Shots In The Dark: KV's Ghostwriters

Thursday, April 27, 2024

KV's Ghostwriters

I've been waiting for someone to do a piece looking into 17th Street Productions, the ghostwriting agency that's part of Alloy Entertainment, the marketing company behind Kaavya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta.....

Good for the Harvard Independent for doing it. (Where's the Times on this seedy aspect of book publishing?*)

The Independent interviews Lizzie Skurnick, a former 17th Street editor and ghostwriter.

"The impulse at a place like the 17th Street is to have a house voice," Skurnick tells the Indy. "There are just reams and reams of stuff that’s written… It’s unavoidable that certain phrases will be recycled or said in a certain way… Often what you’ll find is that, it’s not that anyone is copying, it’s just that [these phrases] are the first things a mediocre writer would reach for.”

I wonder if the teen readers for whom these books are generated care whether or not the people who are claimed to have written them actually wrote them.

I know that when I was a kid, I would have been pretty broken up to learn that John D. Fitzgerald or Roald Dahl or Tolkien or E.B. White didn't really write the books that carried their names....
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P.S. A reader who has gotten to the paper earlier than I points out that the Times weighs in—oops—with a piece on exactly this subject on today's front page. (Did I say oops?)

Here it is.....

¶ 7:36 AM

Comments:

"Where's the Times on this seedy aspect of book publishing?" What? On today's front page...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/books/27pack.html

# posted by Anonymous : 8:42 AM

Well, there you are. Thanks for that.

# posted by richard : 8:47 AM

Sure, you would've been broken up to learn that about Dahl or White. But this is hardly a new phenomenon. While there was certainly some period of time during which I believed that Franklin W. Dixon had written all the Hardy Boys books, it didn't last very long -- and i don't think i was an exceptionally savvy young reader in that regard. Tons of 'young adult' series are written that way, and I couldn't have cared less; I cared about the characters and the plot. I certainly never cared that various episodes of my favorite cartoons were written by different people, for example.

Now, certainly what's going on here is different and way sleazier -- the purported writer exists and is publicly asserting authorship, which you'd never catch the non-existent Mr. Dixon doing -- but in answer to your question about whether teen readers care about the real authorship of these things: I very strongly suspect NOT, in general. Here, where they are being asked to conflate protagonist and "author," though, it may be a different matter.

# posted by Anonymous : 1:09 PM

Terrific points. I expect you're exactly right that it's a mistake to think that this is a new phenomenon. Did Franklin W. Dixon ever exist at all? (I too was a Hardy Boys reader.)

Do teen readers really not care whether the authors of their favorite books "exist"? Perhaps it varies depending on the author and the nature of the book (whether it's one mystery in a series, for example).

I mean, if it turned out that J.K. Rowling had a ghostwriter, imagine the uproar....

# posted by richard : 1:19 PM

Using a ghostwriter is one thing, and most who do make no secret of it. In this case, we have a Harvard student who made worldwide news with her big news about her debut writing for big bucks. Now Harvard's taking a hit and it was all so unnecessary.

# posted by Anonymous : 4:36 PM

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