The People Behind The Pen

Meet Madeleine Morel, a literary agent who specializes in ghostwriters:

[W]hat I have now is a talent agency. I have hundreds of different writers to whom I have access, but I would say that at any given time I have 100 to 150 writers who I’m in touch with on a semi-regular basis. So when anybody’s looking for a writer, I always give them four to six different writers to choose from, all of whom have been published multiple times by the major houses and many of whom have put books on the bestseller list. They all specialize in particular areas: sport, politics, popular culture, health and fitness and diet. Whatever you see on the bestseller list is what I do.

How she describes a “typical” ghostwriter:

[Ghostwriters] fall into three rubrics: former magazine writers; former book editors who couldn’t stand the corporate life any longer, or who were laid off; and what we used to call in the old days mid-list writers—that is, writers who wrote perfectly nice books and got advances of $5,000 to $15,000. But those books can’t be sold any longer, because they don’t have a platform. So they started writing for other people.