Reprinted from The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2009
Earlier this month, the Borders bookstore at Time Warner Center hosted a reading of "Fall to Pieces," a memoir by Mary Forsberg Weiland, the former wife of rocker Scott Weiland. As photographers snapped pictures of the author, another woman stepped up to the podium. "Hi," she said. "I'm Larkin Warren, and I was Mary's midwife on the project."
This is Ms. Warren's sixth time as a "midwife," helping in the delivery of manuscripts (sometimes considerable pushing is involved) by such high-profile authors as actress Loni Anderson and O.J. Simpson's defense lawyer Robert Shapiro. "I always ask for cover credit," she said. "It's a point of pride."
Sometimes, "there's a desire on the part of publishers and agents not to take attention away from the primary author," said Madeleine Morel, whose firm, 2M Communications, specializes in representing ghostwriters. Such, Ms. Morel suggested, may have been the case with Sarah Palin, who has sole billing on the memoir "Going Rogue," but who had an assist from Lynn Vincent. Phone calls and emails to Ms. Palin's publisher Harper Collins went unanswered.
Midwives, collaborators, co-authors, co-writers, writers-for-hire, book doctors, ghosts—call them what you will—give aid and adjectives to athletes, politicians, movie stars, moguls, miscreants and the briefly famous who are asked to tell their stories and don't know how. "Often, when a celebrity tries to write the book himself, he'll be on page 200 and he's still only 12 years old," said Dan Strone, CEO of Trident Media Group, a literary agency.
Cover billing is a function of the publisher's wishes, the "name" author's wishes, the collaborator's wishes, prior experience, fee, prominence (big names in the field include "Iacocca" co-writer William Novak, and David Ritz, the go-to guy for musicians with a tale to tell) and level of involvement in the project. Is this helper writing every word, simply doing research and fact-checking, or perhaps organizing a pre-existing manuscript into tidy form?
The Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Ron Powers, who worked on Ted Kennedy's memoir "True Compass" but whose name went missing on the cover, is a case in point. "'True Compass' was based on years of personal journals and five years of an oral history," said a spokesman for Twelve, the book's publisher. "Ron's role as a collaborator was unique. It was more a matter of shaping text. The words were the senator's own." Because of a confidentiality agreement, Mr. Powers declined to comment.
"Cover credit is the prize," said Elisa Petrini, an agent at Inkwell Management and a collaborator on several autobiographies, including Tatum O'Neal's "A Paper Life" (Ms. O'Neal had sole billing on the cover). "I could have fought for it, but I preferred to fight for money," Ms. Petrini said. "It's not that celebrities are necessarily vain," she added charitably. "It's just that they see these books as an extension of their brand. Having another name on the cover is like having a co-star."
A book's subject matter as much as the name author's ego dictates the placement of a co-writer's credit. "It may not feel right to have the collaborator's name on the cover because the topic is sensitive," said Mr. Strone, citing Mackenzie Phillips's recently published memoir, "High on Arrival," in which the actress claims to have had an incestuous relationship with her father, John, a founding member of the '60s pop group The Mamas and the Papas.
"I've had clients who didn't want cover credit because of the sleazy nature of the books," said Ms. Morel. "They were happy to take the money but didn't want to shout their involvement from the rooftops." Yvonne Dunleavy, who received cover billing in 1972 for her collaboration with famed New York call girl and madam Xaviera Hollander on "The Happy Hooker," declined it on a later project "because I disapproved of the way the manuscript was altered," she said.
According to Ms. Petrini, some collaborators simply don't feel it's part of the game to get cover credit. "They don't need that billing to get their next project," she said. Others view such credit as very much part of the game. "If I wanted to be unnoticed, I'd write the technical manual that comes with your TV," said Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow, a co-writer with Randy Pausch on "The Last Lecture" and with pilot Chesley Sullenberger on "Highest Duty," "I'm a storyteller and I want people to know that," added Mr. Zaslow, whose name appears on the cover of both books.
Mr. Ritz, a collaborator on the memoirs of B.B. King, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin, among others, has no patience with celebrities who are afraid of ghosts. "A high-profile mogul was willing to pay me an additional $40,000 or $50,000 to keep my name off the cover because he wanted people to think he'd written the book," recalled Mr. Ritz, who claims he walked away from that project.
Collaborators who aren't named on the cover don't necessarily go unheralded. They can be listed on the title page or given a shout-out in the acknowledgments. Such was the case with Mr. Powers; with Palin collaborator Ms. Vincent; and with J.R. Moehringer, co-writer with tennis star Andre Agassi on "Open. " It was Mr. Moehringer who declined cover billing against the urging of his agent, of Mr. Agassi—and of the publisher, Knopf. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the celebrated memoir "The Tender Bar," Mr. Moehringer would have been value added on the jacket. But "I didn't feel full authorship," he said. "It was Andre's story."
Perhaps Mr. Moehringer wanted to spare himself the negotiations that accompany cover credit—for example, will the writer's name be preceded by "as told to," "with" or, what's generally perceived as the more desirable, "and"? How large will the collaborator's name be writ? "There's a Hollywood billing aspect to it," noted David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. "The size of the type is an indication of the financial participation of the co-author," said literary agent Laurence J. Kirshbaum, former CEO of Time Warner Book Group. "If the names are equal size or close to equal size, the collaborator is, in all likelihood, getting a piece of the book."
One name on the cover or two—apparently, it's all the same to consumers. "I don't think they care a whole lot about whether a co-writer is involved," said Edward Ash-Milby, a biography buyer for Barnes & Noble. "After all, they're getting the story told to them from the subject's mouth. If someone else adds a little color, flourish or personality to the material, that's a good thing."
—Ms. Kaufman writes about culture and the arts for the Journal.