Prolific Authors like Tom Clancy

Do prolific authors, like Tom Clancy, have ghostwriters? How can these authors pump out book after book when, in reality, one manuscript can take years of struggle to perfect? Or, after the first publication, you know your editor, well, like a book?

Some people use ghostwriters, I’m sure. Others can just write ridiculously fast; Isaac Asimov, for example was well known for that. Ninety words a minute for hours, with barely any editing needed in the result.

Another prolific and fast writer was George Simenon, who probably wrote over 400 books. On average it would take him only 11 days to write a novel of about 200 pages. To my knowledge he never used a ghost writer.

It depends what is meant by prolific.

I’ve never read a word of Clancy but his entry in Wikipedia reveals his personal authorship of 14 novels in 24 years. In addition to these apparently self-penned efforts he has put his name to a number of non-fiction works and a whole raft of ghost written books as indicated in the link. It’s news to me, by the by, that anything prefaced by Tom Clancy’s… wasn’t written by Tom Clancy which, IMO,is a little bit naughty.

Compare and contrast the master of the genré, to wit John le Carré, whose output comprises 22 novels in 45 years. I’ve read all of these books and judging by the credits he spends a lot of time engaged in research, an activity which I’m unsure Clancy gets overly involved with. This may account for his relatively greater prolificness.

For true prolificacy you could turn to Barbara Cartland who, dictating off the top of her head to a secretary, churned out 657 novels inside 77 years.

I bolded the answer. :smiley:

The fact that the Tom Clancy’s Op-Center, Tom Clancy’s Net Force, etc, series are ghostwritten, is not in dispute. In fact, ‘ghostwritten’ is not really the right word here since the real author’s name usually appears on the cover next to the more famous name (albeit in a smaller font), so there isn’t really a serious effort made to conceal the fact that Clancy is not the book’s primary author.

Generally, whenever you see the apostrophe-s form on the cover of a book, that is an open admission that the famous author’s name is being used only for marketing purposes and that (most of) the writing was done by someone else. The big-name author may have provided the universe and the characters, and maybe he came up with the general outline for the plot or maybe he did some proofreading, but you can safely bet that he did not spend a lot of evenings sitting up past midnight sweating over the best way to word some paragraph.

(The same thing happened with super-prolific potboiler author Alistair MacLean, where to increase the confusion even further one of his ‘co-authors’ had a name very similar to his own: Alastair MacNeill. So you’d get a book cover saying Alistair MacLean’s Death Train, written by Alastair MacNeill.)

Clancy’s early books, usually starring Jack Ryan and John Clark, were written by the man himself, as far as I am aware. It has been a long time since I read any Clancy books, but I seem to remember that he produced about one book per year in that period. Given the average size of his books, that comes down to a couple of pages per day, which does not seem implausible for a professional writer. After all, while his books are generally tightly plotted and carefully researched, it’s not as if he writes the kind of style-over-substance literature where every word contains half a dozen double meanings and obscure literary references.

Generally, no. There are some exceptions: Ellery Queen used ghostwriters, including Theodore Sturgeon and Avram Davidson, who wrote from outlines that Dannay and Lee gave them, and V.C. Andrews started using ghostwriters after she died. It’s also an open secret that William Shatner uses ghosts; he usually thanks them by name in his introductions.

But those are rare. By far the vast majority of writers write everything that has their name or pen name on it.

Practice.

It’s hard work writing your first novel, but once you get the hang of it, it starts to come more easily. Also, certain types of plot-driven novels are relatively easy to write once you’ve developed your skills.

As for time, look at the people taking part in Nanowrimo or whatever it is they call it. Lots of people can do 50,000 words in a month (which is a bit short for a novel these days – 70K is the minimum and many publishers want 100k). Also, the established writers write full time; Fred Pohl once calculated that it takes about 40 hours to type a 70,000 word novel (assuming 50 wpm), so on that basis, a full-time writer can easily come up with a draft in 2-3 months and a final version in six.

Rather, the editor knows you. Remember, book editors don’t “edit” books – in the sense of taking the text and rewriting it to make it publishable. If it’s not publishable to begin with, back it goes.

