Ghostwriters, book deals, and AI: What you didn’t know about publishing, with Dan Gerstein
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. And for the next few weeks, while we're taking a season break, we're releasing some of the best of the best bonus episodes that people who support the show got during the last interview season. This week, you're getting the behind-the-scenes conversation with Dan Gerstein, who runs Gotham Ghostwriters. And we're talking about the special joys and problems of ghostwriting fiction.

We do these kind of extras every time I do an interview. So almost every week and people who support the show get these right away. So they got this one back in February. Their support really, it means a lot and it helps us keep going. And it tells us that people care, which actually matters too. So thank you to those of you who may be listening right now who support the show. And if you want to become

a supporter, a Grammarpalusian, you can sign up on the show page at Apple Podcasts and right there in the listing or separately, you can also get everything by text message. To learn more about that option, go to quickanddirtytips.com slash bonus and links to both of those are also in the show notes.

Welcome to your bonus episode for our interview with Dan Gerstein, founder of Gotham Ghostwriters. Check out the main segment if you haven't checked that out already. But Dan has been a prominent political speechwriter. He's been doing writing and communications work for more than 30 years. He has a degree from Harvard. He's taught at NYU PR and Communications University.

school and just is, you know, one of the leading voices on ghostwriting. And so, Dan, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me.

You bet. So, you know, we talked a lot about nonfiction ghostwriting in the main episode, but it also happens for fiction. And I suspect that that's sort of a different thing, that working on a creative project is different from working on a fact-based project. So can you talk about sort of how ghostwriting for fiction works? Yes, it really is different. And, you know, it tends to attract...

You know, there are definitely writers who do both nonfiction and fiction. But for the most part, when we're placing writers with clients, our value proposition is helping people find customized, specialized talent and the right writing partners for them. And we've developed a very strong network of novelists and fiction writers and story consultants to help

authors who want to develop a novel idea for a novel. And the working relationship is often similar, like the process, the work product for the collaborator. But it's a different skill set for the most part. And the reality is for a lot of the nonfiction authors we work with, they have a vision for their book. And they're just looking for a skilled professional to kind of help them refine that vision and then execute it.

For a lot of people who are hiring ghostwriters to write a novel, they may have an inspiration or an idea.

But really, what they're struggling with is, you know, how do you construct the narrative, character development, all these things, which, again, unless you're a novelist in your own right, are really hard things to do. And they're not something that the average person has really any understanding of how to do. So to a certain degree, again, if you have an idea for a novel and you want to try and publish it,

There's even a greater need for professional help than a lot of the authors we're working with on the nonfiction side. Is it mostly celebrities who are hiring people to do this? Or like, oh, and I want a novel too, as well as my perfume. Yeah.

I wouldn't say it's mostly celebrities. I would say mostly what you hear about are celebrities because they're public eye. And, you know, when Snooki from Jersey Shore is writing a novel, right, you have a pretty good idea that she didn't write that novel herself. And, you know, and I know it's generated not just some attention, but some controversy when celebrities are working with ghostwriters on their novels. We can talk about that in a little second. But there's a whole other category of people.

who are pursuing writing novels and hiring ghostwriters or writing coaches who aren't celebrities and not even public figures. And they kind of fall into two main buckets. There's the dreamers, we call them, which are people who have really big ambitions. They've come up with this idea that they think is really marketable. They ideally want to have the novel turned into a movie or a TV show, but they recognize that they need professional help to do that.

OK, and they're willing to invest in that. And then the second category is the bucket list people. And these are people who just like they've had this story burning inside of them for years and they and they're dying to kind of get it down on paper. And they again, they need professional help, but their aspirations are very different for them. It's it's, you know, it's a legacy thing. It's just something they want to be able to kind of say they did it. They can share it with their friends and family if it gets, you know,

sells 100 copies on Amazon, they'll die a happy person. Yeah, this reminds me of a question I, a bigger picture question I had is about sharing of sort of the extension rights from a book. So, you know, does the ghostwriter typically share in the film rights on a novel? But also does a regular ghost, a nonfiction ghostwriter, you know, share if the book is a mega bestseller? They do on occasion. The reality is, so let's deal with like the royalties sales part of it first.

