Writer Q & A: Sari Botton on Ghostwriting

During my MFA program, I turned down a bunch of writing and editing work. I know. But this was before the great financial collapse, before the student loans payment began, before every laid-off wordsmith of any kind jumped into the already-crowded freelancing pool. In most cases, I'm only sorry about the lost income, but one lost learning opportunity I regret is not signing on to ghostwrite a nonfiction book when it was offered. At the time, my decision made so much sense: the wrong time to target attention toward someone else's vision when I needed to focus on my own voice. Still. Ghostwriting has always fascinated me. When I was a full-time public relations specialist, I occasionally ghostwrote magazine pieces for clients, and always liked the satisfaction when one of them said I had conveyed their message just as they'd hoped. Once, I wrote a personal essay for a professional football player whose mother told him, "see, I always knew you could write!" But an entire book is another matter completely.

Recently, while debating how to properly carve up my freelance efforts, I met the gifted Sari Botton, whose ghostwriting career is in full swing. We met because of a joint reading from a recently published collection, in which we both have essays, but when I learned of her ghost status, I decided to pepper her with questions. She kindly answered.

LR: You've mentioned that you got started in ghostwriting by accident. Do you mind describing how, and did you like it right away, or did it grow on you?

SB: I was working as a journalist for W magazine. It was a pretty good job, but I had wanted to go freelance for a while. One evening while covering an Author's Guild event, I was seated next to an agent who happened to have been looking for a ghostwriter for one of her clients. I got the assignment, and that book allowed me to leave my day job. Well, it held me over briefly. Ghostwriting was a mixed bag from the start. Collaborations always have the potential for conflict. But I had fun channeling people’s voices into their own stories.

LR: You worked with fashion designer Dana Buchman on her memoir about her daughter's learning disabilities. Did you work with both Dana and her daughter on that? Did it require a great deal of research?

SB: Dana and I worked very closely on that book. I worked with her daughter, as well. Sometimes, Dana and I would be up, on the phone, at five or six in the morning because that was when she had time to talk. We worked together on research, interviewing educators and other specialists in the LD field.

LR: While some ghostwriters prefer to have a "with," "and," or "as told to" alongside the author's name, but your byline does not appear there. Why do you choose to remain anonymous?

SB: As much as I enjoy ghostwriting – I really like helping people tell their moving stories – I don’t want to be a career ghostwriter, to the exclusion of publishing my own work. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t think a lot of the writers who are credited on a “with” byline go on to establish themselves as authors in their own right. Also, as a reader, I feel confused when a book comes from more than one person. How can I identify with the writer, how can I hear one voice when I read? In my opinion, a book that comes officially from one author is more likely to resonate with more readers, and therefore sell more books.

LR: Do you normally rewrite notes and text provided by the author, or do you craft the manuscript from the ground up?

SB: It’s a mix of both. I try not to work with authors who aren’t generally fairly good writers themselves. They may not know how to write a book, but they can write a sentence, a paragraph, can tell a story. They have a certain individual verbal flair, a way with words that will help me identify their unique voice and keep it authentic through the book. At first, authors tend to be self-conscious about showing me their writing. They think I’m going to take a big red pen to it and give them an F. So, I’ll usually be the one to get the ball rolling. Before an author really gets comfortable with me, I’ll do interviews and start to put together some material for us both to play with. I create an outline, and will often also outline chapters. As we go along, the author will often get more comfortable writing and start to send pieces that I will manipulate.

LR: How do you best like to gather material – long in-person interviews? By telephone? Email?

SB: I do a combination of in-person interviews and phone interviews, depending on geography. Fortunately, I now have a great little digital recorder, and this $24 device from Radio Shack that allows me to record conversations on the phone.

LR: When in the process are ghostwriting services usually sought?

SB: Often, I am sought out before a book gets started. An author may have a few pages written, or an outline, but not much more. These are the best situations. When they try to bring me in at the point where a whole rejected manuscript exists, or when another ghostwriter has been fired, it is actually a harder job than starting from scratch.

LR: What do you like most about being a ghost?

SB: I feel as if I do some good in the world when I help people who have really inspiring stories to tell them, in their voices. I try to choose only those memoirs that have what I consider to be important messages, books that will ultimately be valuable contributions to the world.

LR: Least favorite part of the job?

SB: When an author and his/her editor don’t see eye-to-eye, and I am stuck in the middle, not knowing whom to please.

LR: How much of your career is made up of ghostwriting, and what are the other parts of your business?

