Andrew Crofts - Confessions of a Ghostwriter

The Minister smiled and nodded his appreciation to each of the speakers in turn, but he was also working the room as they talked, shaking hands and hugging everyone who came near him.

As he moved closer to where I was standing I overheard him accepting praise from a woman swathed in colourful traditional dress, a Rolex glinting on her wrist.

‘Your book will be a bestseller,’ she assured him.

‘Yes, yes,’ he grinned his acknowledgement, ‘we have a million copies printed up and ready to distribute. We want every child in Africa to have a copy.’

I caught his eye over the lady’s shoulder and smiled. I knew that it was his knack for positive thinking and dreaming big dreams that had got him where he was and might yet get him into the presidential palace. The book, I knew, was just one more step in the process of establishing himself as a future leader. Eventually he reached me and clapped a mighty arm around my shoulder.

‘Are you having a good time, my friend?’ he asked. ‘Are you glad that you came?’

‘Yes, very good,’ I said. ‘How many copies have you actually had printed?’

‘A million,’ he said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

‘I thought we’d agreed to start with a couple of thousand,’ I said, still not sure whether to believe the bombast.

‘You know me,’ he winked, ‘I like to think big. I believe in the message of the book. I want copies in every school in Africa.’

‘You’ve actually had a million copies printed?’

I was trying to imagine what a million copies of a book must look like. Even if he was exaggerating and he had only printed a tenth of that figure it would still mean crates and crates of books.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Where are they?’

‘My brother has a warehouse near to the town where my mother lives. You remember going there?’

‘Of course.’

I had spent a pleasant weekend with his mother, a sunny, smiling woman who spoke no English and passed her days happily sitting in the shade inside the walls of the family compound, preparing food to be cooked by her daughters and shouting abuse at the goats whenever they strayed amongst her vegetables. I could imagine the delivery lorries arriving in the tiny town, coating the watching locals with dust from the unmade roads. In his home area the Minister was like a king and the warehouse full of books would be one more jewel in the crown of his glorious career.

As far as I know the crates are still in the warehouse.

My first invitation to ghostwrite came from a management guru I was interviewing for Director magazine, the house journal for the Institute of Directors, which is a sort of gentlemen’s club for business people housed in one of those grand buildings in Pall Mall.

The guru and I were driving back to his gleaming white Surrey mansion in his powder blue Rolls Royce, having had a very long lunch and feeling exceedingly mellow.

‘You’re a writer,’ he said, apropos of nothing.

‘Yes,’ I replied, liking the sound of that phrase.

‘I’ve been commissioned by a publisher to produce a series of business books,’ he went on. ‘I’d like to do them because it’s good for business, but I don’t have the time. Why don’t you write them for me? I’ll get the glory and you can have the money.’

I was insulted for about five seconds and then I saw the potential of what he was offering. The books already had a publisher. It was definite money. All the information was in one place and would be relatively easy to collect. He was an interesting man with a lot to teach me. When I reflected a little further I realised that I had actually been doing much the same thing in journalistic form for clients of public relations companies, writing articles and speeches on their behalf. This was merely a protracted version of the same process.

I accepted the job and it went without a hitch. There must, I thought once it was over, be millions of people with books in their heads who don’t have the time, ability or inclination to write them themselves. I just need to find them. That was when I hit upon the idea of taking a small ad in The Bookseller – ‘Ghostwriter for Hire’ – in the hope of reaching every publisher and literary agent who had a client with a great story but no time or inclination to write it themselves.

My ghostwriting gene must have developed early. I didn’t realise that what I was doing was going to be my life’s career but at the age of around 11 I decided, with the help of my best friend, Tom, to write the life story of Stumpy.

Stumpy was one of many mice that I had bred in the school nature society (a society of which I was voted President, I’ll have you know, largely because my mice bred with greater speed and ferocity than anyone else’s), but he was different, born with only three functioning legs. I guess this could be described as my first ‘misery memoir’.

Every bit of free time we could squeeze from the dreary daily routine of boarding school, Tom and I would hurry off down the corridors to the school library – a permanently unpopulated, panelled room with floor to ceiling shelves of unread books, looking out over terraces to the valley beyond – to write another chapter of Stumpy’s autobiography … Even then I should probably have been taking more fresh air and physical exercise.

‘I’ve had a call,’ the agent said, ‘from the managers of a model called Jordan. She’s looking for a ghostwriter for an autobiography.’

‘Who?’

It was the beginning of the twenty-first century and unless you were a regular reader of The Sun newspaper, you did not necessarily know who Jordan was or what her story might be.

‘She’s famous for having had her breasts enlarged. Her management are asking publishers for a million pound advance. Do you think it would be worth meeting her?’

‘She sounds like an interesting character.’

The agent was Andrew Lownie, one of the most distinguished independents in the business. He was one of the agents who responded to my ad in The Bookseller and we had worked together very successfully on a number of projects, all very different to this one. He agreed to set up a meeting and rang back a few hours later.

‘They want to have the meeting at her lawyer’s offices: Mishcon de Reya.’

‘Mishcon de Reya! Seriously?’

This was one of the biggest-hitting law firms in London. They had acted for the Princess of Wales in her divorce. This Jordan girl was not messing about. Lord alone knew how much a firm like this would be charging for their services.

The meeting room was surprisingly full when we arrived and I couldn’t help wondering how many of the shiny male managers and lawyers around the shiny conference table were charging by the hour.

Jordan, in the sort of skimpy dress a ‘saucy French maid’ might wear in a farce, had brought a friend with her and seemed totally relaxed in the surroundings despite the fact that she can’t have been much more than 25 years old. The two of them chatted and giggled like they were in Starbucks while the men attempted to talk business. Every so often, however, Jordan would interject with a question which completely cut through all the bullshit, and hold the eyes of whomever she was talking to with a disarming – and slightly alarming – intensity. I wasn’t completely convinced that she had enough of a story for a whole book, but I was completely convinced she would be fun to work with. She too said she would be interested.

After the meeting I made a few phone calls around publishers and other agents that I knew, just casually asking if they had heard of Jordan and whether they thought there was anything in it. With each phone call I found out more. It seemed that Jordan’s management team had already been to virtually every agent and publisher in the business, leading the conversation with the announcement that they were looking for a million pound advance.