Yeah. The reality is for a nonfiction book, the overwhelming majority of nonfiction books do not earn back their advance, right? So the process is the author gets paid some money up front for the rights to their book. Once the book sells enough that the publishers recouped the advance, then the author will get a share of the profit and that's

called the royalty. There are very rarely royalties for books that are not written by big celebrities or brand name CEOs. They're lucky to earn back their advance. In many cases, they don't earn back the advance. The most in-demand ghostwriters for those projects, like say for Keith Richards' book or when Prince Harry worked with J.R. Moirier on his book Spare,

Those in-demand ghostwriters can negotiate a percentage of the back end, right? To sort of say, in addition to what I get paid up front, if I'm going to help you sell a lot of books, then I want to get a piece of the upside. And they'll be able to negotiate a percentage. And then they'll also negotiate for a percentage of the derivative rights. The argument as a business proposition being is like, you couldn't have done this on your own. I've created a property that's generating a lot of value for you.

I expect to have some of the profit. Now, where it gets interesting is that sometimes the ghostwriter will sacrifice some upfront compensation in exchange for some of the back end. Right. They're betting on themselves. Right.

And in some cases, there's not really upfront compensation in the sense that the author's paying out of pocket. They negotiate a deal where the ghostwriter is getting a split of the advance and then a split of the royalties and maybe a small percentage of any derivative properties of film or television rights. Now, when it comes to novels, again, if you're dealing with people who don't have a lot of capital, the authors, right, but they want professional help, what some –

Ghostwriters and collaborators will do is say, OK, I will discount the fee I will normally charge if they see some sales potential. Right. And that and then negotiate a bigger chunk of the back end. And, you know, for the author. Right. They're making a rational calculation that like I can't do this on my own. I really need this help. And I'm willing to kind of reward the writer if they help me succeed.

That sounds risky.

And again, even though it's not standardized, they have a sense of the ballparks and the structures that are often charged and they can get the best deal for the ghostwriter. Yeah. The Guardian had a really interesting series of articles on ghostwriting, kind of about fiction. And the first one I saw was about the actress Millie Bobby Brown, who wrote, I think, a novel based on something that happened to her family.

But there was a lot of backlash when it came out that she worked with a ghostwriter. What was the do you know what the origin of all the backlash was? Well, I mean, I think what social media has done has made celebrities and public figures much more accessible. And again, if you're a younger celebrity, you're probably online a lot. Right. You have a very active social media. You have a lot of followers and those followers feel a real connection to you.

Right. So if they're invested in you and then it comes out that, you know, you, you, you, they bought your book, right.

And they may some of them. And this came out in The Guardian article has come out in other controversies around celebrities using ghostwriters for novels is they feel cheated. Right. They feel misled that, you know, you didn't write this on your own. Now, is that a reasonable expectation? From my perspective? No, because I have intimate knowledge of the publishing industry and how these things work.

For the average person, you know, they don't have that intimate knowledge. And that said, I still think it's unfair to punish the celebrity because the reality is if you're not a writer, you're an actor, you're not a writer, that's not your profession. And beyond that, you're not just kind of writing a first person essay for a website. You're writing a book, you know, concocting a fictionalized story, right?

Chances are you're not able to do that on your own, whether it's working with an editor or a coach, whatever. So even though, again, setting aside my personal knowledge of the space, I think it's unfair of a lot of this criticism. Now, again, the place where it is deserved is if the author misleads their audience explicitly and says, yes, I wrote this book on my own.

because they're ashamed or they don't want to admit they work with a ghostwriter. And then I think people have a lot of grounds to criticize the author because then they truly did mislead their audience.

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Right. Emily Bobby Brown, she did acknowledge her ghostwriter. The name wasn't on the cover, but it was acknowledged. So I was surprised by that. I was also surprised, you know, how many older books, like apparently The Great Gatsby, there was a ghostwriter involved and the Jason Bourne novels were written by a ghostwriter or a collaborator, at least. Far more than I would have thought. It surprises me more for fiction, but I guess maybe it shouldn't.

