History of Ghostwriting: From Ancient Scribes to Modern Bestsellers

Calling ghostwriting cheating ignores a few thousand years of history.

The job is older than the printing press, and it’s given us some of the most influential books and speeches ever written. Every writer in this history did what I do for my clients. Somebody had the knowledge, the story, or the authority, somebody else had the craft to put it on the page, and the work went out under the name of the person whose ideas it held. I’m proud to be part of that line.

Who Were the First Ghostwriters?

The scribe’s job hasn’t gone away. Clients with limited written English, or none at all, are one of the main reasons people hire me. Their stories are every bit as good as anybody’s. What they need is somebody who can carry those stories onto the page in a voice that still sounds like them, and I think that’s some of the most worthwhile work a writer can do.

The earliest ghostwriters were scribes: professionals employed by rulers, religious leaders, and wealthy people to record spoken words in written form. Kings didn’t write their own proclamations. Scholars transcribed religious texts, and their names were never attached to the work. The content belonged to the person who commissioned it. The scribe provided the skill. For more, see the writer’s hidden laws. This is the fundamental transaction that defines ghostwriting today. One person has the knowledge, experience, or authority. Another person has the writing ability. The two collaborate, and the work is published under the name of the person whose ideas it contains.

Did Alexandre Dumas use a ghostwriter?

Alexandre Dumas published The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo in the 1840s. Both became foundational works of adventure fiction. Both were written in collaboration with Auguste Maquet. The arrangement was simple.

Maquet, a trained historian, developed plots, researched settings, and wrote first drafts. Dumas revised the drafts, adding his distinctive dialogue and narrative energy. The books were published under Dumas’s name alone, at the publisher’s insistence, because Dumas was the established brand.

Maquet eventually sued for co-authorship and lost. The court ruled that Dumas retained sole authorship, though he owed Maquet 145,200 francs in unpaid fees. Maquet went on to publish novels under his own name. None achieved the success of the books he wrote with Dumas.

The partnership produced eighteen novels. The dynamic, with one person providing raw material and structure and the other providing voice and polish, is the same process used in professional ghostwriting today. Maquet provided the architecture. Dumas provided the brand and the finishing craft. Neither produced their best work alone.

How did the Stratemeyer Syndicate turn ghostwriting into a business?

Anonymous ghostwriting is still the norm. Three of my clients’ books went to traditional publishers, and none of those authors disclosed that a ghostwriter was involved. Each one took twelve to eighteen months to reach print. I don’t recommend traditional publishing to my clients, for that delay alone, before you even count the much lower royalties and the control you hand over.

In 1905, Edward Stratemeyer formalized ghostwriting into a publishing operation. He created plot outlines for children’s book series and hired ghostwriters to turn those outlines into finished novels. The books were published under collective pseudonyms: Carolyn Keene for Nancy Drew, Franklin W. Dixon for The Hardy Boys. The ghostwriters signed contracts surrendering all rights and agreeing to keep their involvement secret. They were paid flat fees, around $125 per manuscript in the early years, roughly two months’ wages for a newspaper reporter at the time.

The Syndicate produced over 1,400 volumes across 125 series. Nancy Drew alone has sold over 200 million copies. The Hardy Boys debuted in 1927 and continued under multiple ghostwriters for decades. Mildred Wirt Benson wrote the first Nancy Drew books at age 24.

Leslie McFarlane, a Canadian journalist, wrote the early Hardy Boys. Neither name appeared on a cover. The Syndicate worked for eighty years before Simon & Schuster purchased it in 1984. It was the first book packager to target children’s literature, and it showed that ghostwriting could produce commercially successful, culturally significant work at scale.

When did political speechwriting become ghostwriting?

The double standard here is absurd.

Nobody accuses a president of fraud for reading a speech somebody else drafted, and yet a ghostwritten memoir still gets called a lie. The arrangement is identical. The ideas and the authority belong to the person speaking, and the writer’s craft is what makes them land.

Every modern president has used speechwriters. The practice is so established that no one questions its legitimacy, yet political speechwriting is ghostwriting by another name. The speechwriter crafts the words. The politician delivers them and takes credit for them.

