An In-Depth Exploration of the Field of Book Ghostwriting

Abstract

“Almost every statement spoken today by major political, business, and academic leaders was written by someone else” (Einhorn, 1991, p. 115). Those “someone elses” are ghostwriters who are willing to craft documents, anonymously, for clients for a fee. As familiarity with the role of ghostwriters has risen, shame or embarrassment at having used their services seems to be declining (Conner, 2014), which is why we have heard that Prince Harry paid his ghostwriter $1 million and apparently Michelle Obama had as many as six different ghostwriters assisting in the writing and production of her bestseller, Becoming. Still, very little is known about who ghostwriters are and how they work. To begin to empirically understand the burgeoning ghostwriting industry and its participants, as well as how the occupation has evolved, I conducted an in-depth inductive, qualitative study using a grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) methodology, conducting interviews with ghostwriters, ghostwriting agency owners, and ghostwriting clients to chronicle and explain the trajectory of the field.