> Also quite a few of the most prolific contemporary mass market authors have "assistants".
I told my new editor what I paid to hire the big-name editor and she said, "You could've gotten a book [as in a ghostwriter] for that."
And yeah, I'm well aware of the authors who farm out their names. If you're writing formulaic commercial work, why not? I don't begrudge their existing; I just wish they didn't take up so much marketing and publicity oxygen (but, on the other hand, if the commercial hacks weren't using that up, it'd go to overconnected MFA "literary" hacks, so... no worse for it?)
I told my new editor what I paid to hire the big-name editor and she said, "You could've gotten a book [as in a ghostwriter] for that."
And yeah, I'm well aware of the authors who farm out their names. If you're writing formulaic commercial work, why not? I don't begrudge their existing; I just wish they didn't take up so much marketing and publicity oxygen (but, on the other hand, if the commercial hacks weren't using that up, it'd go to overconnected MFA "literary" hacks, so... no worse for it?)