Celebrity memoirs are a dime a dozen, but there’s a smaller cohort of stars who have tried to add “novelist” to their résumés. This includes Kylie and Kendall Jenner, who wrote the 2014 YA novel Rebels: City of Indra; Carrie Fisher, author of the deeply autobiographical Postcards From the Edge; and Tyra Banks, whose 569-page Modelland is about a girl named Tookie De La Crème. In early October, Reese Witherspoon announced she was collaborating with the best-selling thriller author Harlan Coben. But what does it mean when a celebrity decides to write fiction?
Here, the writers and agents working behind the scenes on similar books tell us how it actually works.
A longtime ghostwriter of more than 30 fiction and nonfiction books who wrote a reality-TV personality’s beach-read series and a Novel for the Star of a Teen Show
I did a couple novels with a reality star. I was hired because I had done other ghostwriting work for the publisher and I had done YA novels under my own name. The reality star had no part of this world; it was really just a business opportunity for her. The publisher recommended me, and her team was just like, “Okay.”
We had an initial phone call, and we talked loosely about what the plot would be, about what the goals of the book were, and then she went off to film the show. I wrote the book in seven weeks — for fiction, it’s the record for me — then she read the draft and we had a call and talked about edits, which were minimal. We didn’t even meet until the photo shoot for the cover of the second book.
It was a really smart marketing decision. The idea was her fan base would want to read a novel that would be an extension of a universe that already existed. It was a New York Times best seller for like four weeks. I wrote it in my 40s, and I had been dying to be on the best-seller list my whole career. I couldn’t get there on my own, but I got there with her for the first time. My name wasn’t on the cover, and I didn’t give a shit. I knew I had written this book. I knew people were buying it because they loved it.
There was a segment of the general population who reacted to this book in a very negative way, but people within the industry understood that it was a huge success and that I should feel proud of the work. That was the beginning of my career as a fiction ghostwriter, fully understanding what the job is: to do the craft and the work I had honed over my entire career as an author, while channeling somebody else, for the potential of reaching a wider audience. I don’t know if I ever could have been at that level on my own.
The ego part of it, like, No one knows it was me, I really didn’t care about that. I was being paid in the mid–five figures, and the people who mattered did know, the editors and the agents who would get me more work to earn a living as a writer. So yeah, I’m a ghostwriter, but within publishing, I’m pretty well known for it.
One actress I worked with years later already had a co-writer, who was her friend, and then I was the ghost writer who was barely acknowledged. In fact they only mentioned my first name in the acknowledgements section, which was not what my contract said. And then I felt definitely screwed over on the second novel. I wrote the whole thing. She didn’t read it until it was done, and then she’s like “I have problems with this,” and she wanted revisions. They hired a book doctor to work with me on a new outline. She never approved it or read it, and I basically wrote an entire novel for my four-figure signing payment and never saw another penny.
A fiction writer who co-wrote a professional dancer’s novel
The majority of my clients are self-published romance authors, but this was my first celebrity client. We connected through my agent. Pretty quickly in the process, she mentioned that she wanted to give me cover credit because she was like, “I don’t need people to think that I wrote this by myself.” So that was cool.
People will ask, “Am I offended that people are putting their name on a book I wrote?” But a lot of the time, it doesn’t feel like mine because it’s all their ideas. She had a very general idea of what she wanted it to be about. I think she wanted to tell some of her story in a way that still kept it private. But she wanted to share some of the experiences she’s been through and to talk about, if not the factual details, then the emotional details of it. And she wanted to up the creativity of it and make it more like magical realism. We worked together on how to put it into a plot, etc. Usually, with clients like that who haven’t written books before, I’m a lot more heavily involved in the outlining and development process.
We did this one in chunks, so I wrote the first third and sent it, and then the next third and sent it, so she was giving feedback along the way. I was sending a lot of the more specific themes to her for detailed feedback because there were certain things she really wanted to happen.
I wasn’t paid up front. We decided to split the copyright 50-50 instead, so it sold for $30,000 and I got $15,000. We’re close to earning out, so hopefully more in the future.
I got to go on the book tour. I have a couple of books out under my name, and this was a very different experience. We got marketing support, which is an unfamiliar feeling for me. Her media team put together appearances on Good Morning America and the Today show, that kind of stuff. So that was cool in one sense and I guess dispiriting in another because it’s, like, how do beginner writers ever get that sort of coverage?
A successful novelist who auditioned to ghostwrite an A-list actor’s spicy series
Channing Tatum was going to do a series of novels for Magic Mike. Obviously, he wasn’t going to write them, but it would have been with his name on the cover and then the author’s name. So the author would have gotten credit, but you would have gotten paid a flat, really low fee. I didn’t get it and then he didn’t do the project at all, but a lot of romance authors were auditioning to do it. The terms were basically you get paid $200 for your audition, which would then be coming out of the advance if you got the project. It was for a series of full-length novels, so you would’ve had to write 75,000 to 80,000 words for $10,000 to $15,000 per book.
Another one of my friends had signed up to write a novel for a former child star. She got flown out to meet them, and it was like a nightmare situation where the celebrity thought they were going to write it themselves and the author was just there to help. Ultimately, she got paid a kill fee, and the project never went anywhere.
A literary agent who negotiates celebrity ghostwriting deals for the authors on his roster
Editors usually come out looking for authors to do this. So, like, an American singer and actress did a book and they came out and hired one of our authors to do it. I’ve had friends who know someone who introduced me to the someone, who then says, “I want to write a book. Which one of your authors is going to write it?” Typically, they get a flat fee. It can go anywhere from $10,000 on up. The power of ghostwriting is doing it a lot. You have to audition, send in a sample. Sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, this is good, but we want to rewrite it. Try this.”
I know this because I have friends who are talent agents and represent celebrities. It’s all about diversifying your investments — having your personal brand and another income source because you’ve got the royalties and then the film deals. And from what I understand, a lot more people lost money in the Bernie Madoff thing than you’d think, and people are just embarrassed to say it, which is why I’m not surprised to see so many celeb novels, because it feels like an easy cash grab.
These projects make me feel disheartened and, I’ll be honest, maybe a little bitter that it’s such an evil, by-the-numbers business that is really, really not about the literary merit. It comes down to money.