Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is about to bring out his political memoirs and rather predictably, he is going to make a mountain of cash out of it. He would probably like you to think that he wrote the whole book himself but nothing could be further from the truth.

In actual fact, that book, published under the name Tony Blair, was actually written by a ghost writer, who will probably not receive any recognition, fame and glory at all.

What is a Ghost Writer Service?

And the thing is that’s OK. Ghost writers don’t write for fame, glory and attention. Instead they write for money. Call them writing mercenaries if you will, or a glorified writing service. Their job is to be a ghost, someone who floats about in the background, completes their writing assignment and then leaves again with their paycheck.

The Pros of Running a Ghost Writer Service

And it’s the same for nearly all celebrities, politicians and anyone else with a busy life who wants to bring a book out. They simply don’t have the time (and quite often don’t have the writing talent). So they hire someone to do it for them, give them a few hours of their time to provide background information (if a biography is being written) and then the person takes full credit for the book, after paying the writer off.

This is an ideal life for a lot of people because all they want to do is write and make some cash out of it. They may be frustrated authors themselves who can’t get their own book published so they figure the best way to make some serious money from writing is to write other peoples stuff instead. They can also be someone from that person’s past. For example, to use the politician example again, the politician may hire someone from their political staff when they were in power, to write the book for them. Keeping it all in the family as it were.

The Cons of Being a Ghost Writer

But it can also not be an ideal life for many other people. If the ghost writer has an enormous ego and starts to resent the client getting all the fawning glory from an adoring press and public, they may decide they want some of that too. Of course they would be contractually forbidden from saying anything to anyone so they couldn’t claim credit for anything. But I’m sure you can imagine the frustration from a person like that who wants to scream “I WROTE THAT! NOT HIM!” and not be able to do so for fear of being sued.

The whole practice of being a ghostwriter has been catapaulted to the public’s attention in a major way by the release of Robert Harris’s thriller novel “The Ghost” (and its subsequent 2010 Hollywood movie release starring Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor). Ironically the politician in “The Ghost” is someone modelled closely on Tony Blair!

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Mark O’Neill is a freelance writer of 20 years experience, and also the managing editor of MakeUseOf.com, since August 2007. You can see his personal website at markoneill.org Mark has 21 post(s) at Free Writing Center