Recently I’ve been vaguely looking into how people earn money from writing, and have discovered that you can make a full-time living as a speechwriter. It’s probably not an option for me, as it’d prove way too dangerously tempting for me to slyly insert last-minute additions, so politicians begin blurting out statements like “That’s why I have such pleasure to open this memorial museum, and can anyone sell me a foil of coke?”
What I’ve found truly fascinating is the profession of ghostwriting. If you can work your way into the industry, it seems like there’s some serious coin to be made – Wikipedia, that towering pillar of truth, claims that the average ghostwriter’s advance is between US$30,000 and $100,000!
It doesn’t seem like this work is limited to celebrity bios, either – popular authors will continue to churn out formulaic novels under their name which are ghostwritten by someone else. I knew that bloody Ann M. Martin was up to something with that constant, vomituous flow of Babysitter’s Club books!
Admission: the Babysitter’s Club series was literary heroin during my childhood, and I was perplexingly oblivious to the female target market. No doubt this played hand-in-hand with my attendance of a 1988 Kylie Minogue concert in forming my sexuality.
There was a particularly fraught moment in my childhood when my family entered an Angus & Robertson bookstore, only to be confronted with a giant display shouting “THE BABYSITTER’S CLUB: AUSTRALIA’S FAVOURITE BOOK SERIES FOR GIRLS!” My fearful suspicions all came crashing around me, and in a moment of genuine, anxious terror, I ushered my entire family away from the display for fear they’d see the hard evidence too: it was a fact, I was obsessed with books for girls, and my parents would never let me read them again if they saw it! Or so I thought. They clearly had some idea, as they were completely happy to let me plaster my bedroom walls with posters of a shirtless Craig McLachlan. Which, strangely, should have steered me away from being gay, but look how things turned out.
But ghostwriting: what an idea. Mostly because if someone asks me what I do for a living, I can shriek “I’M A GHOST!!…… writer”.
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I can’t remember the details, but one of my earliest sexual fantasies involved me imagining myself as Mary Anne sneaking away to screw Logan.
I think I still have some of those books in the basement.
Did you move on from BSC to Sweet Valley High?
Nar, I think I moved straight on to reading TV Hits after BSC…
Oh dear. Another who lusted after Craig McLachlan. At least you were only an impressionable teen. I have no excuse.
omg how could you not know the babysitters club was for girls?
Every school across Australia had a wannabe club full of girls obsessing about babysitting during lunch break and playtime.
…unless you went to a guys only school but then I imagine whipping out a copy of the babysitters club wouldn’t have gone down too well.
Oh dear god. Ann M Martin didn’t actually write the books? I’m still getting over the revelation that Carolyn Keene was never a real person.
You’ve just brought the last of my childhood delusions crumbling down.