Ted Sorensen worked as speechwriter and counselor to President John F. Kennedy. The line most tied to Kennedy’s presidency, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” is widely attributed to Sorensen’s pen. Sorensen’s role went beyond writing speeches. He helped shape Kennedy’s public voice and political messaging, functioning as both ghostwriter and strategic advisor.

This dynamic continues in every administration. The speeches that define presidencies, shape policy debates, and move public opinion are collaborative products, the politician’s ideas and authority combined with the writer’s craft. The public accepts this without controversy. That raises the question of why ghostwritten books are sometimes treated differently.

When did celebrity memoirs start using ghostwriters?

Celebrity memoirs get the headlines, but athletes and other sports figures are a growing share of the people who hire me. Most of them want to write about what their sport taught them, and I think that’s the better book. A career told as a highlight reel wears thin fast. A book about what the game did to a person, and for them, stays with a reader.

The modern celebrity memoir industry runs on ghostwriting. The economics make it inevitable, because public figures with engrossing stories rarely have the time, skill, or inclination to write a 60,000-word book. Tony Schwartz ghostwrote The Art of the Deal for Donald Trump. The deal gave Schwartz a $250,000 advance plus half the royalties. The book spent 48 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and earned Schwartz over $1.6 million by 2016.

James Fox worked with Keith Richards on his memoir Life, backed by a reported $7.3 million advance. The project took five years. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Andrew Crofts has ghostwritten over 100 books, with a dozen reaching number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list. His fees average around £100,000 per project. His clients have included public figures across entertainment, business, and politics. If you want a professional to take it on, there’s my celebrity ghostwriting.

Those deals show how the publishing industry works at the highest levels. The subject provides the story and the name. The ghostwriter provides the craft. The result is a book that neither could have produced alone.

How does James Patterson’s co-writing model work?

I don’t do co-authored books. The few co-author requests I’ve had were spec offers in disguise, where I’d write the book now and split the royalties later, if there were any. I turn down every one of them. I don’t work for free. Even the best-known co-writing arrangements pay the writer and put the writer’s name on the cover, and a deal that gives a writer neither is a bad deal.

James Patterson has sold over 300 million books. He openly uses co-authors (listed on the cover in smaller type) to produce multiple titles per year. Patterson develops outlines, co-authors write the manuscripts, and Patterson reviews and revises. The model is a direct descendant of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, updated for the modern publishing market. Patterson’s name is the brand. The co-authors provide the production capacity. The arrangement is transparent, commercially successful, and has made Patterson among the best-selling authors in history.

Whether this qualifies as ghostwriting depends on definitions. The co-authors receive cover credit, unlike traditional ghostwriters. But the dynamic, one person’s brand and vision and another person’s writing labor, is the same relationship that’s existed since ancient scribes transcribed the words of kings.

Why Does Ghostwriting Work?

A CEO who built a company from nothing has a story that could help thousands of entrepreneurs. That CEO works 70-hour weeks and doesn’t have the time or writing skill to produce a manuscript. A ghostwriter turns that CEO’s experience into a published book, one that generates speaking invitations, media coverage, investor confidence, and a permanent record of what they built.

That’s collaboration. It’s the same collaboration that produced The Three Musketeers, the Kennedy inaugural address, and every Nancy Drew mystery. After 54+ ghostwriting projects, I can say that the best ghostwritten books are real collaborations.

The client provides the substance: the experience, the expertise, the stories, the perspective. The ghostwriter provides the structure, the craft, and the ability to translate spoken ideas into written narrative. The published book belongs to the client because the ideas are theirs. The ghostwriter’s contribution is making those ideas readable.

I’ve written memoirs for clients in their nineties, and I’ve written memoirs from a subject’s papers after they’d died, by interviewing the family. Those books exist because a ghostwriter was willing to do the work, and I get angry when people call that cheating, because the alternative was that those stories would never have been written down at all.

Schedule a free consultation to discuss your book project.

From the author

The Ghostwriting Advantage
The Ghostwriting Advantage covers how the profession works today. I wrote it from 54+ ghostwritten books to show how to get your own book written for you.

Frequently Asked Questions