LINDSAY ELLIS: And on that dark, dark night, in that dark, dark house, in that dark, dark attic, there was a juicy, juicy celebrity tell all being written by a scary, scary ghostwriter.

[GASPING] [INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING] Oh, sorry.

I was just reading aloud the blood curdling tale of a skilled writer churning out a whole book and getting none of the glory when it's published under a different, usually much more famous name.

And you might be asking yourself, why do ghostwriters even exist?

Isn't that cheating?

Isn't literature supposed to be the result of one person's agonizing need to create?

Aren't books supposed to be the blood, sweat, and tears of the tortured auteur?

And the answer is, well, it's not that spooky, but it is a little more complicated than you might think.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING] So what is ghostwriting?

What wretched phantoms lurk under the guises of-- sorry.

But what actually is ghostwriting?

Well, at the bare bones-- get it, bones-- Ghostwriting is the act of hiring someone to write a text that will be published under and credited to another person.

Not only do you see it in books and novels, but in articles, blog posts, political memoirs, and even rap lyrics.

If it can be written, it can just as surely be ghostwritten.

The breadth of ghostwriting duties can span from researching and writing a manuscript from the top down to cleaning up an already existing text.

It can require extensive research on to interviews with the credited author, or even the creation of a style guide to keep the document's voice on brand.

So if you're having a rough day, imagine essentially having to pretend to be Alan Greenspan.

The ghostwriter, however, often signs a contract prohibiting them from taking credit for their work.

If a ghostwriter receives any acknowledgments, it's usually along the lines of something like research assistant or as having been told the story by the author, as if they had been possessed by a spooky scar-- sorry, I'm doing it again.

See, in ghostwriting culture, there is a huge distinction between the author, i.e., the publicly credited brain trust of a work, and the writer.

And the verbiage used to distinguish the two is very important.

See Alexander Dumas and August Jules Maquet.

Maquet took Dumas to court for co-authorship acknowledgments and royalties, but the court ruled that Dumas was just too important, while Maquet was a nobody.

Harsh.

George Washington used a ghostwriter for his farewell address, setting a precedent that is now so ubiquitous, you'd be hard pressed to find an American politician who writes their own speeches.

There is also a streak of YA in children's series being picked up by ghostwriters.

Even though these books are old enough that your grandparents can lecture you on how they read them while walking 15 miles to school in the snow, the "Hardy Boys" and "Nancy Drew" series are still published under the names of Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene.

But if you pull away the masks, we reveal that both authors are creations of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which sounds way more sinister than it is.

The Stratemeyer Syndicate was a group of anonymous writers hired by Edward Stratemeyer to produce fiction series under pseudonyms, which he would then sell to publishers.

"Hardy Boys" and "Nancy Drew" are the most famous series to come out of this syndicate.

One "Nancy Drew" writer, Mildred Wirt Benson, would get $125 a book plus Christmas bonuses, and also signed away all rights to royalties and personal recognition.

When Mildred Wirt Benson died in 2002, she was eulogized as one of at least two and perhaps as many as six writers who used Carolyn Keene for the original 56 "Nancy Drew" mystery stories.

As of 2015, Simon & Schuster, which still publishes "Nancy Drew" and the "Hardy Boys" won't reveal the names of its current writers, and so Carolyn Keene lives on as a ghost-- written author.

The immensely popular "Babysitters Club" series was first commissioned by Scholastic, and the concept was realized by author Ann M. Martin, who did write many of the books in the series.

But many an adventure of those plucky, entrepreneurial pre-teens were actually written by multiple authors.

Same with other long running series with dozens of titles to them, i.e., K.A.

Applegate's "Animorphs" series.

The author name isn't more important than the book's branding, but the conceit is maintained to foster that imagined relationship between the author and the audience.

Some big name genre authors like James Patterson now hire co-writers to keep up a frenetic pace of production.

According to Jonathan Mahler in an article in "New York Times Magazine," "Patterson is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course."

There is a minor popular outcry that Patterson doesn't write his own books, but he does.

As much as he gets lambasted for using ghostwriters, he gives co-writing credit when it applies, and many of his co-writers have spoken positively about the experience.

So does that even count as ghostwriting?

And now, we get to the truly terrifying twist in our sordid tale, but isn't this-- [INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING] --plagiarism?

[LIGHTNING CRACKS] According to Jonathan Bailey, founder of Plagiarism Today, "Plagiarism, generally, is defined as presenting the works, ideas, or words of another as your own, without attribution.

By that standard, ghostwriting is clearly a type of plagiarism, just one that's done with permission."

The key difference, as author and attorney Jane Robbins points out, is the expectations of the audience and how much the work depends on the integrity of the authorship.

We might call Patterson's work collaboration, the kind you would find in a film or TV writer's room.

And is Carolyn Keene really committing plagiarism when she doesn't even exist?

Some would argue that anyone can have a story to tell, like a politician or a popular celebrity, but the craft of writing still needs a writer, which not everyone is.

But what does a ghostwriter get out of it?

Well, according to one ghostwriter named Holly Robinson, "Once you finish ghosting a book, it's not yours anymore.

The book now belongs to your client, as well it should.

And writing these books is a gold mine for a fiction writer like me who is interested in studying character development, new settings, and how to build narrative tension.

"Ghostwriting" can mean anything, from developing a messy partial manuscript to riding shotgun through another person's life in real time.

Sometimes I'm acting as a journalist, researching background material.

More often, I'm in a therapist's role, asking, how did you feel when that happened?

What impact did that have on your life?"

Some examples of capital I important authors who ghost wrote on the side, H.P.

Lovecraft for Harry Houdini.

Sinclair Lewis sold plots to Jack London.

And it's also how Katherine Anne Porter got her start writing.

Children's author Siobhan Curham ghost wrote for a beauty blogger named Zoe Sugg, who goes by Zoella online, who was then slammed for not being authentic.

Curham was acknowledged in the book, but not credited on the cover.

And people had a major issue with that, as it was a fiction book and not nonfiction.

Also rubbing up against this was the idea that Zoella's YouTube brand was based on her authenticity.

And this was seen by many of her fans as a betrayal of that.

Writer Andrew Crofts has been very vocal about his history as a ghostwriter and how it works.

According to Crofts, "I estimate I've written maybe 70 nonfiction books and 10 fiction books.

It's a bit like if you're a speech writer.

You don't think, oh, that's not fair.

I wish I'd been up there.

It's your job and you move on.

The best bit is finding stories and learning new things.

It's a great pleasure to be able to tell someone else's story."

Camilla Nelson sums up the unsettling reality of ghostwriting in the title of her 2015 article "Ghostwriters haunt our illusions about solitary authors."

There's a perception that writing should be solitary, that even if all parties agree to collaborate that attention must be paid, credit must be given, or else the audience has been deceived.

But as author Craig Fehrman says, "People fixate on ghostwriting for the same reason they fixate on authors.

Over the last 200 years, we've invested a lot of time, energy, and emotion in a particular idea of the author, alone and inspired.

It makes sense that when confronted with the complex systems that produce, promote, and sell books, we need to isolate one element, whether to idolize the author or to condemn ghostwriting."

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING] Readers may tremble in terror at the mere idea of their favorite book being haunted by a ghost-- writer.

But ghostwriters exist because there is a demand for them.

And it goes to show that sometimes there is more value to the name attached to the words than who actually wrote the words in the first place.

"The Great American Read" is a series on PBS about our love of books.

Stream the episodes on demand or head to pbs.org/greatamericanread for more info.

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