newman's memoir Unhinged, an insider's account of the Trump White House. She also wrote two fiction and two non-fiction books with Nicole Snooki-Polizi from the MTV show Jersey Shore. Snooki's first novel in particular required an extremely fast turnaround. I wrote it in, I think, seven weeks.

7:47It was a very tight deadline because sometimes that happens with people who are extremely hot in the moment that the publisher wants to get their book out. They crash the book out, which means it's written very quickly and then published very quickly. And then like a month later, it was on the bestseller list.

8:16A part of the job is to have a discerning eye for what to include in the book. Earlier this year, a ghostwriter hired by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem learned this the hard way. Her recent book, No Going Back, included a story about her shooting and killing her 14-month-old dog, and it caused an uproar. I want to say the ghostwriter should have said you really shouldn't include that story. And of course, the ghostwriter community agreed.

8:45You do have an obligation to the author to be the civilian, right? Like a lot of the people who need collaborators are VIPs or celebrities or politicians, and they don't live in the real world. So the collaborator functions not just as the writer, but also the reader, the person who exists in the real world and will have real world reactions to their content. Ghostwriting is a challenging job, and it's a service that celebrities are willing to pay handsomely for.

9:15That's coming up. Ghostwriting is, by nature, an opaque world. So when a famous person decides to publish a book, they generally need a little help getting set up with the best writer. And oftentimes, the first call their literary agent makes is to this woman. My name is Madeleine Morrell. I have a company that specializes in ghost writers. And the only thing I do is matchmake ghost writers.

9:49with quote unquote authors. The author is the person who doesn't write the book and the writer is the writer. Morrell basically invented the job of ghostwriting matchmaker. I've been doing this for almost 25 years. I recognized that book publishing was becoming more and more like Hollywood and everything was predicated on big name people or what we call in the industry, platformed authors, i.e. somebody who can bring a preexisting audience to their book.

10:19and nobody was specializing in providing writers for these authors. Morrell has worked with Dan Pastner on a handful of projects. She now has around 100 freelance ghost writers in rotation. So all of my writers specialize in their particular field, be it politics, business, memoir, health, whatever. And I only work with writers and be multiply published by the five big houses.

10:48And so when somebody comes to me looking for a writer, I go through my list of writers and figure out who's available, who would be most sympathetic to the book in hand. And I come up with 46 different choices of writers. There's a lot of demand, especially in the past few years, when memoirs and autobiographies have boomed.

11:16It's an incredible explosion. I think nowadays, and this is unscientific, but I reckon very frequently 60 to 70% of all books on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list have been ghostwritten. I think that what happened with the advent of social media, with the advent of this endless churning of celebrities, Suddenly, it became obvious that there was a big need for writers to work with these people. There's a huge amount of work out there, which is wonderful for all these freelance writers. But there are also so many freelance writers out there that it's become incredibly competitive. The ones who get regular work can make a good living. The average starting price is probably $100,000. So...

12:12There are books that pay 50,000 to 70,000. I would say the health fitness books pay less on average. And then there are really big books for major celebrities or business people. And those can pay $250,000 or more. I mean, it can go up to, you know, three, four, five hundred. But that's fairly rare.

12:42can fetch even more. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist JR Moreinger was reportedly paid a $1 million advance to ghost-write Prince Harry's 2023 bestseller, Spare. There's a lot of variance in how ghost-writing deals are structured. Here's Valerie Frankel. There's the work for hire, which is where you get a fixed rate that you mutually agree on, where you just get paid a fee, and that's it. There's no...

13:11bonus on the back end, there's no percentage of the advance. I have other relationships where I get a percentage of everything. So, if the author signs a contract for say $10 and I get 35% of everything for every $10 that person makes, I will get $3.50.

13:36from the initial advance to any royalties, to foreign, to drama rights, anything. For all time, I would get a third. In other cases, ghost writers might get incentive bonuses if the book ends up on the New York Times bestseller list. But getting paid in a timely manner can be challenging. Ghost writers are typically paid out of the author's royalties, which means they're last in line when the checks are cut. As a result, Some ghost writers now ask for 50% of their fee upfront. The way a publisher will structure it, it's four payments on signing, on delivery, and acceptance on publication, and then a year after publication when the paperback would come out. So it seems completely unfair that a ghost writer would have to wait a year after publication, which could be a year and a half to two years after the manuscript has been accepted.