Well, no, I think it's understandable that it would be more surprising in fiction because, again, if someone is writing a novel, chances are they're a professional writer for the most part. And it's only, I would say, you know, again, in the last 20 years where you've seen this real spike in non-writers publishing novels. And so in the past, I would say it was a real outlier or unusual for a true novelist to

Engage a ghostwriter. Yeah. And I would imagine to get this work, too, you would have had to have written an entire novel, at least one, yourself before anyone would hire you to do it for them. Yes. Yes. But again, like, you know, sometimes, you know, again, it's there's a the dividing line between a ghostwriter collaborator versus an editor in these cases can be pretty thin. And it could be like, you know, someone had a.

a colleague that they've relied as a sounding board or an editor. And the, the role that editor played evolved over time, right? Because maybe the author got stuck or maybe the, the editor or friend they're working with had a better feel for some of the characters and, and, and kind of took over that part of the book or help them, the author finished the book. There could be different scenarios again, where the, you know, the author, the,

wasn't uninvolved in the writing of the book, but they engaged, again, a colleague or another writer to help them complete it, take it to the next level, what have you. Yeah, you reminded me of a big lawsuit I was reading about recently in the publishing world. Someone is, I've

apologize, I don't remember the details, but there was an accusation of stealing an idea. And the people who wrote the popular book said they were working on it so hard that between the writer, the agent, and the editor, they had these frantic working together sessions. And they couldn't even say who had contributed which part to the book. It was really interesting to hear about that process. Yeah. And I think

we're in a moment of transition, right? Where like ghostwriting, we like to say is coming out of the shadows. We held the first ever convention of ghostwriters in,

a year ago here in New York. That was the central theme of it, that was that the nature of the profession is changing. It's getting more publicly recognized. The stigma is fast disappearing. And the publishing world is embracing the role of collaborators in a way that hasn't happened before. But I think we're still in this transition mode where we're not fully there yet.

And I think one of the longer term goals and solutions to a lot of this is for there to be more transparency and not just to have a vague reference to, you know, thanks to, you know, Joe Smith for his help on the book. So it's nudge, nudge, wink, wink to acknowledge the ghostwriter, but to sort of say this person collaborated with me to name the editor.

in the book. There's a big movement in the translator community for translators to be publicly credited. And again, given the trend lines, what we're seeing in all forms of media where the wires are hidden and people recognize that a lot of cooks in the kitchen, I

I think that's by far the best way to be honest with the reading audience. And I think for the most part, they won't care. And they'll appreciate knowing that more than one person, the name author, is responsible for the creation of a text. It doesn't – and a matter of fact, I don't think it diminishes –

accomplishment of the author at all for them to publicly credit the people who helped them bring it to life. Absolutely. A lot of people work on a book. You reminded me, I can't believe I forgot to mention this in the main episode, and I want to give credit because it's such a good idea. So Alex M. at Packet Zero at Mastodon suggested there should be an awards for ghostwriters and that they should be called the Casper's.

Which is, that was brilliant. Well, funny enough, last year, in conjunction with the first ever convention of Ghostwriters, we launched the first ever awards for book collaborations. And we very purposely didn't want it to be about Ghostwriters. We wanted it to be about the partnership between the author and the collaborator. So all the books that qualified for, were eligible, we

were had to be where the author and the collaborator submitted the book jointly and they would be recognized jointly.

And we had three categories and we announced the winners at the convention in January. And we just closed submissions for the second year of the awards. And we called them the Andes because, well, the author and the collaborator, you know. Oh, yeah, that's clever. Is the trophy an ampersand? Yeah.

No? I believe it was for the initial round. Really? Yeah. Oh, that's great. I love that. Well, moving on, actually. So we had two questions about AI because that comes up with everything around writing these days. So Lisa Payne and Jim Norina both wanted to know sort of the interplay these days between ghostwriting and AI and if you're feeling like that industry is being affected. Yeah.

Oh, totally. And I get this question all the time. Yeah. So I'll preface what I'm going to say by that. Everything is fluid right now. And anyone who pretends to like they know the future can speak authoritatively about what things going to happen in five or 10 years.

