Gone are the days when readers could blindly trust the authors about the words penned in their books, as the recent trend of getting one’s ideas penned down by a professional writer and taking all the credit for the writing has created skepticism among the readers. The practice of ghostwriting is steadily increasing in India, and a number of companies are openly advertising their ghostwriting services at different prices.
A ghostwriter is a professional writer who can write any literary or journalistic work based on an idea presented to him. Although all elements other than the basic idea of the text belong to the author, the author does not receive credit for his texts in exchange for a set amount of money. This type of service is used by people who have an idea worth turning into a book, article or speech, but who lack either the time or the necessary writing skills.
This profession is nothing new in India, but it has been inspired by the West. Author and lyricist Javed Akhtar has previously admitted to writing a script for director SM Sagar’s film in the 1970s for Rs 5,000. Ghostwriting, as the name suggests, is considered taboo and not openly discussed. However, the recent trend towards more ghostwriting services is probably due to the increasing number of celebrity memoirs and the desire to gain mass exposure.
Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee, former director of the National Book Trust who currently heads the editorial board of Niyogi Books, told IANS: “Successful people are gradually becoming more ambitious and want to talk about themselves and they do that in autobiographies and memoirs. But they don’t have the means to write books. So they hire ghostwriters. Most of the autobiographies and memoirs of popular personalities in the last 20-25 years have been written in whole or in part by ghostwriters.”
In India, ghostwriting services have recently been promoting themselves as the “ultimate solution to realizing literary visions” as they promise solutions to writer’s block. These professional service providers have a whole host of experienced ghostwriters who transform ideas into a polished manuscript.
An ad from a publisher offering ghostwriting services states: “Say goodbye to the difficulties of writing and hello to the joy of being a successful author. Let us do the hard work while you reap the rewards of seeing your book come to life.”
These companies offer “low cost” ghostwriting services for fiction, non-fiction, poetry books, business books, thought leadership articles, speeches, blogs and more with features such as plagiarism-free and error-free quality in content creation.
According to Write Right, one of the ghostwriting service providers, the average price of ghostwriting services in India ranges from Rs 2 to Rs 5 per word. According to Astitva Prakashan, a publisher who offers this service, a ghostwriter can charge between Rs 50,000 to Rs 250,000 for writing a book in three to six months.