SB: I also work as a freelance journalist and essayist. I sometimes do copywriting for advertising and the web. Currently, though, ghostwriting is my bread-and-butter. It accounts for about 60-75 percent of my income.

LR: You have a major new ghostwriting project on the burner, a memoir, which I understand you are very excited about – contractually, can you tell us anything about it?

SB: Actually, I can’t. Other than to say it is a really moving story that will touch and inspire people!

LR: How has ghostwriting contributed to your own writing efforts, in terms of craft, productivity, and business aspects?

SB: I have learned a lot about storytelling from ghostwriting. I think that has enhanced my essay writing skills. Also, having recently had to write an entire book in seven weeks, I have been shown that I am able to achieve a lot rather quickly – more quickly than I would have ever imagined! It really honed my chops.

LR: Have there been any fun perks? (Travel? Clothes from Dana Buchman?)

SB: I got to go to Costa Rica for a recent assignment. Although I was writing the whole time, there are worse places to have to go for work! When I wrote a book for Aveda founder Horst Rechelbacher, I got to spend three weeks at a time at the (former) Aveda spa in Wisconsin, and received a spa treatment every day I was there!

LR: What advice might you give to someone who is interested in finding work as a ghostwriter? Is it essential to already have an agent?

SB: Getting started as a ghostwriter, you might need to take a low-ish fee the first time to establish yourself. I wrote one book, early on, for just $5000. But it helped to establish me. You definitely want an agent involved. It will be worth the 15 percent every time. I am a very bad business person on my own. Without an agent, I’d probably wind up paying the authors to allow me to work on their books!

LR: What kind of a writer makes a good ghostwriter? Do you think it hinges as much on skills and experience, as on temperament and other personal traits?

SB: You need both. I think my years as a journalist – particularly my time profiling people, including celebrities, helped. Good interviewing skills are important. It helps to also love memoir and first-person writing. I devour that category, so I’m not just a writer of it, but a reader of it. I am naturally keyed into that Seymour Glass idea of “ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice.” Personality-wise, clients often tell me that I am like a therapist. Somehow, I have always been good at putting people at ease. One of my “tricks” is to share anecdotes of my own, so that it’s not one person self-consciously on the hot seat; rather, we’re having a conversation.

LR: What are some pitfalls you may have encountered when you were new to ghostwriting, and how might one avoid them?

SB: Make sure your client is ready to write his or her book. One high-profile client of mine thought she was ready, but then canceled 70 appointments to work with me. Also, as I mentioned before, make sure your author and his or her editor have the same vision for the book. In one case, the author wanted one thing, the editor wanted another, and they were each prodding me behind the scenes to make it more their way.

LR: I'm sure every writer wants to know how lucrative ghostwriting might be. Can you give some typical ranges in the business?

SB: According to Writer’s Market, the average price is $35K. Over the course of my career, I have been paid both less and way more. Once you are established, you should be able to get between 40 and 50 percent of the author’s advance. With celebrity books bringing in several hundred thousand dollars or more…well, you do the math. Early on, though, you might have to take lower-profile assignments, and in some cases, take a flat fee.

LR: Without naming the books, have there been a few projects you've passed on, which you now wish you had done?

SB: Actually, I have the reverse kind of situation to report. I had put my hat in the ring to work on “Angel over the Fence,” Herman Rosenblat’s book about how his wife threw apples to him over a concentration camp fence when he was starving there, and then they were reunited on a blind date many years later. I was rejected because I hadn’t written fiction. “We want it to read like fiction,” I was told. Well – it turned out to have been fiction! He’d fabricated most of the story, and the book got pulled before publication.

LR: What (or who) would be your dream ghostwriting project?

SB: Someone who is making a difference in the world, who is a positive role model, with a story people can identify with.

Winner of the Feed Me! Book Giveaway

And...we have a winner. Thanks to everyone who entered to win a copy of Feed Me! Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image. My son picked a lucky number, and it corresponded to commenter number seven, Susan Breen. Enjoy the book, Susan.

Reminder: Food and Book Lovers

Reminder: Tomorrow, Saturday Feb. 14, is the last day to snag a chance to win a copy of Feed Me! Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image.

Think of it as my Valentine's Day gift to everyone who loves food, for better or worse.

I'll announce the winner here on Sunday.

Guest Blogger Susan O'Doherty on Writing Large

At a reading I did in November at Queens College, one other writer impressed me because of her quiet, haunting delivery of a short story and seemed like someone I'd like to get to know. We were seated in the same row, but since my husband and I had to make the trek from Queens back to the hinterlands of New Jersey, this interesting woman and I didn't have a chance to get acquainted. A few weeks later, I got the list of other contributors to Feed Me! Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image and there was Susan O’Doherty's name. We had something in common and were going to get acquainted after all.