I think it's full of it. I will do my best to kind of give you a perspective about what's happening now and what I think is likely to happen. But I do it with humility and with the sense that there's so much uncertainty right now. What I think is happening is there's been a disruption in the professional writing world.

writ large, that AI is completely blowing up the bottom level of professional writing, meaning a lot of people look for writers on Fiverr and Upwork. There's a lot of copywriting work that is very information-heavy, SEO-based, formulaic, okay?

Those writers tend to work for cheap. A lot of them are overseas. AI can do it for free and do it in many cases better than those people. So that part of the marketplace is getting radically disrupted. And a lot of that work is done by humans is going to disappear.

I would say then in the second layer is the, you know, a lot of writers who are employed again for brands, for organizations, for companies, even in some media companies. The nature of their skills are going to still be valued and there are still going to be jobs. But the nature of those jobs, I think, is starting to evolve where the responsibilities are less in creating the text and

and being the first pen to prompting the AI and then being responsible for refining, editing, catching hallucinations, checking for plagiarism, right? So it's more of an editor project manager role than a pure writing role. For the work we do, both in terms of ghostwriting full books, but also speechwriting, high level white papers, thought leadership content.

My theory is that it's going to make the work these writers do that much more valuable because people are going to try to use AI to do this kind of work and they're going to fail miserably and they're going to be very unsatisfied. And the reason for that, first and foremost, is that the greatest value that a professional ghostwriter or collaborator provides to the client is before there's ever a word written.

It's not the writing. It's the conceptualization. It's the creative dynamic. It's extracting stories from the principle. The AI can't do any of that because the AI is dependent on prompts.

So if there's no one to prompt it and the author is incapable of prompting it, none of that value is going to be captured by the technology. So they don't even know the questions they should be asking. That's right. That's exactly right. And then, you know, one of the most valuable things that collaborators do, particularly when it comes to books, is pushing the author to go deeper, to make themselves vulnerable, to extract stories that they wouldn't necessarily tell

on their own or if they were just feeding, you know, transcripts into chat GPT. And again, I think that's the thing that people are going to recognize pretty quickly. And it's already starting to happen. You know, we have a subset of our clients coming to us that we call AI refugees. They tried using the technology to save money and time and recognize that what they got was, you

not at the level that they feel comfortable putting out in the world and they recognize that they need to work with a professional ghostwriter. So I think it's going to make the work we do more valuable. And then my other theory, though, is it's going to make ghostwriters more productive and profitable because elite writers will be able to do more work because they can outsource some of the time-intensive, what I call blocking and tackling, the constructing of basic chapter text,

to the technology because their main contribution will be in the upfront work, you know, coming in with the hook of the book, the outline, the narrative arc, deciding which stories are going to be. So, and then taking the interview transcripts feeding into the technology and

And then being in a position to refine that. I think that's going to make professional ghostwriters and collaborators, again, more productive. It's going to allow them to take on more work and ultimately earn more money. Interesting. So interesting. Well, Dan Gerstein, thank you so much for being here with us today. Where can people find you if they want more information? Sure.

our agency website is www.gothamghostwriters.com. People can reach me at Dan at Gotham ghostwriters.com. Um, always happy to do a free consultations, both with, uh,

perspective authors who are ghostwriter curious, as we like to say, and exploring their options. And then also for writers who are either looking to break into the field or level up their ghostwriting practice. You're just the best. Thanks so much. No, happy to be here.

I hope you enjoyed that bonus segment. If you didn't catch the full interview when we talked about ghostwriting nonfiction back in February, and what a great job opportunity it can be for people, you can find that in your feed or we'll link to it in the show notes as well. And thank you again to the Grammarpalooza supporters. We appreciate your help so much.

And if you'd like to become a Grammarpalooza supporter or a subscriber and get all the bonus episodes when they first come out, and more importantly, just help us and show your support for the show, you can sign up on the show page, the Grammar Girl show page at Apple Podcasts, or you can get everything by text message. And you can learn about that option at quickanddirtytips.com slash bonus. That's all. Thanks for listening.