Publishers have always used ghostwriters. Particularly when they’re selling a marketable personality. The recent success of Prince Harry’s Spare has brought the hidden collaboration between author and writer into the public eye – but is the practice new? And why hasn’t it been made obsolete with the onset of AI?
The business of ghostwriting is often thought of as a secret part of publishing and its history, but if we trace its origin story we travel all the way back to the speechwriters of ancient world, then move through the medieval scriptoria, the Elizabethan theatres and on into London’s Grub Street. These days, titans of industry can hire a scribe at the click of a button. Like Henry VIII, they may not have the discipline, the skill, or the time to craft the writing but, like for any king, a book can establish authority across time, and do so in a way that trumps any social media post; it’s a twenty-year marketing campaign for an entrepreneur, where all professional knowledge is brought into one authoritative form. The right book will open the right doors, it can enhance and professionalise an entire organisation – for this reason, ghostwriting has become a common service in the corporate world for new startups and established founders.
Luke Shipman, Founder of The London Ghostwriting Company, says that ‘industry-leading company directors have vision and story but they will need a ghostwriter to combine their message with the right amount of corporate biography and family history.’ With the amount of services advertised today, those in need of a book should be looking for a published, represented professional to commission – and contacting an agent or publisher is a good place to start, and if using search, using it properly…
The London Ghostwriting Company is celebrating their 10th year in the business, developing memoirs, non-fiction, business books, novels and screenplays with their clients. Projects come to them at different stages; from blank page and first idea, to AI-generated drafts that just aren’t working. With LGC’s focus on project development, and their history as story specialists, they are extremely sceptical about AI and have not seen it deliver what’s been promised. For this reason, their number of clients has increased, with more people turning up with AI-generated slop that they don’t know how to edit or re-structure.
According to LGC, AI has complicated things and made the editorial process difficult and messy – it’s overpromised and under-delivered. An experienced writer understands this: they were toiling and grafting before AI, the internet and mobile phones. Shipman, who has run over 400 projects, remains unimpressed by the text AI is producing compared with the writing of his seasoned writers: journalists, authors, academics, scholars, historians, and award-winning screenwriters. But in a world that prioritises speed and ‘progress’, the public’s use of AI and LLMs has been inevitable. The problem? There’s nothing more expensive for a business than a badly written artificial book that is negatively reviewed.
Writing a book involves more than assembling content and text. A seasoned ghost works in a similar way to a professional journalist; they tease out parts of a story that would otherwise go unmined. They pick up on nuance, anxiety, and a revealing head shake during chats. AI can’t do this; and it can’t produce anything original, ‘it’s a covers band!’ Shipman says. Meanwhile, an experienced writer has learnt to guide a client through the meaningful process that should come with writing, and this is where the value of a ghostwriter comes in. For all these reasons, Shipman remains sceptical about replacing all of this talent and value with mere software; his company in fact prohibits the use of AI and his writers are required to sign a declaration of original work. All of the writing they review is run through GPTZero, which detects how much text has been AI-generated. ‘We’ve found it extremely accurate as it understands the difference between organic writing and pattern matching’, he says.
Everyone has access to free LLM tools today, but people are becoming distracted by the problems they create and are also missing out on the experience of going back and forth with a co-writer or ghost – someone who will ask the important questions. Is this worth developing? Should we run a flashback? Will the market want this? The value a ghost brings has been cherished for thousands of years, and the service doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. When new technology comes around, like movable type, it actually creates work for writers, it doesn’t replace them, and this is what’s happened in the business today, in the form of the rewrite or heavy edit. The ghostwriting business is very much alive – writing is not just about generating text by playing with algorithms.
Leave a Comment