Why every HNW should write a memoir
Writing a memoir is a chance to control the narrative around
you're life story
- just don't expect to make (another) fortune, writes William Cash
Back in June there was a Times front-page article entitled ‘How to get (filthy) rich as a writer’, with a photo of my old LA lunching companion Jackie Collins (worth £140 million before her death in 2014) sitting beside her Beverly Hills pool. One of the revelations of the article was that, of all the professions, becoming a HNW writer today is increasingly impossible, with median earnings for professional writers falling by 42 per cent since 2005 to less than £10,500 a year. Yet sales of books in the UK actually grew by 7 per cent in 2016.
‘Exploitation comes to mind,’ says multimillionaire author Philip Pullman of the inequality divide that has arisen between super-rich authors and your average new novelist or ‘mid-list’ author.
According to agent Jonny Geller, the ‘money’ today is in memoirs, which presents a fascinating opportunity for an HNW businessman, entrepreneur or Rich Lister looking to be remembered by posterity. Although the Me decade, as chronicled by Tom Wolfe, was actually the Seventies, as far as publishers are concerned the ‘me, me, me’ literary genre is now the hottest genre at book fairs.
‘Ghostwriters’ are not a category that we currently include in the Spear’s 500, but they might be a useful addition. There is now no shortage of ghostwriters available to help tycoons and Rich Listers portray themselves as interesting and sensitive individuals whose ‘real self’ does not fit the popular cliché of the tabloids and diary columns. The only trouble with this form of literary reinvention is that memoirs need to be well written in the first place to work. As VS Pritchett commented: ‘It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.’ Or doing business.
But that’s exactly the point. Most narcissistic HNWs and tycoons want to be remembered as visionaries and ‘business artists’, not just ruthless commercial operators. For a billionaire, founder of a law firm or ‘survivor’ of a dysfunctional HNW family, the memoir also allows the chance to set the record straight about events that may have lit up the pages of the press....
...MUCH MOREWilliam Cash is founder and editor at large of Spear’s.
And from The Baffler:
American Ghostwriter
My adventures among the memoir-happy one-percent
The prognosis for American journalism is not good. In due course, the cancerous forces of Google, Facebook, and algorithmic optimization will complete the terminal ravaging of the journalistic trade from the inside, chewing through it vital organs one newsroom at a time, hollowing out its traditions and lore. Journalists and editors will grieve the demise of their beloved calling, which once nourished the sacred democratic principle of holding those in power to a sustained public accounting—and, on occasion, created a kind of widely accessible art form. Now, however, as journalism slouches toward oblivion, it churns out high-outrage, low-grade content for its web-addled audience, who click and share anything that flatters their ideological preconceptions.
Sundered from all the now-obsolete protections and best practices of a free and independent press, journalists will do what displaced workers everywhere must: get on with the necessary business of making a living. And a select few will fall into what is perhaps the grimmest possible simulacrum of journalistic endeavor: they will join the now burgeoning market for luxury ghostwritten memoirs.
Among a handful of competitive outfits offering these ghosted biographies, two in particular, LifeBook and Story Terrace, have established themselves as the lead providers of compelling life sagas for an exclusive if international customer base of moguls, C-suite executives, and titans of industry and finance. Publishing hundreds of small-batch editions in recent years, with prices as high as $8,000, these ghost houses have found a way to once again make good money employing journalists writing for the printed page—if not good money for the journalists, then at least for themselves and their investors....MUCH MORE
Last November, while tracking the growth of this nascent post-journalism narrative marketplace, I came upon a job listing posted by LifeBook. The firm certainly presented itself well. Based out of a renovated barn in the lush rolling county an hour south of London, LifeBook has carved out a prosperous niche as the biographer of first-resort for the global ruling class. The job notice explained that the company was looking for an experienced former journalist to become their next American Ghostwriter. Although that sounded less like the description of a secure job than the title of a Philip Roth novel, it was, indeed, a paying gig, and unlike many opportunities in freelance journalism, it offered the American Ghostwriter the potentially steady work of writing three books at one time. The ideal candidate, the listing informed me, would be fluent in the tradecraft of narrative, character, structure, and descriptive scene detail. Once hired, the American Ghostwriter would partake in the “extraordinary exercise of tracking people back to their childhood and their heritage.”
Founded in 2012, LifeBook was clearly a standout concern in the silent- author industry. Unlike other ghost houses offering all forms of scribe-for-hire writing, from penning “Thank You” cards to a keynote speech, LifeBook focused its consumer product line on a single $9,000 luxury item: a two-hundred-odd page book handcrafted in a London bindery, wrapped in fine linen covers, and embossed in gold letters. Written by someone not unlike myself, a journalist who applied care and concern to the story itself, the exquisite presentation enshrined a hagiographic narrative of the subject’s successful career in (usually) business, real estate, or finance, interspersed with scenes of choice family vacations and holidays in exotic locales. Indisputably at the top of the ghost-memoir class, a LifeBook biography was an heirloom-quality depiction of a life well lived.
The Birth of the AuthorCurious about the career prospects facing and many thousands of other displaced journalists, serving the same maximum leaders of commerce that, with hipster-digital elan, have gutted modern journalism, I applied for the American Ghostwriter position. Not long after the new year, I received an invitation to a phone interview with Tom, a project manager at LifeBook....
