A Day in a Ghostwriter's Life

  

Some days there might be an invitation to fly to a private island on a private jet, or to spend a night lurking in the shadows of a back street brothel with a girl forced into sexual slavery. Most days, however, ghostwriters are like every other sort of writer, bashing away at our keyboards for hours on end. So, let’s pick one of the more interesting days.

Their enquiry had stood out from the usual half dozen that arrive on my screen each day. James emailed that he and his girlfriend, Penny, lived in Switzerland and were looking for a ghostwriter to tell their love story. He warned that it would contain sexual elements that many would find shocking, but that there would also be many lessons to be learnt from it. He told me they would be in London the following weekend and would be staying at the Dorchester in Park Lane. Since I was going to be in Mayfair that Sunday anyway, interviewing an African President whose memoir I was ghosting, I suggested I pop into the Dorchester once I was finished.

The President, an easily distracted man of almost infinite good humour, had to break off from our meeting to deal with a crisis and I found myself free in the middle of the day. James invited me to join them for lunch at Zuma’s, a famous Japanese restaurant in Knightsbridge. Even if nothing came of the book it would be an interesting lunch and would pass the time until the President was free to resume talking.

The couple waiting at the restaurant were extremely good looking, reserved and charming at the same time, intent on making me feel comfortable in their company despite being completely wrapped up in their adoration of one another and being about to share some amazingly personal details about their lives. One chilled bottle of wine followed another as they shyly revealed their tale of true love.

They had met as teenagers and, like Romeo and Juliet, were forced apart by family pressures. Unlike Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, however, these two had been given a second chance, which they had turned into something magical and deeply erotic. By the time the espressos came I was hooked and had agreed to fly out to Switzerland the following weekend so that I could start the process of “becoming Penny” in print.

I was so in thrall to their story I only realised the whole afternoon had sped by when my phone buzzed to tell me that the President was now ready to talk again over dinner. Grabbing a cab back to Mayfair I set the tape recorder going once more and realigned my brain, submerging myself inside the head of a man clinging to power in a dark and dangerous world, many miles from the hushed luxury of the room we were going to be spending the evening in.   

Secret “White Glove” deals between Amazon and the Literary Agents.

It is my belief that almost all the innovations that Amazon has brought-to/forced-on the publishing and bookselling industries over the last couple of decades have eventually worked to the advantage of authors and readers.

I am quite sure if I were a publisher or a bookseller I would feel very differently about the rise of Amazon to virtual world dominance, but I’m not. As both an author and a reader I love the many ways in which they have enriched my life.

There have been rumblings recently of “mysterious and secret” deals being done between Amazon and some of the biggest and brightest literary agents. They are calling it their “White Glove” service, and from the point of view of authors whose agents love their books but are unable to persuade traditional publishers to take them on, it’s a brilliant innovation.

Last year I wrote a novel, Secrets of the Italian Gardener, set inside the palace of a dictator about to be overthrown in the Arab Spring. The narrator is a ghostwriter who, while inside the palace writing a book for the dictator, meets a wise, elderly Italian gardener who gradually unravels the story of who really holds the power and wealth in the world. He literally discovers "where the bodies are buried". As the rebels draw closer to breaching the palace walls the ghost is also struggling with his own breaking heart. I have spent much of my ghostwriting career amongst the dictators, politicians, arms dealers and billionaires who hold the reins of power and control the wealth of the world, passing time in their lavish palaces and heavily guarded compounds in the wildest parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East as well as in tax havens like Monaco, Geneva, Bermuda and the Caribbean.

I sent the manuscript to one of the biggest and best agents in London, who I have known for many years, and he came back brimming with enthusiasm. He wanted no re-writes and he was sure he could get a sale. He told me the book was a "contemporary re-casting of Ecclesiastes” and was about “the vanity associated with the desire for power and possessions and ultimately about the cycle of birth, growth, death and re-birth" - which was a surprise, but by no means an unpleasant one.

Six months later he had to admit that he had failed to convince any publishers to come into business with us on this one. In the old days that would have been the end of the story. Simple self-publishing was now one option, of course, but with Amazon’s “White Glove” service we had another, and to my mind far preferable, alternative.

Highly skilled staff at the agency proceeded to do a totally professional copy-edit and then did all the heavy lifting with getting the book up onto Amazon, ready for print-on-demand as well as electronic publication. It has become a team effort rather than a lone author’s voice in the crowd and should the book start to “gain traction” in the market place the agency is already fully engaged and ready to handle the business side of taking it to the next level.

The book is now available at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Secrets-Italian-Gardener-ebook/dp/B00DC4Y4IA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371028839&sr=8-1&keywords=secrets+of+the+italian+gardener

So, bravo Amazon for inventing yet another route to market for authors.

If It Worked for Dickens...

Since Wattpad is proving to be such a fruitful source of readers I am now putting up a new book, one chapter at a time, (serialisation worked for Dickens after all, so …)

Secrets of the Italian Gardener is a gripping, emotional and inspirational story set inside the palace of a dictator about to be overthrown in the Arab Spring. The story is told by a ghostwriter who, while inside the palace writing a book for the dictator, meets a wise, elderly Italian gardener who gradually unravels the story of who really holds the power and wealth in the world. He literally discovers "where the bodies are buried". As the rebels draw closer to breaching the palace walls the ghostwriter is also struggling with his own breaking heart.

