Confessions of a Ghostwriter

by Andrew Crofts

  Filthy lucre

  It’s vulgar to talk about money, I know, but it’s so interesting to know how other people manage and to draw comparisons, which is invidious, but we’ve all got to earn the stuff somehow and if no one talks about it how do we ever learn what’s going on?

  The first criterion for considering any project is always whether I find it interesting enough to spend several months of my life thinking and writing about it. But there always has to be a second criterion too – can the project be made to pay in some way?

  The moment you decide that you are going to earn your living as a freelance writer (or a freelance anything for that matter), you condemn yourself to a lifetime of thinking about money. Every day you will find yourself frantically doing sums in your head when you should be thinking about something more productive, trying to reconcile the money that you think you are going to be earning in the next month or two with the bills that you know for sure are going to be coming in.

  You have only a limited number of hours in every day and so you cannot waste too many of them on speculative projects that don’t work out. But at the same time you know that it is often the speculative projects, the biggest gambles, that produce the most dramatic results. But which ones? There is no way of knowing. Can you afford to do ten speculative books in the hope that one of them will prove to be a bestseller and compensate if the other nine fail to earn a bean? These are the questions that will be haunting you as you try to get to sleep at night, and will still be there when you wake up in the morning, and linger around in the background for most of the hours in between.

  As you get older and take on family responsibilities the calculations grow more urgent and more hours of work have to be found at just the moment when other demands on your time are increasing. Sometimes you must choose projects with good commercial potential over those with more literary appeal. Sometimes you must tilt the telling of a story in ways that might not be to your personal taste in order to appeal to as wide a market as possible. You can blame the commercial demands of the publisher for such lapses if you like, but the truth is you stand to gain as much from increased sales and happier readers as they do.

  Some writers escape from the financial treadmill when they hit upon an unexpected seam of gold (Harry Potter, Fifty Shades, etc.), others supplement their writing with earnings from broadcasting, journalism or university teaching. Yet more treat writing as a sideline, being primarily professors, chefs, actors or television presenters. If you do none of these things, concentrating on the writing of books as your sole source of income, you are going to have to grow ruthless in your self-discipline both in the projects that you agree to take on and in the hours that you work. It is a fabulous way to earn a living, but keeping the money coming in is grindingly and relentlessly distracting.

  One of the sums that I used to use to try to cheer myself up on bad days was to extrapolate out possible future earnings by assuming they would continue to rise at the same level as in the past. Quite early on I had a particularly good year in which I managed to make twice as much as the year before. To avoid writing whatever it was I was meant to be writing, I immediately wasted my time drawing up a chart showing how much I would be earning in the future if I continued along the same line, doubling my income every year. By doing that you can go from £20,000 a year to over £20 million a year in just ten years.

  I managed to remain quite excited by this prospect for some time, despite my wife’s scepticism as to whether I had any grasp at all on the economic realities of life. The following year, however, I was back down at a figure somewhere between the previous two years and new graphs had to be thought up in order to remain optimistic.

  The sums that publishers sometimes bandy around as advances can also be deceptive. If a publisher offers a quarter of a million pound advance it sounds like a lottery win, and feels like one for as long as it takes before you actually go away and do the sums. If the project is ghostwritten then that figure is going to be divided between two people and probably an agent will be taking 15 per cent as well. It will then be pointed out that the publisher wants two books for that money, so the money halves again and will be paid out in bits and pieces over the next two years, which comes out at £50,000 a year each for two years before tax. It’s certainly a nice wage, but no longer looks quite so much like a lottery win. If the book then takes off there may well be royalties down the line, but more often than not the advance is the end of the story.

  One of the benefits of having now been in the business for more than 40 years is that I can look back over the real figures and see that although it has been a bumpy ride, the overall line of the graph has risen pretty steadily, if slowly.

  I now receive three or four enquiries a day from people thinking of hiring or working with a ghostwriter. Whereas at the beginning of my career I used to have to spend more than half my waking hours searching for such leads, I currently have the luxury of picking and choosing which opportunities I will pursue, mainly thanks to the internet and the magical powers of Google. In the past it was almost impossible for anyone outside the closed world of publishing to know where to start looking for a ghostwriter, now all they have to do is type the word into their search engine and hit the ‘enter’ button.

  Big Brother is watching and listening

  ‘Why does it keep doing that?’ my wife demanded when the bedside phone yet again let off a single ring just after we had fallen asleep, jolting us both back to wakefulness.

  I had no sensible explanation to give her. I had tried explaining the problem to the phone company, but after coming out to check the physical line they were perplexed, only able to suggest that it was a fault with the handset. I’d tried replacing the handset but it had made no difference. The obvious answer would have been to take the phone out of the bedroom, but with elderly parents and young children who were starting to stay away quite frequently, that didn’t seem like a helpful option.

