Ghost writing is a simple concept. The person listed as the author of a book--or other things, but usually books--isn't actually the author. Someone else was commissioned to write it and the listed author gets the credit and usually most of the money. What you might not know is just how prolific it is. It happens a lot. Like, a lot. Like, a real lot. Good literary gods a lot! You've very likely read at least a few ghost written books and never knew it.
The practice is not only perfectly legal but most of the time the ghost writer signs an NDA preventing them from even talking about it. On rare occasion, they'll get credited as a co-author or will be named in the acknowledgements without mentioning why, but there's not even a socially accepted norm for that. Now in some cases, it's pretty obvious a ghost writer was involved. No one with half a brain thinks Donald Trump wrote The Art of the Deal or that Sarah Palin wrote Going Rogue. I mean their voters probably do and that's why these people got into office to begin with buuuut I digress.
My question is, why is this allowed and how is it different from any other form of media that requires disclosure?
YouTubers, streamers, bloggers, journalists and more are required to very clearly state when they've received compensation from a subject for their coverage. If I took a sponsorship to write a post here (LOLZ), I have to clearly mark it and mention it in the post or I'm breaking the law, at least in the US and here in Canada. TV shows and movies are required to mention promotional consideration for things like product placement, though with laughable requirements that basically amount to flashing it by in the credits. Yet when an entire literary work is authored by someone other than the person it's being sold to you as, that's apparently both legal and widely considered ethical.
To me, it's straight up false advertising. If a book claims it was written by Wordsmith McLiterary but it was actually written by Ghosty McFakeout, I think I have every right to know that before handing over my money for it. You're selling a product on a set of claims, and those claims are false. What else would you call it? It's not even the at best, grey ethics of it, it's the hypocrisy of saying that all other content should be forced to say when they take money for something--and they should--but entirely misrepresenting authorship is just a normal thing for a book? I don't buy it.
As I showed with all the links at the start, it's now pretty easy to crowdsource if something was ghost written and make your choices from there. But it wasn't always this way. The Art of the Deal for example, came out in 1987. It would have been damn hard to figure that out back then and indeed, most people didn't know until the actual ghost writer outed himself during Trump's first Presidential campaign.
I'm not even trying to bash ghost writers in general, nor claim they don't have their place. Someone who can write an entire book about and/or for someone else and also reproduce that person's tone and mannerisms to make it seem like they authored it takes some real talent. I certainly couldn't pull it off. I also think there's nothing wrong with saying a book was your ideas, but someone else's wordsmithing. We all have our talents and not everyone's cut out to be a writer.
More to the point, not everyone should be a writer, but it seems every celebrity, politician or someone who gets even mildly popular needs to write and cash in on a book these days. This practice of undisclosed ghost writing has become a parasocial tool by people who want to further their brands by making their fans feel like they're reading their own stories told in their own words when in reality, it's just sanded down versions, as squeezed through the lens of someone else who's in it for the money. Virtually every content industry has scummy people at the top and this is just one of the ways those in the publishing world have figured out to fleece us. I don't know about you, but I think we should let them keep getting away with it.
To conclude, here's another hilarious ghost picture I found that I couldn't not put in here.