14:34when your work is completed. It's really a terrible, terrible situation that's been set up by the publishers. Again, that's Madeline Morel. So from the time a literary agent has a verbal deal on a book to the time they get what we call the on-signing payment, you're probably looking at an average of three months. The writer gets paid when the author gets paid.

15:00If it's a book that's on a rushed schedule, which a lot of these books are because so many of these books have to tie in with some kind of media thing, you know, the writer maybe has to write the book within six to nine months. Well, for three months, they have the choice of either writing without having been paid. They double up and do another book, or they come to Bank Morel, which sort of pisses me off when I'm fronting the moneys for my ghost writers when the authors have plenty of money. And if a writer decides screw it, I'm not going to start writing the book until I have the money. They have a very compressed delivery date. Then they run the risk of delivering a book that's of lesser quality, which means the editor won't want to work with them again. And the agent won't want to work with them again. I mean, we all spend our life cursing and yelling, where's my contract? Where's my money? In order to make any money to begin with,

15:59Ghost writers have to develop a name for themselves. And traditionally, that's been a challenge outside of the publishing world. Ghost writing used to have a sense of secrecy. Celebrities didn't want readers to know they hadn't written books with their names on them. And many writers thought cranking out pseudo-autobiographies was de classe. All of that has changed. The analogy I withdraw is that 20 years ago or so, if you would, doing online dating, you would never tell anybody. Now everybody's perfectly open about it. And I think it's the same with ghostwriting. 20 years ago, it was a dark secret and now it's being talked about. That can be good news for ghostwriters who need to get credit for the work they do under someone else's name. In most cases, the ghostwriter will get what we call a generous acknowledgement.

16:58you know, which is on the acknowledgement page. The acknowledgement can read anything from, you know, who wrote this book for me to somebody who, you know, interpreted my thoughts and some bullshit like that. Increasingly, title page credit is given and that's on the inside page where it says buy XYZ with so-and-so and smaller type. And then, you know, there's cover credit.

17:27Personally, I don't think it's that important, I sort of say, you know, if it makes your mother happy, that's great. Dan Pacenor doesn't mind when celebrity authors downplay the role of the ghostwriter, at least in most cases. The only times it does bother me is when you'll see somebody on the couch at the Tonight Show saying, you know, I had this idea for the title, or I remember when I wrote this part of the book, you know, when they take it to the extreme and talk about how they did this on their own, smoking a pipe with leather patches on their elbows, credits are a currency of the realm for us ghost writers. I need to be able to share with other prospective clients who I've worked with in the past. Most people are happy to share credit and to acknowledge that they had a helping hand here. The few exceptions to that,

18:19rule have mostly to do in my career with people who are known as creative individuals, stand-up comedians, for example, whose audiences have been conditioned to reasonably expect that this person is providing their own material. So publishers in those cases have asked me to step off of the cover, and I'm happy to do so. Paciner might be happy to leave his name off the cover, but one of his well-known collaborators wasn't.

18:48When I worked with Whoopi Goldberg on her book, it was very important to the publisher that she stand alone on the cover. And Whoopi herself kind of bristled at that. We ended up writing together a whole chapter in her book on affirmative action and what it meant to take help and why is it that we can't freely admit when we need assistance of some kind or another. So it's basically this chapter-long acknowledgement of my work.

19:17on the book, which I helped to write. And in the end, Paster is there to help his clients. I think of these books as assignments looking to win over a readership of one. If Serena Williams is happy, if Denzel Washington is happy, then I'm happy and I feel like I've done my job. For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Julie Canfer and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston.

19:53We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapsen. Oh, you must have some great stories to tell. Oh, tell this. Well, I actually don't, you know, because the ghosts have to sign confidentiality clauses. Very important part of the book contract.