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his fiancée, for a book on -- believe it or not -- fashion tips. (Here, for anyone unfamiliar with Ms McLoughlin's personal style, is a typical image of her distinctive, artful way with co-ordination and accessories.)Now, no sensible person actually believes that celebrities, given a whacking great advance by publishers to write their autobiographies, sit down in front of their computers and dutifully get on with the arduous task of organizing their life story, researching dates, names, and places, and turning the whole thing into catchy, easy-to-read prose. The editor who bought the book puts the celebrity together with a ghostwriter, who's well paid for their trouble, but stays in the shadows: if they're lucky, they'll get a passing acknowledgment in the credits. An autobiography is usually a one-off, though, unless you're Geri Halliwell. Geri, Sharon Osbourne, Charlotte Church, Jordan, Posh and Becks, sit down with their ghostwriter, have a few chats, do the round of book signings, and trouser the dosh. Fair enough. And these books do seem to sell: we see them everywhere, great stacks of them piled high in every bookshop. I have no problem with the celebrity autobiographies. Frankly, they make my publishers a ton of money, and I benefit from that, in a small way: they throw tiny fractions of that ton of money my and my friends' way to write books a tiny fraction as commercial, but from which we actually manage to make a living. Lucky us, to be published at all in this climate. Because it's not the celebrities' life stories that bother me. It's when they, and the publishers, get so carried away that they cross the line and start putting out novels which are allegedly written by celebrities. Pamela Anderson, Naomi Campbell. Nicole Richie. Ivana Trump. They've all turned out 'novels' which, in numerous interviews, most of them claim they wrote themselves. Here's a recent quote from The Guardian about this very subject: "After paying her ghost Camille Marchetta $350,000 to write a novel about a Czech alter ego named Katrina, Ivana Trump… seemed to have convinced herself of her gift. 'To my surprise, I find I have a great imagination,' she told Vanity Fair in her unwieldy English. 'I don't say I'm the Shakespeare, but it's not just about the beautiful people and the gorgeous yachts and the fabulous homes and lots of sex. I tried to put in more the feelings.'" This is what kills me. This is what I'm ranting about. Some ghostwriter gets $350,000 to write Ivana Trump a novel? I mean, good for her, but I have friends who write really well-selling books that don't make that much money! How the hell much of an advance did Ivana Trump get? Or was that just a vanity deal, because she wanted to have 'written a book' so she could talk to Vanity Fair about it? And if you check the press, Pamela Anderson does talk like she wrote her novel herself -- she admits to having a 'co-writer', who, um, actually did the writing, but on her website she's listed as being the author of 'Star Struck'. Here's how the Washington Post covered the story: " 'I know how to write a column," Anderson says of her dots-and-dashes work for Jane magazine. "But a book? Like chapters, how many pages are in a chapter? How many chapters in a book? I needed some guidance.'I love the bit where she says blithely, "Obviously, he typed the whole thing out." Right. Gosh, I wish it were that easy, Pamela, I really do. Oh, and by the way -- I'm damn sure that she has no idea how to write a column either. I've worked on magazines with celebrity columnists -- who were journos, unlike Ms Anderson -- and believe me, none of them turned in a perfectly formed column every month. Some just scribbled a few paragraphs which the subs had to turn into decent prose. I'd be amazed if Anderson did anything but email a few thoughts to Jane every month which the subs then expanded into 2000 words (which then got run by Pam's PR person, naturally, to check they hadn't put words into her mouth she didn't want to say). It was for some time a 'secret' that Naomi Campbell hadn't actually written her 'novel', Swan. Campbell then told journalists airily that she was 'much too busy to sit down and write a book', and it gradually emerged that the book had actually been written by Caroline Upcher, an author and editor. Campbell's agent later said: "Naomi's very much the author but Caroline [Upcher] is the writer. That's fair. You can't expect Naomi to produce a novel straight off on her own." No, you can't. Of course you can't. Naomi Campbell is much too busy stuffing coke up her nose, dating creepy rich men, starving herself, and throwing hard objects at people who work for her, to have time to 'sit down and write a book', or, as Pamela Anderson would put it, 'type the whole thing out'. So, hello, let's ask the big question: Why commission her to write a novel in the first place? This is the rant here, ladies and gents. Because these novels, unlike the celebrity autobiographies, are rarely best-sellers. Tons of money gets thrown at these famous people, who I doubt even bother to read the book they've supposedly written, while writers like us, by comparison, get practically nothing. Not only do we not get the advances, we don't get the gigantic publicity push that rolls up behind any author who's secured a stonking great advance. I got really lucky with my recent book, Jane Austen's Guide To Dating. The book went to an auction between two publishers, which meant I got a bigger advance than I usually do, which meant that the superb Headline publicity machine got behind the book and started pushing with all their strength. That's how it works -- the bigger the advance, the more publicity effort you get, because the publishers want to earn back their advance through sales. If you get a tiny advance, it's total sink or swim -- you're lucky if you get any help from a publicist at all. This is the line that publishers are crossing when they cynically commission near-illiterates to write novels or fashion guides, and this is the line that those near-illiterates are crossing, too, when they equally cynically take the money and then kid themselves that they've actually got some involvement with the creative process. We all know that Colleen McLoughlin isn't going to write a word of 'her' book, beyond signing her name in copies at publicity events. And it's deeply depressing to think how pathetically grateful many talented authors would be for a hundredth of that 2 million pound advance, which Colleen doesn't even need and will only spend on more nasty fringed handbags which she saw Lindsey Lohan sporting in the latest issue of InStyle. (Lindsey Lohan, of course, being a real celebrity, ie someone who actually goes to work for her money, got hers for free.) God knows how much of an advance Jordan, the glamour model, got for her two upcoming novels, which are to be written by the same ghostwriter who did her autobiography. But what I do know is that it's money that could have been spent much better, on writers who are actually working on books in which they believe. Commercial or literary, fiction or non-fiction, I don't care. Make the money off the celebrity 'autobiographies', by all means, and funnel it back into publishing other, less celebrity-oriented books. But please stop insulting real writers -- and the readers, many of whom aren't going to realize that they've been conned into buying a novel not written by the big name on its cover -- by throwing gigantic advances at people who aren't even going to bother to attempt to, as Naomi Campbell puts it, 'sit down and write a book'. |
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