Working Hard at Work Worth Doing

A hard look at the celebritization of book publishing, ghostwriting, and what "vanity" means in modern-day publishing

Last month, HarperCollins released a book called Nineteen Steps, the debut novel of Millie Bobby Brown, of Stranger Things fame. Doubts and criticism set in well before the book was even published on Reddit threads and elsewhere, since Brown is, after all, nineteen years old and not a writer, and the book is touted as a work of serious historical fiction. On the week the book was released, to her credit, Brown praised and credited her ghostwriter, Kathleen McGurl, whose name is conspicuously absent from the book’s cover. New frustrations emerged over this fact, leading to threads online about whether and when ghostwriters should receive cover credit.

Celebrities and book publishing have long intertwined, but only in recent years has the industry obsession with author brand and celebrity reached such a fever pitch, due to social media and influencers’ reach, plus the firehose volume of books getting published into an already-crowded market. It was this obsession with author brand and author celebrity that led me to leave traditional publishing to start a hybrid press in 2012, in part because I could remember a time when books were not acquired based on author platform alone. We no longer live in that era of book publishing, however, which means that nineteen-year-old movie stars with ideas for novels are one hundred percent likely to get book deals, and to be partnered with ghostwriters to help them pull off the work-intensive feat of writing a good novel.

The celebritization of publishing has a lot of triggers for me and other people. Acquiring editors feel conflicted about this, too, by the way. I don’t know Brown’s editor, Liz Stein, Executive Editor at William Morrow, who acquired Nineteen Steps on “exclusive submission,” according to Publishers Marketplace, but I have been in her position. I was Executive Editor at Seal Press, whose mandate was to bring in “big books” (read: books that have not just potential, but guaranteed markers of success, which boils down to the author having a built-in fanbase). Because I was an editor who wanted to acquire books I was excited about, books I believed in, the acquisitions my parent company were most excited about were often the ones I felt compromised my values.

Now I’m twelve years into my journey as a hybrid publisher. Our business model has the luxury of acquiring books based on writing alone. We do not have to consider author brand or author platform in our acquisitions decisions—by design. Since hybrid publishers are author-subsidized, critics who fail or refuse to understand the nuance of the business model will lob the accusation that hybrids are “vanity” presses (a term that’s both outdated and intended to be perjorative), but what is “vanity” publishing if not HarperCollins leveraging Millie Bobby Brown’s celebrity, or Millie Bobby Brown “writing” a novel and getting it published just because she’s a celebrity? It seems time to turn this label on its head.

In the Guardian article that covered Brown’s ghostwriting kerfuffle, Shannon Kyle of the Ghostwriters Agency said, “The general public wants to be entertained by a book, they want to read a good story, and ultimately, whoever puts it together, I don’t think they really mind.”

Maybe that’s an accurate assessment of the target readership, but for the larger publishing industry, elevating books by celebrities has a diluting effect on the whole. It’s discouraging to aspiring authors who put in the hard work and who will never get a deal with a traditional publisher because they don’t have the brand, or the “star quality” that publishers crave. There’s also something sacrosanct about the novel, specifically. I think readers expect celebrities to have ghostwriters for their memoirs—because memoirs are life stories that no one but the authors themselves have lived. I’m less bothered by J.R. Moehringer having written Prince Harry’s memoir than I am by McGurl having penned Brown’s novel. The reason is because I can’t help but wonder: Did Millie Bobby Brown really need to have written a novel? And if this truly were the story of her heart, maybe she could have sat with it for a few more years, and worked with the content herself over time as opposed to the “couple” Zoom sessions her ghostwriter is said to have had with the actress before writing the first draft of the book. It was Teddy Roosevelt who said, “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” In our era of shortcuts and instant gratification and people who take credit for the work of their entire teams, these words land as strongly today—maybe even more so—than when first uttered well over one hundred years ago.

The double-edged sword of publishing is that there are no measures (beyond an author’s existing fanbase) to measure a book’s “potential” reach. A book can be gorgeously written—and still fail. A book can get all kinds of great publicity—and still fail. But it’s this very lack of being able to predict success that also makes publishing so magical. Unknown writers can rocket into the stratosphere based on readers’ recommendations, and on the power of a great story. Sleepers often surprise everyone, making for unexpected success stories that no one saw coming. I worry about big publishers’ choices, given their outsized influence on what we read and what books get pushed into the world, but also feel grateful for the thriving world of indie publishing that works to ensure the voices of the many get published too.