Ghostwriting - Really?

I was recently thinking about some of the books that I read as a child and did some online reading about them.  I came across some startling facts while reading the Wikipedia article about the Babysitter's Club Series.  I discovered that Ann M. Martin wrote only some of the books and that many in the series were actually ghostwritten.

Ghostwriting is when the publishing company hires another author to write books and then publishes them under the name of a well-known author.  The author that the book is said to be written by may have had some input (they probably wrote a summary of what it should be about) but did not do the actual writing. They seem to do this when books are selling faster than the author can write them.

As I continued my research, I was shocked to find that most of the series' that I read as a child were not written by the people that their covers said that they were.  Not just the Babysitter's Club but also: Animorphs, Goosebumps, Sweet Valley High and I'm sure many more.  This absolutely shocked me.  How can a book be written by someone and then said to be written by somebody else?!  It just seems so fundamentally wrong!  Usually all the ghostwriters get in these cases are a small mention saying that they helped with the production of the book.

The author will write the first few books and then once it seems that they will be popular, ghostwriters take over so that the books can be written faster and the publishing companies can make more money.  I understand that these series' have 50 - 100 books in them, but it still just doesn't seem right to me.  I actually feel like I've been deceived.  I always thought that it was amazing that these authors wrote all of these books so quickly and now I find out that they really didn't.  I feel like they cheated me for my money when I was a kid.

And it's not just children's authors.  Famous authors like James Patterson and Tom Clancy (including the first two Splinter Cell novels) haven't written all of the books that have their names on them.  James Patterson has actually admitted that he is "better at coming up with ideas than actually writing sentence after sentence".  Often the ghostwriter's name will be on the cover as a a secondary author in small print at the bottom.

I have no respect for an author that would let someone else write a book and then slap their name on it.  I don't care if it is the publishing company's idea, they can't do it if the author says no! Why should this author get the credit when all they did was come up with the idea for the book?

There are a few cases that I think are more acceptable.  VC Andrews is a famous romance writer who hired a ghostwriter before she died to continue writing books under her name.  This still seems a little sneaky to me, but at least it seems to be a pretty well-known fact that this is what is going on.  Also, the Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene are all written by ghostwriters.  Carolyn Keene does not exist, which in my opinion makes it alright.  She's not a real person so no one is really getting the credit for another author's work.

Everyone knows that musicians use ghostwriters and then say that they wrote their songs themselves, that happens all of the time.  Some people may even realise that a lot of celebrities use ghostwriters to come up with cookbooks and other little books that are credited to them.  But, did you know that many celebrities (including politicians) have hired people to write their own autobiographies?

Hilary Clinton paid a ghostwriter $500,000 to write her autobiography.  Ronald Reagon had a ghostwritten autobiography and two of JFK's books were almost completely ghostwritten.  One of those books was Profiles in Courage which won the Pulitzer-Prize, a good chunk of it was written by his speechwriter Ted Sorenson. Other celebrities who have used ghostwriters (that we know of!) are Victoria Beckham and Sharon Osbourne.  It really makes me wonder how many celebrities have actually written these books about themselves, by themselves.

Obviously the ghostwriters are okay with this happening.  They are getting paid good money (although I'm sure it's not as much as the credited authors and publishing companies are making) and they won't get blamed if the books are bad (or would they?).  But does this mean that we need to be okay with it?  No, I don't want to read a book that is being written by a lie and I will try my hardest not too.

People need to own up and be honest.  Write on the cover of your book "Idea by ____, Written by ____ because I was too lazy to do it myself!"