If You’re the Ghostwriter, Know Where to Hover

I am hovering just to the rear and right of the author seated at a table signing copies of my novel. He’s having a grand old time chatting up friends, colleagues and neighbors who have stopped by the bookstore to congratulate him. As his eyes keep darting to the door to see who’s coming through Dutton’s glass-and-steel portal on North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, I just know he’s hoping it will be a producer, director or actor who’ll slap an option offer on the table within the next three days.

I arrived an hour early to help him set up his pens, business cards and coffee, then spent a ridiculously long time deciding exactly where to position myself. Good manners and courtesy demanded that I appear as self-effacing as possible, almost invisible. In fact, completely invisible, if that can be arranged. It would fit perfectly with my role.

As the ghostwriter of several nonfiction books, mostly autobiographies, I never have trouble absenting myself from book signings, except for my own book published a couple of years ago (still being mulled over by a producer). After I pass along a client’s ghosted or collaborated manuscript to the publisher, whether it is a vanity press or a “real” publisher, I am usually back home casting about for my next project.

But this time is different. I have ghostwritten a novel. A mystery, to be exact. My first. Sure, there are a few collaboration mysteries on the market, including books by the Dick Lochte and Christopher Darden team, but I hadn’t found anyone else who’d ghostwritten a novel. I initially found myself floating in misty confusion.

I finally decided to take my client’s original plot premise and toss in a couple of killings to spice it up. I researched a charming method for murder, gave one nasty character my great-grandfather’s Scottish name, and honored my favorite 18th century poet by sprinkling some quotes throughout. All in all, a neat package.

Fortunately, my client enjoyed the experience. He occasionally threw a spanner into the works, such as wanting to add several more murders to the mix, but basically he was pleased with the story’s various twists and turns, especially when we included a fictional Bel-Air branch of the Brooklyn Russian Mafia.

So here we are, he and I, at Dutton’s. And I am still in a quandary about where to stand. The author/client graciously invited me to attend and never disguised the fact that he had hired a writer for his book. Actually, he is pretty proud of himself for finding me. He’d read the biography of Rudy Vallee I’d collaborated on with his widow, Ellie, and adapted as a screenplay (also still in limbo), so our hopes for an option and a subsequent TV series or movie are energizing us both this evening.

When the client called me a couple of months earlier to say that the publisher had set up the book signing at Dutton’s, I panicked. What was the publisher thinking? That bookstore had closed. But I had the wrong bookstore, and this one in Beverly Hills was pretty posh.

I decide to phone the producer who is mulling over my own book. I walk away from the author and his pile of books, take out my cellphone and call.

“Hi Brandon, how about coming along to a book signing?”

“Whose?”

“Oh, no one you know.”

“So why would I come?”

“Well, I wrote it.”

“Why didn’t you say it was your book signing?”

“It isn’t.”

He snorts and hangs up.

Still undecided about where to stand, I continue to hover, ghostlike.