  ‘Rudi says it means they’re bugging the phones,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Are you seriously suggesting that the government has time to listen in to all our conversations? You’re becoming as paranoid as he is.’

  The logical part of my brain agreed with her, but on the other hand it did seem a bit of a coincidence that our phone had been behaving like this ever since I started having meetings with Rudi, a man who had just been let off a life sentence for spying for the Russians, having been caught and convicted at the height of the Cold War. By the time he was named by a KGB defector, Rudi had been active for 20 years and was probably the best placed agent the Russians had ever managed to recruit, with virtually unlimited access to information on projects like Exocet and Polaris. The country where he was caught was politically volatile and still practised the death penalty, so throughout the period of his imprisonment he had never been sure whether he would be executed or not. Changes in the political climate and in a number of regimes around the world, and an intervention from the Russian President, had led to him being pardoned and released after serving 10 years, at which point he went into hiding.

  It was easy to imagine that the timing of these rings on our home phone fitted the picture he painted, as the eavesdroppers gave up listening for the night, assuming they would hear nothing interesting again until the morning.

  If it was true they must have been disappointed because Rudi was adamant that we should never talk about anything over the phone, just as he always changed the venues for our meetings at the last minute to fox anyone who might be hoping to listen in. Interviewing him was never a restful business as his eyes darted around rooms, scrutinising everyone near us, noting when people came and went. If anyone got too close he would immediately stop talking and we would move on to a new venue. If we walked anywhere together he would take roundabout routes, often more than doubling the distance we needed to travel.

  ‘Why would they still be interested?’ I asked him one day. ‘The Cold War is over now.’

  He sh
ook his head in despair at my naivety. ‘It’s never over.’

  Revelations in 2013 about levels of surveillance from Edward Snowden, former CIA and NSA employee, suggest that Rudi might have been right.

  The publishing world was not interested in Rudi’s memoirs, believing that people had now moved on from the Cold War and were no longer excited by the idea of spies. Once we had abandoned the project our phone found itself able to rest peacefully once more.

  It’s always hard to know if you are being paranoid in these matters. Conspiracy theories are so tempting but can so easily be punctured with mockery. I was approached by a whistleblower who was in a position to cause considerable embarrassment to senior government officials. The man’s name had become a byword for injustice in the media and was scrawled on motorway bridges at the time by supporters armed with aerosols. Publishers were keen to buy what he had to say.

  A sturdy advance was negotiated by the agent involved and the day the first cheque arrived on the agent’s desk the whistleblower was summoned in to talk to his government employers. They assured him they had no objection to him writing a book, in fact they thought it extremely ‘brave’ of him, but they felt they did have to warn him that if he went ahead with publication they wouldn’t be able to ‘guarantee his safety’, or that of his family.

  Since he had small children he had to take the warning seriously and we instructed the agent to return the money. He then asked me to return the diaries which he had given me to work from. Wanting to be sure that they arrived safely I went to the local village post office and asked the Postmistress to send them the most secure way possible. She advised sending them as registered documents.

  Several days later the package had not arrived at its destination and I went back to the Postmistress and asked her to track it. She was happy to oblige, embarrassed to think that the service had let us down, but when she started to make enquiries she found that the parcel’s trail ended abruptly at Gatwick Airport, never to be resumed.

  But perhaps I am being paranoid again.

  A real-life Shades of Grey

  Their enquiry stood out from the others that came through that day. James emailed that he and his girlfriend, Penny, lived in Switzerland and were looking for a ghostwriter to tell their love story. He warned that it would contain sexual elements that many would find shocking, but that there would be many lessons to be learned from it.

  Dear Mr Crofts, If possible, I think that meeting up with us, seeing who we are, hearing us out, would not be a waste of time.

  He told me they would be in London the following weekend and would be staying at the Dorchester in Park Lane. Curiosity got the better of me. Fifty Shades of Grey was selling millions of copies a week and female sexuality was the hot topic of the day. Since I was going to be in Mayfair anyway, interviewing an African leader whose memoir I was just finishing off, I suggested I pop into the Dorchester once I was finished.

  The African leader had a busier schedule than expected and finding myself free in the middle of the day I sent James a text. He invited me to join them for lunch at Zuma, a famous Japanese restaurant in Knightsbridge. It seemed that fate was working to make this meeting both pleasant and convenient. Even if nothing came of the book it would be an interesting lunch and would pass the time until my African client was free once more.