The inspiration for the story comes from the times I have spent during my ghostwriting career amongst the dictators, politicians, arms dealers and billionaires who hold the reins of power and control the wealth of the world, visiting their lavish palaces and heavily guarded compounds in the wildest parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East as well as in tax havens like Monaco and Bermuda.

The cover is once again by Elliot Thomson at http://www.preamptive.com

Ghostwriter - Film Star

The first cut of a short film made about me by a particularly charming and professional group of students from Farnham University of the Creative Arts is now on view at www.vimeo.com/17529822

Ghostwriter as Scurfy Recluse

Oh, the hubris of it all. In the very same week that the great Horace Bent celebrates the sex appeal of the ghostwriting fraternity in the equally great trade organ, The Bookseller, Terence Blacker writes in The Author that in publishing now scurfy recluses "put the words on paper", while well-scrubbed celebrities "appear on the cover and do the chat show circuit". From “sexy” to “scurfy”, how mortifying.

The eminent Blacker, however, goes on to provide a chink of light by predicting that within a year ghostwriters will be forming their own trade association, Ghostwriters of Britain (GOB), and will be powerful enough to “cripple the book trade for several months” by withdrawing their labour. The revenge of the scurfy recluses; it seems our day of power is nigh.

The Puzzle of Creating Best Sellers

Trying to judge which books will catch the public imagination doesn't get any easier, however long you struggle on in the publishing world.
I was pretty certain as I wrote "Cry Myself to Sleep" with Joe Peters that it was a story that people would really want to read, but follow-up books are always hard to pull off. We had had a number one success with "Cry Silent Tears" and it seemed almost too much to hope we could do it again, however much Joe might deserve it.
The second book picks up his story from when he ran away to London at sixteen to live on the streets. It is all about what happens to damaged kids once they grow up and go looking for a place in the world. Joe is an incredibly inspiring character.
Thankfully, my gut feeling has been proved right and the book is already at number three in the charts, battling it out with Jade and Barak and the rest. But then I was equally sure that "For the Love of Julie" which I wrote for Ann Ming, would soar straight to the top of the charts. Everyone who reads this story of a mother fighting for justice for her murdered daughter, (whose body she herself found,months after the killing), tells me that they sobbed almost all the way through it. Ann is another inspiring person who has achieved the most incredible things in getting the 800 year old law of double jeopardy changed, but the book has not soared as fast as Joe's.
I'm confident that word of mouth will result in big sales for Ann eventually, albeit at a slower and steadier rate, but it is a puzzle why the one title has taken off so much faster than the other.
In between these two lies "Disgraced", which I wrote for Saira Ahmed, telling of how she ended up on the game after escaping from her arranged marriage. The book went into the charts, and is selling well around the world, but did not go straight into the top three like Joe.
I guess if we could predict accurately who the big winners were going to be, some of the excitement would have gone.

When is a "misery memoir" just a "powerful story"?

There was yet more coverage in the publishing trade media this week of "mis-mem sales dipping" - but how is anyone measuring what is or isn't mis-mem?


Misery memoirs are just powerful stories starring great heroes and the world will never grow tired of reading them, however the trade chooses to label them.


Over the last few months I have been involved with four books that might be included in the genre; "Cry Silent Tears" by Joe Peters, (currently number one in the Sunday Times paperback non-fiction chart), "Daddy's Little Earner" by Maria Landon, (which went to number two in the same chart a few weeks ago), "Disgraced" by Saira Ahmed, which is the newly published story of a girl who escaped an arranged marriage in Pakistan and went on the game to support her family and "For the Love of Julie" by Ann Ming, a woman who spent 17 years battling to get the law of double jeopardy changed in order to bring her daughter's murderer to justice.

They could all be labelled as "misery", or perhaps "women in peril", or "crime", or "culture gap stories" - or perhaps they are just powerful tales about heroes and heroines who battle against adversity and have extraordinary and extreme experiences that the rest of us are fortunate enough to avoid. If it is the latter, doesn't that cover virtually every great story ever told?

Or are we saying that "mis-mems" are only the stories told by abused children? If that is the case how can they be said to be in decline when Joe Peters, Maria Landon and Judy Westwater were all in the paperback top ten together a couple of weeks ago?

Powerful tales, with strong and likeable heroes battling against adversity are always going to appeal to readers, whether you pigeon-hole them as "misery" or just call them "powerful stories".

People overcoming adversity, (or misery if you prefer), always make for gripping reading in both fiction and non-fiction and the subject matter they deal with will always develop as we learn and understand more about the world about us. No publisher would have been willing to touch the incendiary material contained in "Cry Silent Tears" five years ago when Kevin Lewis's "The Kid" was first published. We have all learned a lot in those five years and I suspect there are many more moving, inspiring and powerful personal stories to come, whether we choose to call them "mis-mems" or not.