Susan, a writer and clinical psychologist, is the author of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued (Seal, 2007). She's written for journals (Eureka Literary Magazine, Northwest Review, Apalachee Review) and anthologies (Mama Ph.D, Sex for America, The New Writer’s Handbook, and About What Was Lost). Her advice column for writers, "The Doctor Is In," is featured every Friday on the publishing blog Buzz, Balls & Hype (the following is a cross-post from there today).


Please welcome Susan O'Doherty.

All of my female psychotherapy clients think they are too fat. This has been true for at least the past five years; probably longer.

This is not exactly headline news, of course. The cultural pressure on women to be thin is well known. However, since most of my clients are writers, I think this phenomenon warrants further exploration.

I have worked with a few male clients who were concerned about their weight, too. Usually, their concerns centered on health issues thought to be associated with overweight: cardiac problems, diabetes, or lower back pain. The topics of attractiveness and social acceptance seldom came up.


Some of my women clients might be healthier and more comfortable physically if they were ten or twenty pounds lighter. But that isn’t the primary concern they express. Heterosexual women worry that their husbands and boyfriends no longer find them attractive. Several women have reported humiliation by strangers who complain that their “thunder thighs” take up too much space on the subway, or by physicians who refuse to believe that their symptoms could be caused by factors other than gluttony and sloth—even though recent medical research suggests that weight is determined more by genetic factors than by personal effort and willpower, and that for people in otherwise good health, being a few pounds overweight is preferable to being underweight.

My own weight was in the average range for most of my adult life, until a brush with serious illness (detailed in Feed Me) caused me to lose over 20 pounds, along with a great deal of hair, stamina, and resistance to disease. Despite eating normally, I have never regained my weight or much of my health. But I very seldom have to endure disparaging remarks about my size or admonitions that my medical issues would disappear if I would only exercise some discipline and drink more milkshakes. On the contrary, I find myself the object of friends’ and acquaintances’ expressed envy, and of sudden sexual attention from men who previously related to me only as my son’s mother, their wife’s friend, or that woman who always asks for Tahitian Blue fountain pen ink in the large bottle.

Healthy, beautiful bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and I certainly don’t claim that large, curvaceous bodies are more “adult” or “legitimate” than those that are smaller or more angular. However, it’s hard not to see the increasing fetishization of slenderness as a collective wish that uppity women would return to a state of preadolescent innocence, dependency, and powerlessness.


What does all of this have to do with writing?

No matter what we know intellectually, these attitudes tend to penetrate. And internalizing the message that in order to be acceptable, we must make ourselves smaller, weaker and more childlike can affect creativity in profound ways.

It is hard for my overweight clients to shrug off the message that they are not acceptable as they are; it is hard for me to ignore the signals that I am more attractive and desirable now than when I was robust and athletic, when my hair shone and my skin glowed.

It’s hard to take in the message that we are too large, too much, and take up too much space—and then to raise our voices and boldly express potentially incendiary ideas in our writing. It’s hard to be told that we must ignore the signals of our own bodies, but must instead starve and malnourish ourselves so that we won’t be hideous in others’ eyes—and then to find the physical and emotional strength to attend to and record our authentic feelings and beliefs.


Life is too fragile, beautiful, and important for this nonsense. If we are to write authentically and live fully, we need to be too big, too much; to take up space; to listen to and express our inner truths even—or especially—when they conflict with accepted standards. We need to convert the energy we spend planning and executing diet regimes, plodding away on the treadmill, and flagellating ourselves for perceived lapses into the creation of ambitious, audacious novels, earth-shaking lovemaking, fierce love for our children and our friends, and pursuing a richer, deeper, happier existence. We need to give ourselves this permission, because clearly, it will never be handed to us.

Feed a Book Addiction with a Freebie

Tuesday was the official publication date of a new collection in which one of my essays appears, Feed Me! Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image, and since I love freebies, and since the book blogs and social media book sites even the health blogs, and the book review sites and at least one edgy online magazine are talking about it, I figure it's time to give away one copy of the book here.

Leave a comment by the end of the day on February 14 and if yours is randomly selected, I'll send the book off to you, along with the wish that you love – or at least appreciate – your own body.

If you are near New Paltz, NY, drop in for a reading from the book this Saturday.

And if by chance you are thinking of buying the book via Amazon, consider doing so on February 1, the book's Amazon Spike Day. No one (certainly not me) will earn any more if you do, but it does bump up the book's ranking -- always a good thing.

