Meet the ghostwriters who secretly pen bestselling celebrity memoirs
nypost.com“Becoming” and received a whopping $60 million joint advance with her husband for both Obama memoirs, used a “collaborator” — a ghostwriter — an expert wordsmith who can magically turn speech patterns and sentence structure into a cogent story and garner huge sales and big advances.
Michelle wasn’t the first first lady to hire out. Hillary Clinton teamed with ghostwriter Barbara Feinman Todd for her 1996 bestseller, “It Takes A Village.”J.R.
Moehringer, 57, is the highest paid ghostwriter in the business. A Pulitzer prize winner, he began his journalism career at the New York Times and later wrote for the Los Angeles Times.
He is said to have earned seven figures for writing Prince Harry’s memoir due to be published late this year. Still, his name never appeared in the advance news the publisher released on the royal’s upcoming book — nor will it appear on the cover next fall.Moehringer’s name also didn’t appear anywhere in tennis champion Andre Agassi’s 2010 autobiography or in Nike founder Phil Knight’s 2016 bestselling memoir “Shoedog.”“There are probably 25 really top flight writers but few get credit on the cover — usually just the line ‘written with’ — it’s a battle to get the name on the title page of acknowledgments,” says New York Literary agent Madeleine Morel, whose agency 2M Communications, Ltd.
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