I’m always banging on to journalists that one of the main attributes required for ghostwriting is that you need to be able to suspend your ego, and I certainly stand by it as a necessary part of the process. I have done a pretty good job over the years of keeping mine sedated, but I have to confess that there have been times, in between ghosting assignments, when my ego has broken through like one of those white stage tigers in Las Vegas that savaged their trainer, so this is a confession of those moments of conceit.
Seeing how successful the construction of Robert Harris’s book, The Ghost, was, reinforced my own long-held belief that ghostwriters make excellent central characters and narrators for fictional adventures. Like policemen, private detectives, lawyers and doctors, their lives are made up of bite-sized dramatic episodes. Every time an enquiry comes in from a potential client you have the starting point for a plot, which can be wrapped up at the end with the publication (or shelving) of the book.
Following through on that theory I have twice written novels with ghostwriters as narrators. The first was Maisie’s Amazing Maids, which drew on my experiences of human trafficking and the stories of bar girls I had met in the Far East, and was sold to a publisher called Stratus by Andrew Lownie, afterwards republished through his own imprint, Thistle. Later I wrote Secrets of the Italian Gardener, narrated by a ghostwriter who is working for a Middle Eastern dictator just as the Arab Spring awakens to topple him, an idea that came to me after taking tea with Mrs Mubarak and meeting other powerful figures in the region at that time.
I showed Secrets of the Italian Gardener to Robert Kirby at United Agents. Robert is an agent I have worked with a great deal over the years. He was the eager young assistant to the legendary agent Giles Gordon when he first responded to my ‘Ghostwriter for Hire’ ad and went on to become one of the founders of United Agents, now amongst the biggest and most successful agencies in London. He was extremely encouraging over dinner in a restaurant in Soho’s Tin Pan Alley. He told me it was, ‘a contemporary recasting of Ecclesiastes, a story about the vanity associated with the desire for power and possessions and ultimately about the cycle of birth, growth, death and rebirth’ – which was a surprise, but by no means an unpleasant one. Fired up on food and wine we felt optimistic that we would be able to get a quick sale to a traditional publisher.
Six months later Robert 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 and the manuscript would have been consigned to a drawer somewhere, the wasted time written off to experience. Things had changed, however, and simple self-publishing was now an option. But I had heard of a new service from Amazon, which they were calling their ‘White Glove Service’. This seemed to me to offer yet another, and to my mind far preferable, alternative.
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 that 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. They had created the White Glove Service in conjunction with established literary agents with a view to helping those agents to publish and promote books for their clients that they had been unable to persuade traditional publishers to take on, or which had fallen out of print.
Robert Kirby’s assistant, Holly Thompson, an ex-publisher herself, proceeded to copy-edit the manuscript and then did all the heavy lifting with getting the book up onto Amazon, ready for print-on-demand as well as electronic publication, liaising with them about prices and promotions in a way that no author would ever be able to do on his or her own. The process provided several advantages over straightforward self-publishing because it meant the project had 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 (and offers for film rights came in pretty quickly), one of the biggest agencies in London was already fully engaged and ready to handle the business side of taking it to the next level.
Once the book existed it started to garner good reviews. In the first promotion that Amazon included it in a few months later, it became Kindle’s number one political book within a few days, apparently allowing it to enter into the black magic world of ‘improved metadata and algorithms’, whatever that might mean.