  The composed, confident couple I found waiting for me at the bar with perfectly chilled glasses of white wine were extremely good looking, but with no hint of arrogance. They managed to be both reserved and charming at the same time, intent on making me feel comfortable in their company despite the very obvious fact that they were completely wrapped up in their adoration of one another.

  Plate after plate of tiny, elegant delicacies were presented at the table by discreet waitresses and one chilled bottle of wine followed another as they slowly revealed their fable of true love.

  It started with love at first sight when they were little more than children and was shattered a few years later by the realities of adult life and the expectations of their families. Just like Romeo and Juliet the young lovers were forced apart by circumstances but, unlike Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, these two had been given a second chance and they had turned it into something magical and extraordinary and deeply sexual.

  By the time the espressos were being served I was hooked and had agreed to fly out to Switzerland the following weekend with a tape machine. That was the start of a journey deep into the lives of a couple who together have discovered some of the most profound secrets of personal happiness.

  One of the skills necessary for ghostwriting is the ability to ask very personal questions without causing people to clam up with embarrassment. Exactly how far, I wondered, could I go with my questions this time? How much detail would they be willing to go into?

  Initially Penny was more reserved in what she wanted to talk about than James was – although she didn’t seem to think that she would be more comfortable with a female ghost, like Jordan and Twiggy – but gradually, as the three of us spent days together talking, she became more sure of what she wanted to reveal. Because James had done most of the talking initially the first draft of the book had too much of a male slant, but it made it possible for Penny to see what she didn’t want and she started to open up more with her own descriptions of their relationship, both physical and emotional. That was when the book really started to take on a life of its own.

  A gift for a billionaire

  ‘Are you doing anything next weekend?’

  I’d pulled the car over to take the call and was having trouble hearing my client’s voice above the rushing traffic.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’s my father’s seventieth birthday and my mother’s throwing him a party in Dubai. He’s always saying one day he’ll write a book and we thought we would give him a ghostwriter as a surprise birthday present.’

  ‘Jumping out of the cake you mean, like Marilyn Monroe in front of President Kennedy?’ I joked.

  ‘We can work out the details once you are there,’ he replied, obviously not ruling out the cake-jumping possibility. ‘I’ll email you with the arrangements.’

  The email was already waiting in my inbox by the time I got home. My client was a wealthy businessman in his own right, based in London. His family was one of the richest and most powerful in Asia and his father was now the head of the large, extended dynasty. I guess it was a bit of a challenge to think what to give a man like that for his birthday. My flights were booked and a room was arranged in the seven-plus star hotel which had been totally commandeered by the family for the weekend. No one was to know why I was there until the presentation.

  ‘What do I say if someone asks me who I am and why I’m at the party?’ I asked when he phoned again to check everything was okay.

  ‘Just say you’re a friend of mine,’ he said, ‘no one will question it. And can you get a cover of the book mocked up to take with you, so we have something to show him?’

  Photos of the great man arrived and I dashed off some copy for the back cover and inside flaps of the dust jacket, sending the package quickly to a friendly local publisher whose designers put the whole thing together in a remarkably convincing facsimile of a book that might actually exist. I headed for the airport a few days later.

  There was a greeter from the organisers of the party waiting for me at the airport and she ferried me straight to the hotel where several hundred of the family’s closest friends, relatives and business contacts were already ensconced. The entire hotel had been turned over to a carefully orchestrated private carnival. Guests had the run of the place and everything was provided at the expense of the hosts. I had always assumed that the parties depicted in The Great Gatsby were entirely imagined by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I think he too must have been entertained in exactly this manner. Unless, of course, it was the other way round and modern billionaires are modelling their styles of entertaining on Jay Gatsby’s, even thos
e who would never have read the original book.

  I have to confess that it is a glorious feeling to be given permission to suspend your social conscience for a few days and allow yourself to be transported to a world where costs and prices are simply not a factor in anyone’s plans. International stars are hired to entertain, banquets are spread out for guests to pick and choose from as and when they are troubled by the slightest pangs of hunger, and barmen constantly stand waiting to prepare whatever cocktail you ask for. All the guests had to worry about was what they would do next and what they should wear to do it. No doubt some of the seemingly social groupings of men in the various bars, restaurants and lounges were busily networking and setting up future deals, but most were simply there to catch up with people they hadn’t seen since the last family gathering (which had involved a similar hotel arrangement in Penang a few months before), or meeting new people. The wives and children of the wealthy men passed the long hours playing cards or visiting the discreet jewellery shops that can always be found in such places.

  There was indeed a cake, but thankfully it was constructed around a famous Asian supermodel and I was only required to stand demurely beside her as I was presented to the surprised, and initially puzzled, birthday boy.