Alexandre Dumas, père, had a ghostwriter, or ‘nègre’ as folks like me are sweetly referred to over in France. His name was Auguste Jules Maquet. In the 1830s Maquet, a novelist and playwright, had tried to have one of his own works published but was told: ‘You have written a masterpiece, but you’re not a name and we only want names.’
Nothing has changed apart from the scale of this hunt for ‘names’. Marketing books is one of the hardest tasks any business person can take on and anything which makes the titles more noticeable to the public is going to be irresistible. Celebrities are consequently created and nurtured specifically for the purpose of selling products from movies to perfume, clothes to books. If an author is not a celebrity then the publisher will do their damnedest to make them one – usually with limited success.
A diet book by a film star is certain to gain more column inches than one written by an unknown doctor, a memoir by a television soap star is far more likely to get a six figure deal than one by a distinguished Shakespearian stage actor who appears nightly in front of audiences numbered in their hundreds rather than their millions.
Realising how useful it is to have a cast of characters who are known to wide segments of their markets, business people who want to attract the attention of customers need to invent celebrities to do the talking for them. To begin with these celebrities were people who had genuinely achieved something remarkable or unusual, like winning a war or being crowned king. Then they began to be drawn from the entertainment and acting worlds. Eventually that supply also proved inadequate for the marketing needs of the modern world. The newspapers were able to invent some of their own by inflating and personalising scandals and court cases, but it was the proliferation of the television and music industries that was to provide the most fruitful opportunities for creating celebrities that other people would want to listen to or watch.
Many of these people end up wanting to write books or are asked to put their names to books in order to help sales, and so they find themselves sitting down with people like me.
The most surprising thing is how very ‘normal’ many of them are. They might have been involved in ‘news’ stories that have kept them on the front pages for weeks on end. They might star in television programmes which are watched by tens of millions, but more often than not they live very ordinary lives in very ordinary houses with very ordinary partners and fret about all the same things as everyone else.
Most have virtually no power over their own destinies. The ones who appear in the television programmes are generally treated like commodities by their producers and masters, who pay them little or nothing, work them like slaves and decide when they are going to be killed off by scriptwriters or reality television judges. The ones that the media decides to love never know when the editors are going to turn on them, withdrawing the airbrushing services that made them look so desirable in early photographs and pointing out their cellulite on the beach at the same time as exposing their private lives to ridicule.
It is certainly true that these celebrities put themselves up for fame by auditioning and giving interviews and frequenting the places where the paparazzi will find them easily, but most of them have little or no conception of what they are letting themselves in for when they set out on this road as bright-eyed young hopefuls. The clever ones exploit the system (step forward Victoria Beckham and Katie Price as the most fabulous modern-day examples), but most are no match for the business and media manipulators who make them and break them at will.
Simply being famous is never going to be enough to make an interesting book. There must be another story going on unless it is going to be a picture book for fans, like the titles that hit the shelves within a week of a boy group winning, or maybe losing, the final of The X Factor. In those cases the book is no more than a memento of the moment, like a very thick fan magazine or concert programme. It is all part of the merchandising campaign and intended to be ephemeral. In some cases the producers have manuscripts prepared for all the finalists in the last weeks of a competition so that they are ready to start printing the winner’s story, and any others that the publisher believes to be sufficiently commercial, the moment the results are known.
To create a full-length book which people will actually read, however, the ghostwriter has to find another, deeper story. It might be overcoming a difficult illness, an abused childhood or an abusive relationship, a controversial court case or a high profile divorce, a drug habit or a criminal record – anything that adds another level to the story. Merely appearing in a programme in front of millions of people may well get you into a meeting with a publisher but it won’t necessarily get the public to shell out their hard-earned cash or tempt them to devote the time needed to reading it.
A highly regarded literary novelist of my acquaintance was once commissioned to ghostwrite the autobiography of one of the stars of EastEnders, only to find that she had no real back story at all.
‘There is a limit,’ he sighed over a large glass of wine, ‘to how many different ways you can describe the sound of Bow Bells.’
If a celebrity has a long career of genuine achievement, of course, and has been particularly skilful at keeping their private life private, managing to retain an air of mystery (as with stars like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and David Bowie), then there may still be enough of an appetite amongst the general public for more information to make a book a bestseller, as Keith Richards demonstrated when he finally wrote his autobiography Life with ghostwriter James Fox (the author of White Mischief). In 2013 Morrissey and Penguin were very successful at managing to pique the interest of fans as to what new things their idol might still have left to say.
Haters of the celebrity world are always quick to point out when sales of celebrity books dip, but the truth is that whenever someone famous who is also interesting steps forward with something new to say, whether they are a bad-tempered football manager or an allegedly drug-soaked rock star, then large numbers of people will always pay to read the result.