Noun

Wikipedia ghostwriter (plural ghostwriters)

1. A professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, or reports which are officially credited to another person.

A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written material. In music, ghostwriters are used in film score composition, as well as for writing songs and lyrics for popular music styles ranging from country to hip-hop.

Ghostwriters may have varying degrees of involvement in the production of a finished work; while some ghostwriters are hired to edit and clean up a rough draft, in other cases, ghostwriters do most of the writing based on an outline provided by the credited author. For some projects, ghostwriters will do a substantial amount of research, as in the case of a ghostwriter who is hired to write an autobiography for a well-known person. Ghostwriters are also hired to write fiction in the style of an existing author, often as a way of increasing the number of books that can be published by a popular author (e.g., Tom Clancy, James Patterson). Ghostwriters will often spend from several months to a full year researching, writing, and editing nonfiction works for a client, and they are paid either per page, with a flat fee, or a percentage of the royalties of the sales, or some combination thereof. The ghostwriter is sometimes acknowledged by the author or publisher for his or her writing services.

A consultant or career-switcher may pay to have a book ghostwritten on a topic in their professional area, to establish or enhance their credibility as an 'expert' in their field. Public officials and politicians employ 'correspondence officers' to respond to the large volume of correspondence. A number of papal encyclicals have been written by ghostwriters. With medical ghostwriting, pharmaceutical companies pay both professional writers to produce papers and then pay other scientists or physicans to attach their names to these papers before they are published in a medical or scientific journals. In the 2000s, a new type of ghostwriting developed as web log, or 'blogs' became popular: the blog ghostwriter. Companies or organizations hoping to generate interest in their blog site sometimes hire ghostwriters to post comments to their blog, while posing as different people and using pseudonyms. Some university and college students hire ghostwriters from essay mills to write entrance essays, term papers, and theses and dissertations.

Ghostwriting also occurs in fields outside non-fiction and fiction publishing. Composers have long hired ghostwriters to help them to write musical pieces and songs; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is an example of a well-known composer who was paid to ghostwrite music for wealthy patrons. Musical ghostwriting also occurs in popular music. A pop music ghostwriter writes lyrics and a melody in the style of the credited musician. In hip-hop music, the increasing use of ghostwriters by high-profile hip-hop stars has led to controversy. Ghost-authorship also applies to the visual arts, most commonly paintings.