When leaving your comment, if you are so inclined, I'd love to hear at least one thought about this love-hate relationship almost everyone seems to have with their body, appetite, eating, food, and weight.

Writing about the F-word. Not that one.

"Does my butt look fat? Well, it is. And it's OK to say it, because after decades of agonizing over my weight, I've finally realized that the F-word isn't dirty."

I didn't write the above lines, but I'm awfully glad Kate Harding did, because I've often had those exact sentiments. Harding writes the Shapely Prose blog, and is one of my fellow contributors to the essay collection Feed Me! Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image.

Today, Salon excerpted her piece on the front page of their site. By noon, it had already spurred more than 75 letters, and wow – talk about a spectrum, from supportive to snake-like vicious, from literate and well-informed to…well, you get the picture.

Quite separate from how anyone may feel about the issue, I think Harding's essay -- slightly humorous, thought-provoking, and with a strong voice -- is well-written and worth a read.

You'll find it here.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Labor Day Weekend Edition

Like when you just don't know what to eat and open up the fridge door and stare, or maybe decide it's time to clear out the fridge and start pulling out this and that --here are plenty of picks for your weekend enjoyment. If the three-day weekend is more of a lounge than I think it will be, I'll get more up as it meanders along. Or maybe not. Meanwhile, read, think, wonder, discuss. Report back if you like.

The Salon des Refuses is a compilation and criticism special edition by two Canadian lit journals: only the previously-rejected story need apply. It's in response to 2007 Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, which some thought passed over too many worthy stories (and authors). OK, I get it. And I applaud anyone brave enough to launch any new print vehicle in 2008. Still: doesn't every story in a literary journal or anthology – unless you are Alice Munro – end up being rejected at least a time or two before it's published? And isn't it the job – like it or not-- of every anthology editor to whittle down the possible contenders? Guess the folks behind the Salon just didn't like what (and who) Jane Urquhart chose. And decided to do something about it.

With thoughts of school everywhere, I'm wishing my friend Harriet Brown, who edited the funny and rueful Mr. Wrong, as well as the forthcoming Feed Me: Writers Dish about Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image, much good luck in her new job teaching in the magazine journalism program at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, where I got my undergraduate degree. [Yes, I have an essay in Feed Me, but I'd send good wishes to Harriet anyway!]

I'm addicted to Publisher's Lunch/Lunch Daily, for a bunch of reasons. First, it's free, which its parent, Publisher's Marketplace, though wildly informative, is definitely not. Second, anything that reminds me, on a regular basis, that there are books deals out there for writers and book ideas of every possible kind, that publishers are still hiring despite the "print is dead" rhetoric, and that agents are busy every single day nabbing contracts for completely unknown writers – well, that's the sort of encouragement I can use. Go here to sign up.

Speaking of free, you can sign up for the BookPage twice-monthly e-newsletters here.

High-paying, quality markets for personal essays and creative narrative nonfiction are around, though not as plentiful as we'd like. The Sun is an exception. It's good looking, well-edited, long-established, a monthly, and enjoys a good literary rep. And now there's this update from the submissions guidelines posted on the magazine's site:

"We pay from $300 to $3,000 for essays and interviews, $300 to $2,000 for fiction, and $100 to $500 for poetry, the amount being determined by length and quality. We may pay less for very short works. We also give contributors a complimentary one-year subscription to The Sun. We purchase one-time rights. All other rights revert to the author upon publication."

Hmm. Respectable compensation, fair rights terms, and a literary magazine that looks like a consumer magazine: in other words, I can keep it on my coffee table and visitors who never thought they cared about literary journals, may -- and do -- page through without intimidation, and without ads, too. The monthly e-newsletter, is free.

Okay, then there's this, and I’m not sure whether to be jumping in the aisles or putting on the "too good to be true" look I use when one of my kids tries to tell me something that ordinarily should be expensive, difficult and time-consuming is actually free, easy or quick.

Field Report is a new website promising a $20,000 payment each month to the author of a personal essay, judged the best by site visitors, who are fellow writer-contributors. I'm skeptical, mostly because (except for a few Google Adsense ads - and they pay next to nothing), there's no hint where the contest funds coming from. Who knows, maybe there's a noble-minded nonfiction lover behind the site. (Sure, they exist!).

The blurb on Mediabistro notes that one West Coast journalist said the San Francisco-based site has an "odd new business model." I'm hoping the emphasis in that quote isn't on "odd." Really, I hope it flies. I do. And I'd love to hear from anyone who knows more about it.

Have a great weekend.