Читать книгу Confessions of a Ghostwriter - Andrew Crofts - Страница 12

The ever-cheerful soap star peered suspiciously at the freshly delivered cover of her forthcoming autobiography.

‘Why hasn’t it got your name on it?’ she enquired.

‘Because I’m invisible,’ I reminded her. ‘It says so in my contract.’

‘Does it?’ It was obviously the first she had heard of any such stipulation. ‘Why’s that then?’

‘The publisher thinks it’s better.’

‘Why?’

‘They think the fans will prefer to believe that you wrote it yourself. They want them to picture you sitting down at your escritoire at the end of a hard day’s filming and pouring your heart out onto the page.’

‘Sitting at my what?’

‘Your writing desk.’

She emitted a tobacco-throated croak of mirth. ‘I don’t think anyone’s that thick, are they?’

‘It’s standard practice. The publisher just thinks it’s better.’

‘I’m not sure about that. I don’t want people to think that I’m pretending I can write a book. That’ll make me look like a right knob.’

Such frankness is always endearing in an author. Most, in my experience, are quite happy to confess that they have had help with ‘doing the typing’, as Katie Price would say; it is usually the lawyers and the publishers who insist on contracts that threaten the ghost with hanging, drawing and quartering if they even tell their pet spaniel that their clients didn’t write their own books. The paid advisers are equally fond of confidentiality agreements that forbid you from ever telling anyone anything that you might have found out that doesn’t actually make it into the published book. If the client removes all their clothes during a recording session or confides that they intend to top themselves, mum’s the word.

Things have become less draconian with the passing years and with the public’s growing awareness that most people will find it hard to dash off a book if they are also doing another full-time job like starring in a soap opera, playing in a professional football team or running a country. As a result there are now some books where the ghost is openly acknowledged on the cover or the flyleaf and is free to talk to everyone including the media about their involvement in the project, and others where quite the opposite is true. Likewise there are some author/ghost relationships where a level of trust exists without the necessity of a written confidentiality contract, and a ghost would guard their author’s secrets as fiercely as they would guard those of their friends and family. Those are the best ones. It is the state that all good ghosts should aspire to.