As regular readers know, I think ghostwriting should always be acknowledged. If you have a ghostwriter help you with your book and you don’t admit you had a ghostwriter help you you’re a liar. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve accomplished, which political party you belong to or which deity or god you worship.

Which brings me to Sarah Palin’s appearance on Oprah today, and the fact that — apparently — Oprah Winfrey decided not to ask Sarah Palin about her ghostwriter, or if anyone helped her write Going Rogue, which bears only Palin’s name as author. In fact, the only remotely relevant portion of the interview that I’ve been able to find is a clip posted on Winfrey’s website which did not air in the broadcast interview.

At the 1:44 mark in a clip titled Sarah Palin Explains Why She Wrote Her Book, the following exchange takes place after Palin explains that she has written and kept personal journals for much of her life:

Winfrey — “So when you started to write this book — cause I was wondering how you could remember in such detail, you know…specific events, but that — understood.

Palin — “Yeah, I have detailed prayers that I had prayed over the years, um…different episodes in my life, and — so, logistically speaking, practically speaking, it wasn’t a really difficult exercise to write the book.”

Again, I understand that this is how the publishing business works. If you’re a celebrity and you want a book written, you hire a ghostwriter to write you a book with the understanding that the ghostwriter will not take credit. It’s no different than when you hire a chef to create those easy-to-heat, old-family-recipe meals that impress all your society friends. It’s what busy, wealthy, important people do because there are only so many hours in the day.   Read more

Ten days ago, in a post titled Why I’m Opting Out, I wrote this:

Today when I hear a publisher complaining about how books are sacred and how we need to protect the publishing industry, I’m reminded of the same talk from news executives about how critical hard news and investigative journalism are to the health of our democracy. Yet in both instances these are often the same people who are putting crap on the front page or front shelf, making crap physical products, and marketing the most sensationalistic crap they can get their hands on in the desperate hope that it can compete favorably with the crap on TV and the crap on the internet.

In the middle of writing that rant, however, I had a nagging feeling there was something else I didn’t respect about publishing. Yesterday, after running across this story, I remembered what it was:

Less than three months after resigning as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, the onetime vice presidential candidate, has completed her memoir.

HarperCollins Publishers, which signed a multi-million dollar deal with Ms. Palin in May, said in a statement on Tuesday that it had moved up the publication date from the spring of 2010 to Nov. 17 of this year.

The book will be titled “Going Rogue: An American Life”; the publisher has announced a first-print run of 1.5 million copies. Ms. Palin worked with a collaborator, Lynn Vincent, the editor of World, an evangelical magazine.

To the publishing industry’s determined self-abuses please add: lying about authorship, devaluing authorship and generally treating authorship like a rented mule. Because I can think of no other industry where the practice of lying about authorship is so completely codified and accepted as it is in the publishing world — which, you might think, would be the last place that would tolerate such a thing.   Read more

I don’t know when I first heard the terms narrative nonfiction and creative nonfiction, but it wasn’t too long ago. Five years at most. I do, however, remember what my reaction was.

You’re kidding.

The joke was on me, however, because it turns out that people really aren’t kidding about these — what to call them? — terms? Genres? Amazing new art forms?

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t really see why these newfangled words are necessary from a functional point of view. (If this is really just about marketing the same old books to a new crop of easily-led readers, that’s something entirely different. It’s still not okay, but it’s entirely different.)

As hard as I try, I can’t really see the difference between what used to be called nonfiction and what is now being dressed up as narrative nonfiction or creative nonfiction. Unless of course these new terms (that’s what I’m going to call them) are really an excuse for allowing nonfiction writers to cross the line into fiction writing.   Read more