The Literary Job AI Can’t Replace

Nothing seems to make literary-minded people angrier than an author taking credit for writing they didn’t do. A few weeks ago, Hachette canceled the U.S. release of a novel, Shy Girl, following a barrage of online accusations that it had been written with the unacknowledged help of AI. Last month, authors and journalists posted furiously about Grammarly’s claim to offer LLM-based coaching from versions of living and deceased writers—without their participation, compensation, or even consent; the company behind the app ultimately pulled the feature.

The collective outrage overlooks a fact that the publishing industry acknowledged long before the rise of artificial intelligence: Not everyone with a great idea or unique story has the skill, experience, or time to write a book—or even a book review. Right now, AI tools are cheap and widespread, ready to tap in with a service that some people do need. But these models have been trained on uncompensated creative labor. They plagiarize. They lie, and they lie about lying. So instead, I’d like to make the case for a frequently maligned profession—one I’ve participated in—that rewards good writing, helps authors survive in an ever more challenging field, and allows remarkable perspectives to reach an audience they otherwise wouldn’t. That’s right: Ghostwriting is good, actually—when it’s done by humans.

Ghostwriting has an undeservedly bad reputation. Even without AI, some readers feel betrayed if the name on a book’s cover doesn’t tell the whole story. When the actress Millie Bobby Brown put out a novel based on her grandmother’s life with the help of a ghostwriter, people on X told her she should be ashamed. The sense of stolen valor isn’t new: Thirty years ago, Hillary Clinton allegedly worked with a ghostwriter for her 1996 memoir, It Takes a Village—a move not uncommon for political figures. But the stigma was apparently so great that Clinton didn’t acknowledge her collaborator’s contributions to the book at all.

That said, the stigma has been fading. California Governor Gavin Newsom worked with a ghostwriter for his memoir, published in February. Many other public figures recognize the value of the profession and credit their ghostwriters in print. Demi Moore thanked hers, the New Yorker journalist Ariel Levy, at the start of the acknowledgements in her 2019 book, Inside Out. The cover of the 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey credits both the singer and the Vibe and Essence editor Michaela Angela Davis. Clearly, that collaboration paid off: The book hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list.

[Read: Seven celebrities who published actually great memoirs ]

Carey’s memoir is a favorite of Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton, who for five years hosted a podcast, Celebrity Memoir Book Club, for which they read more than 250 books. Not only do they have no problem with ghostwriting as readers or fans, they might prefer it. They thought Alec Baldwin’s 2017 book, Nevertheless, which he wrote himself, was “preposterous.” The pair also found Shania Twain’s self-written memoir tough to get through, despite gripping real-life drama—a narrow escape from a violent parent; her husband’s affair with her best friend. “Why would someone who rose to the top of their field in singing or acting also be incredibly capable with long-form narrative storytelling?” Hamilton told me. “It’s really hard to do, and people spend years and years studying it.”

Even autobiographies written entirely by their subjects have been edited, of course. No doubt some have been heavily edited. The lines between that work, ghostwriting, and co-authoring can be blurry. An author could come to a ghost with a full draft, or a co-author could start from a blank page. (Because of this fuzziness, the ghosts I spoke with only gave estimates of the number of books they’ve written, depending on how you’d count certain projects.)

What seems clear to me is that experts should hire experts, and everyone should get paid. When would-be writers use AI, tech companies and their investors profit. Ghostwriting, however, offers experienced writers a real living in an industry where a sustainable career often looks like a long-lost dream. According to a 2024 survey administered jointly by the Gotham Ghostwriters agency and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, one in three ghostwriters makes more than $100,000 in annual income from the work. Compare that with the median gross book-related income for authors published by the Big Five houses in 2022: about $15,000, according to an Author’s Guild survey. Those numbers are stark, but of course fees vary per project. Julia Scheeres, who teaches memoir writing at Stanford’s extension program and wrote her own best-selling memoir, tells me she charges an hourly rate of $150 for ghostwriting engagements that can last months or years. Caroline Cala, a writer based in New York who has ghostwritten about 10 books for actors, athletes, and businesspeople, told me she’s had deals that “touched the six-figure range.”

[Read: Modern communication’s big open secret]

Many of these projects arrive presold to publishers, with the contract and timeline already worked out. Cala, who has written a series of middle-grade books under her own name, says that even when the rates are comparable to those for a personal project, ghostwriting feels like less of a gamble because the work isn’t being done in hopes that an imprint will buy the book later. Corey Powell, who frequently collaborates with the science educator Bill Nye, appreciates that he can set his rate up front, based on the math of his own time and effort. And when the client is in tech, entertainment, or business, ghostwriters can try to tap into much deeper pools of money than those available in traditional publishing—and then use that cushion to fund their own work.

Ghostwriting may be threatened by LLMs, but these tools offer only a shadow of a shadow of the service a real-life writer and editor can provide. The ghostwriters I talked with feel that the best work always happens in very close collaboration with the named author, in an atmosphere of mutual respect for what each person brings to the table: the collaborator’s skill with tone and narrative, the author’s fluency in their own life and expertise. A good collaborator can also be a thoughtful sounding board and trusted adviser. “Every client I have ever worked with on a ghostwriting project has said, ‘This is amazing. It feels a lot like therapy,’” Cala said. “I think that the human experience of sharing your stories and secrets with someone—whether they make it into the finished product or not—is something that cannot be replicated.” That intimacy is not just a pleasant side effect: It produces great prose.

Caitlyn Alario, a poet who’s worked on about 20 ghostwriting projects, recently lost a client to AI after five years of working with them on a memoir. The client was frustrated about the process and running out of money to pay Alario. But when she showed Alario the results of her experimentation with AI, Alario saw that the tool had completely distorted the client’s voice, at times even inserting a cruel tone where the author had meant to sound funny. “I’ve never heard you talk about people this way,” Alario told her. Scheeres also had a client try to use AI to make edits, but she reminded him that—at least for now—most traditional publishers won’t buy a book that’s been touched by the technology. As with most things, you get what you pay for.

When done well, ghostwriting can be a generative and respectful path to a sustainable livelihood for writers. And for anyone without literary talent or training, employing a guide, coach, therapist, and sparring partner—in other words, a human ghostwriter—will pay off in the form of a better book (which usually sells more copies). In a world drowning in AI slop and hot takes, careful craft matters. So please don’t just ask ChatGPT. Hire a professional.