My tour of the book festival circuit continues with a recent appearance at the Black British Book Festival at The Barbican in London. It was an enormous amount of fun and an opportunity to talk books and the writing of books through a slightly different lens. It was a particular pleasure to meet Edinburgh-based Tendai Huchu and fantasy author Marvelous Michael Anson for the first time. As always at events like this there were a number of budding writers in the audience, and it was a pleasure to share what someone called our “publishing journeys” with them. Neither Marvelous nor I have been overnight successes (there is a lot of rejection in publishing) so both of us, I think, were able to offer up some hope to people who might otherwise become discouraged.
Which got me thinking about celebrity authors, who, at least in publishing terms, are overnight successes. They rock up to a publisher with an idea for a book, get it published and, lo and behold, instant best seller. I’ve mentioned before that there is a certain amount of resentment in the crime-writing community about the fact that not only have celebrity writers not “paid their dues,” a significant number of them can’t actually write and rely heavily on ghostwriters. Personally, I’ve always been rather relaxed about this. If you’re a writer and you think a celebrity’s road to publication has been easy, my response has tended to be along the lines of, “Fine. Go out and become a celebrity then.” Not as easy as it looks! Celebrities have worked long and hard to earn the fame that guarantees their publishers an instant bestseller. Why they should be criticized for that is a mystery to me.
The ghostwriter criticism is a lot trickier, though. I have tended to the view that if the reader enjoys the product, that is answer enough. Who cares if the celebrity actually wrote it?
And yet. If you’re a celebrity chef, say, that the public can’t get enough of, you can’t just launch a music career. You have to be able to, you know, sing. If you can’t, you will be found out lickety-split and reduced to the status of amusing novelty act. The Eddie the Eagle of music. But if you’re a celebrity who can’t write, a ghostwriter and a decent editor can make that particular deficiency vanish from the page. It is, in a sense, a fraud. The reader thinks they’re consuming the talents of the celebrity – maybe a glimpse into how they think – when it’s entirely possible that what they’re reading is the celebrity’s idea for a book (the easy part, as I once heard Anne Cleeves describe it) turned into something enjoyable and real by the talents of a different person altogether. And then what about the talents of celebrities who really can write, like Richard Osman? Fabulously successful though his books are, are his achievements being somehow devalued by the lurking suspicion that because he’s a celebrity he must have had help?
This was my confused state of mind when, running far later than I usually do in the mornings, the actor Reese Witherspoon popped up on my radio to announce that she, too, has now written a book. Before I could reach over to switch stations, though, she went on to explain that she’d had help: none other than the great Harlan Coben. He’s on the cover with equal credit. And why not? He’s Harlan Coben! Paradoxically, though, because Ms. W openly admitted to having help, I felt that she had probably written more of this book than I would originally have been inclined to believe. And if Reese Witherspoon (who could totally have used an anonymous ghostwriter) is happy to share credit, why can’t everyone else? The thriller writer James Patterson famously writes with co-authors to maintain “his” prodigious output, and no one minds a bit. Perhaps it’s time for the celebrities and publishers who use ghostwriters to finally come clean. The “Children’s Division” of the UK’s Society of Authors has recently called for exactly that. They have demanded more transparency for the “unsung” ghostwriters behind celebrity-authored children’s books, with the ghostwriters to be given credit on the cover as a matter of course. Although it would remove the “ghost” from ghostwriter, this strikes me as no bad thing. In a world already chockful of deceit and misdirection, a little honesty in the world of celebrity book writing would be a welcome breath of fresh air.