Why should the same principles not apply to book writing? The idea started to grow on me.īy using someone else’s knowledge I can cut my research time for a book from months to days because I’m going straight to the source of the material rather than having to ferret around in cuttings libraries and drink endless cups of tea in the front rooms of the subject’s childhood friends and relatives. In the film industry, as screenwriter William Goldman and others have repeatedly pointed out, everything about the writing process has to do with teamwork and collaboration. He suggested that I should write them for him, having attended a few of his seminars and riffled through his filing cabinet. He wanted to have the books out in the shops because they would be good public relations for him, but he didn’t have time to write them. He’d been asked by a publisher to write a series of management books. The idea was first put to me by a management guru I was interviewing for a business magazine. Alternatively they might be experts in subjects that the public want to know more about. These people might be celebrities who would impress publishers because of their notoriety through the tabloid or other media, or ordinary people who have undergone extraordinary experiences. One answer is to collaborate with other people who lack writing skills and experience but have all the necessary information. The fundamental problem facing any professional writer is finding a steady supply of ideas and subjects so dazzlingly certain to appeal to the book-buying public that publishers are bound to put up huge advances. ‘Don’t you resent someone else getting all the glory?’ is the next, and ‘So what famous people have you done?’ nearly always gets an outing before the listener’s curiosity on the subject is finally sated and one can move on to asking them about their lives, (a much more comfortable conversational position for any writer). ‘Why on earth do you want to do that?’ is usually the first puzzled response. There are several questions which regularly follow the conversational revelation that I am a ghost writer.
0 kommentar(er)