Cartland, Clancy, le Carré, I don’t think too much of as “writers.” No surprise to me they’re prolific or their writing is by committee. Stephen King is a separate case though. He achieves his objectives, at least with me; a high percentage of his pages literally tingle my spine.

In his On Writing, I think it was, I was surprised to learn he is a slow reader (although he reads a lot) – about my own speed, in fact, 40-60 pp per hour, conditions being ideal.

I agree on the first and can’t comment on the second but to argue that le Carré writes by committee is just plain wrong.

I’d ask for a cite but non will be available.

Tom Clancy did get help from others with some aspects of his research; he names them in the acknowledgments for each novel. I know one of these people from one of his middle novels.

Also, keep in mind that a person may work on more than one idea at once. I believe Clancy said his later novel Red Rabbit was something he had started on a long time ago, before most of his other ones had been published. He probably had a number of ideas he worked on before publishing anything, and most of his novels use the same characters he invented at the start.

Anyway, I don’t think he’s written an unusually large number of novels. (He also has some nonfiction books though.) As far as I remember I’ve only ever heard speculations about ghostwriters in relation to his later books which a lot of people don’t like as much. I haven’t real all of them myself.

To expand on what people have already said, many authors become Brand Names. That allows publishers to sell anything with that name on the cover, even if it’s obvious - or should be obvious - that the Brand Name has little to do with the actual writing.

I’m sure you can find examples ever since books were published, but the practice took off as far back as the mid-19th century, when the rotary press made mass publishing a reality.

We’re all pretty familiar with the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, who did outlines for dozens of series like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and had them ghostwritten under a “house name” by several authors. But he was following in the footsteps of the Frank Reade books of the 19th century.

Many of the pulp magazines used house names so that favorite characters could appear as often as possible.

The modern pioneer of the name as Brand Name was Ellery Queen. Manfred B. Lee and Fred Danney looked at Willard Huntington Wright’s decision to write the Philo Vance books under the name of S. S. Van Dine, who also appeared as the narrator of the books, and went him one better. They gave the detective the name of Ellery Queen as well. With Ellery Queen writing the adventures of Ellery Queen nobody could make a mistake when they went into the bookstore.

In the late 1930s they authorized one of the first series of novelizations to be made from the Ellery Queen movies. These novelizations appeared under the by-line of Ellery Queen, but they had nothing to do with them. (They appeared in weird ways. The true first edition of The Adventure of the Last Man Club is a Better Little Book!) They also started a young adult series written by “Ellery Queen Jr,” also ghostwritten.

Danney did the plotting and Lee did the writing and by the 1950s he had such increasingly bad writers block that they gave up the series in 1958 with The Finishing Stroke. The Ellery Queen Brand Name was too valuable to give up, though. They solved this in two ways.

Three Ellery Queen novels starring Ellery Queen were ghostwritten from Danney plots by Avram Davidson and Theodore Sturgeon. (Sturgeon was a great writer who also suffered from writers block, and his friends were always trying to help him make money by feeding him assignments based on their ideas.) But Ellery Queen also turned into a house name for original paperbacks, none of which featured Ellery Queen as a character. These were ghosted by a variety of writers including Jack Vance and Ed Hoch. Lee eventually was able to write a few more true, if inferior, Ellery Queen novels before he died.

The influence of Queen as a house name, I believe, caused publishers in the mystery and sf genres to want to emulate it. Novels with the name of some famous, Brand Name, writer on the cover - really written by some up-and-coming broke writer, or at times even some fairly big names - became so popular, and so destructive to the careers of the up-and-comers, that it gained a derisive nickname: sharecropping.

Despite this, it is true for almost all cases that the work published under the name of a Brand Name writer is by that writer as long as none of the obvious clues are given on the cover to CYA. Only transparent frauds, like V. C. Andrews leaving dozens of manuscripts behind at her death (similarly with the mysteries supposedly by Elliott Roosevelt, who didn’t write any while he was alive either), are let by.

Why is this? Because success in the popular genres is governed almost entirely by prolificness. If you can’t pump out several books a year, then you have to be one of the top ten writers in the field to get a career. The number of people in the top ten is obviously limited. Everybody else has to manage by writing huge amounts. Quality doesn’t matter after you become a Brand Name. If you have five million buyers and turn off three-quarters by your lousy writing, you still have over a million left and that’s more than enough.

