By-lines, co-authorship and acknowledgements. Who am I promoting anyway?

There will occasionally be a trade off of payment for crediting the ghostwriter on the cover of the book, although even this is not as straightforward a transaction as at first it might seem. Common sense might dictate that receiving direct acknowledgement for work would give ghostwriters a much-needed profile boost, but not all ghostwriters see this in such linear terms.

Julie-Ann Amos, for example, charges her clients an additional fee for using her name on the cover of their book as she believes her name lends the named author more credibility.

In the US ghostwriters are typically given a “With xxxx” by-line on the cover of a book, which makes the whole ghostwriting industry a much more transparent affair across the pond. In some cases, however, ghostwriters feel that having their name on the cover of a book may actually not benefit their writing career. According to Rick Reilly, “A great friend of mine wrote an excellent autobiography of a tennis player and decided not to put his name on the front because he didn’t want to be associated with sports autobiographies, or ‘jock-ographies’ as we call them.”

In the UK, however, as Tom Bromley put it, “people like the conceit that somebody wrote the whole thing themselves,” and mostly ghostwriters receive no direct acknowledgment of their role. He noted, however that his name usually appeared either on the book’s title page or in the acknowledgments depending on what the named author was comfortable with doing.

Although several of the ghostwriters I spoke to had given up ghosting other people’s work either after becoming disillusioned with the whole process, as in Rick Reilly’s case, following a public break-up with the named author, as in Michael Gruber’s case, or simply finding more fulfillment through writing their own books all, without exception, agreed that ghostwriting was a route into publishing that “puts food on the table” as Rick Reilly said or “funds your own writing” according to Tom Bromley.