“This is an author who really has his finger on the way kids think,” The New York Times says of podcast guest Todd Strasser, the author of over 150 books, including the award-winning young adult and middle-grade novels The Wave, Give a Boy a Gun, and Fallout. He is also the author of the wildly popular Help! I’m Trapped series of books for young readers, as well as several other best-selling series and movie tie-in books and novelizations.  His books have been translated into more than twenty languages, and several have been adapted for film and television. Many of his standalone boo ..read more

Veteran magazine journalist Genevieve Field joins us to discuss her mid-career pivot into ghostwriting, as she celebrates the success of her “Andy Award”-winning collaboration with Hollywood stuntwoman Kimberly Shannon Murphy. Glimmer: A Story of Survival, Hope, and Healing, Murphy’s unflinchingly honest account of intergenerational familial abuse, was honored this winter with an inaugural “Andy Award”—so named for the “and” credit often awarded to ghostwriters—at the first annual “Gathering of the Ghosts” conference in New York City, jointly sponsored by Gotham Ghostwriters and the Ameri ..read more

Seth Davis is a veteran sports journalist and broadcaster, and The New York Times best-selling author of Wooden: A Coach’s Life and When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball. He is the co-author of the just-published memoir It’s Hard for Me to Live with Me, written with NBA veteran and University of Kentucky basketball legend Rex Chapman—a book that transcends (and upends!) the sports memoir genre and stands as a devasting and inspiring story about the human struggle for self-acceptance.  Over the course of his career, Seth has written for The Athletic and Sports Illustrat ..read more

Veteran journalist and collaborator Mark Dagostino is the author of more than two dozen books written with some of our most compelling public figures. He has helped to write seven New York Times best-sellers, including the #1 best-selling The Magnolia Story, with Chip & Joanna Gaines, co-stars of the hit HGTV show “Fixer Upper.” Mark began his career at The Boston Globe, as a general assignment news reporter, before moving on to a ten-year stint at People, where he turned his focus to popular culture as a correspondent, columnist, and senior writer.  While at People, he cond ..read more

“What really amazed me here was that so many of the authors who submitted stories wrote something completely outside their genre,” reflects best-selling author Douglas Preston, one of the project editors behind the dynamic new collaborative novel Fourteen Days. “This book is full of all kinds of weird stories.”  Yes, it is. And so is podcast guest Douglas Preston, co-author of dozens of New York Times best-selling thrillers written with his longtime writing partner Lincoln Child—a shining example of what it means to write in collaboration. In all, Preston has published 39 books of fiction ..read more

“How do you tell someone else’s story, but make it authentic?” That’s the question at the heart of this episode of As Told To: The Ghostwriting Podcast, which is really a repurposed, repackaged edition of a recent episode of Missing Pages, the critically-acclaimed investigative podcast hosted by renowned literary critic Bethanne Patrick—known to readers across social media as “The Book Maven.” Bethanne and her production team at The Podglomerate, a leading producer of original podcasts, pull back the curtain on the lucrative culture of non-fiction ghostwriting, and offer a compelling take on t ..read more

Kevin Anderson is one of the publishing industry’s leading authorities on ghostwriting and editorial development. As the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Kevin Anderson & Associates, a Manhattan-based firm that specializes in developing collaborative projects, he is uniquely positioned to weigh in on what it takes to write a best-selling book. His firm represents over 200 widely-published writers, and relies on the editorial and publishing expertise of more than a dozen former Big 5 acquisitions editors. “A client who hires a ghostwriter is still the author of their book,” Anderson once ..read more

“I’m quite good at detaching and passing the tissues and just listening,” says Andrew Crofts, one of the world’s most prolific ghostwriters, on his ability to help his clients share their most intimate, most harrowing, most traumatic experiences in the pages of their memoirs.  As the author or co-author of more than eighty books, including a dozen Sunday Times best-sellers, Andrew is well-known in England for his work behind-the-scenes with top television personalities, footballers, politicians, and ordinary individuals caught in extraordinary circumstances.  He is also well-known am ..read more

“Voices of their generation. Except for Greta Thunberg. And Malala. Amanda Gorman . . .you know what, I take it back.” — Jimmy Fallon That’s high praise for the comedy writing duo of Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold, from their former boss at NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” where our podcast guests became the two youngest writers in that program’s storied history and earned a shared spot on Variety’s “Power of Young Hollywood Impact List” in 2021. Shaw and Kronengold began dating and writing together as freshmen at Yale University and capped their undergraduate career with a 2018 commencement address ..read more

George McFly’s A Match Made in Space, from “Back to the Future”… Hank Moody’s God Hates Us All,” from “Californication”… Dr. Frederick Frankenstein’s How I Did It, from “Young Frankenstein”… Some of our best-loved movies and television shows feature books written by one of the lead characters. In many cases, the publication of those “books” becomes a central plot point or a running gag. (Think Handbook for the Recently Deceased, from “Beetlejuice.”) In other cases, those books leap from the screen and onto our bookshelves—IRL, as the kids like to say. That’s the case with Look Out for the Litt ..read more