The number of books written by most active genre writers who are not Brand Names is staggering. Realities of publishing mean that they are probably writing several different series of books in several different fields (sf, fantasy, romance, young adult, mystery) simultaneously, usually under several different names.
Those not in the business almost never realize what else their favorite writers are writing.

The problem with Brand Names is not how prolific they are, but that they are not prolific enough. That’s why Tom Clancy and James Patterson and others lend their names to subsidiary series. They can’t write enough on their own to satisfy the demands of the publishers. And the public will, apparently, buy anything that is Branded.

ETA: Nobody writes by committee. I don’t even know what that means. A Brand Name may contribute a plot, idea, or outline but that’s about it. The other credited writer does all the real work. And I know of no evidence that writers use committees for work under their sole names.

I once ghost-wrote a book published under the name of a best-selling author who, at 2 or 3 books a year, might be considered prolific.

I worked from an extremely detailed outline and got a pile of research material in addition to this outline. I got paid a flat fee, and was paid by the writer (although we connected because we both had the same agent and I didn’t personally know the author).

I wrote up the pages and sent them to the author who then had a chance to revise them. In looking at the finished book, it looks like not much revision was done, but I haven’t done a word-by-word comparison with what I wrote and what’s in the published version. The book got the same kind of reviews as always and spent about as much time on the best-seller list as this author’s books usually do. Apparently, nobody but the author and I and a few select others (like my husband) know this even happened–but, in fact, it happens more often than the casual book-buyer would probably suspect.

It doesn’t necessarily mean I could write a best-selling novel under my own name, because I have a lot of plotting problems, and also I don’t really have a NAME.

Neither do I. :slight_smile:

Also, to dispel ambiguity, post #9 should read as follows:

I don’t think much of Cartland as a writer and I can’t comment on Clancy. (My opinion of le Carré is given upthread.) To argue that le Carré writes by committee is just plain wrong.

Etc.

You’re right. Sorry for my carelessness. I meant Robert Ludlum. Le Carré is certainly not in that class. Thanks for the correction.

In the sense banality is their outstanding characteristic, the parts of their ‘creation’ fit together awkwardly, redundancy abounds. Why is a committee of brainstorming ghostwriters so unthinkable? I have no evidence any exist but it would seem a logical step on the slippery slope, to mix metaphors. Walton Firm, in Post 6, says,

Maybe not “really serious,” but an effort nonetheless. Many are fooled I’m sure. Let the buyer beware; in that atmosphere it’s not incumbent upon me, I don’t feel, to show why a committee might not have produced it.

I ask because he came out with quite a few very long novels-did he use other writers to help?
Clancy re-uses a lot of material (in my opinion), and his stuff gets old, rapidly.

This describes the category I’m in. I sampled one after another of the popular genres over the years, always on someone’s excited recommendation and always against my better judgment, and almost without fail (Stephen King was an exception) was appalled by the prose and plotting. At the same time I always entertained, until today, a naively idealized picture of what mass book publishing is like, as I learn from re-reading Post 11. The whole mess is not a recent development and it’s not necessarily a bad thing within its own little world, I guess. I stand corrected in the sense my vexation with these authors stems in part from being unaware of the inner workings of that area of publishing. Ignorance fought! Thanks.

It’s easily done and your decorous response is laudable.

Virginia Andrews was so prolific she kept writing after she was dead.

Hilarity N. Suze, I assume you’re prohibited from divulging the name of the author and/or book?

The Tom Clancy’s Op Centre and later Net Force were labeled as such because apparently Clancy devised the ‘concept’ and then between him and the publisher handed out individual books to other writers. .

From my recollection the first one or two Op-Center books were far from being obviously a Clancy concept without actually being written him. I know I bought the first one under the impression it was written by him. Funnily I remember thinking at the time what was he doing wasting time writing this stuff, when he should be working on his next Ryanverse novel :smack: . This lasted about a couple of pages when I realised the book wasn’t Clancy’s ‘style’ and discovered who actually wrote the book.