Mumbai: Gone are the days when readers would blindly trust a writer for his/her word choices. Today, people can hire the services of a professional writer to put their thoughts on paper, while taking all the credit for the lexicon. Put shortly, that's ghostwriting.
The trend is consistently rising in India, with a number of companies openly advertising such services at varied costs. A ghostwriter is a paid professional who can write any literary or journalistic work based on the brief. Although all the elements belong to the writer, except the primary idea of the text, the 'ghost' does not take any credit, and is compensated monetarily. The service is subscribed to by people who have an idea worthy of being translated into a book, article, or a speech, but they either lack the time or necessary writing skills.
Inspired by the West, this profession is not completely new to India. Writer and lyricist Javed Akhtar had earlier confessed that as a ghostwriting assignment, he wrote a screenplay for director SM Sagar’s movie in lieu of Rs 5,000 in the 1970s. Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee, former director of the National Book Trust, had told a news agency, “Successful people want to talk about themselves and that they do through autobiographies and memoirs. However, they do not have the wherewithal to write books. So they employ ghostwriters.”
Most autobiographies and memoirs of popular figures in the past 20-25 years have been written, partially or wholly, by ghostwriters, said Bhattacharjee, who is currently heading the editorial works of Niyogi Books. In India, ghostwriting services have lately promoted themselves as the “ultimate solution to bring the literary vision to life”. An advertisement by Adhyyan Books Publishing read, “Say goodbye to the writing struggles and hello to the joy of being an accomplished author. Let us handle the hard work, while you reap the rewards of seeing your book come to life.”
Interestingly, these companies offer “cost-effective” services across multiple genres, including poetry, business books, and thought leadership articles. They boast of providing content devoid of plagiarism and errors.
Joyita Bhoumik, operations and creative head at Kolkata-based Orange Publishers, said, “Many people, who have good ideas, come to us and we help them materialise their ideas. Mostly people come to us with romantic and thriller thoughts. We anonymously connect our client to our writers and a nondisclosure agreement is also signed.”
According to Write Right, one of the service providers, the average price range of ghostwriting in India is between Rs 2 and Rs 5 per word. Astitva Prakashan, a publishing house into the same business, said that a ghostwriter can charge anywhere between Rs 50,000 and Rs 2.5 lakh for writing a book in three to six months.
“We have a lot of motivational speakers coming to us as they do not have time to prepare their speeches every day. Therefore, they hire ghostwriters,” said a spokesperson of a publishing house on the condition of anonymity
