There’s been a lot of comment about the fact that former VP candidate Sarah Palin and her ghostwriter wrote her 400-page memoir in 4 months.
As someone who used to work as a ghostwriter, I don’t find this remarkable at all. Let’s say that there are 20 working days per month; that leaves weekends free, and two days of holiday or vacation too. Four months is 80 working days; 400 divided by 80 means writing 5 pages per day. That’s difficult? Not for a memoir. Memoirs typically require much less research than a third-person biography, and typically don’t use footnotes or citations. The subject talks for two hours, the ghostwriter shapes it into text for six hours.
It doesn’t hit me as an unreasonable amount of time.
Hell, even if she did it herself I wouldn’t be surprised, but wouldn’t envy her editor’s job for the following ten months.
It’s not an unreasonable amount of time, given that it was ghostwritten, probably by committee. Many hands make like work. She most likely had to sit down with the actual writers over a couple of weeks and given the the broad sketches, which they supplemented with research from other sources.
IIRC the industry standard for a page of text in a mainstream book is between 400-500 words per page. 8.5x11 text page is like 800 words or so, so really when you think about it that’s like three pages a work day of text.
Especially when you consider that her constituency prefers large typefaces.
No, no, no. That’s an old age joke. You want a stupidity joke. Try something like “Her constituency prefers lot of pictures, and possibly pop-up books.”
Writing five pages a day is simple. Rewriting five pages a day - having the results be decent - now that is hard. Maybe they sent the slurry of the original text to a pipeline of editors and rewriters to try to translate it into English?
I’m sure that Sarah Palin never touched a keyboard during this process. So the rough draft was generated by the ghostwriter from recordings and interviews with Palin and Palin’s people. And since the rough draft was generated by a professional writer it probably wasn’t in bad shape, it only needed vetting by the handlers.
Your math might work out for the initial writing, but even a ghostwriter needs copy and top editing, if nothing else. And then to see proofs and approve them and so on? So I don’t think there is a full 80 days for just the initial draft…
What’s so dramatic about her life? She ran for Vice President but we already know that. She was the Governor of Alaska - how interesting is that? Is anyone reading the autobiographies of her predecessors like Walter Hickel or Tony Knowles? Do you really want to know more about her term as Mayor of Wasilla?
It’s not like Palin is going to surprise us with new revelations about any of the possible controversies in her life.
Getting to be a Governor of any state is noteworthy, and running for VP is icing on the cake, and the first ‘serious’ maybe has a chance female, who is, let’s be real, a hottie, is certainly something worth writing a book about.
At least as much as any of the stupid biographies that have come out in about the last 20 years are worth writing. I wouldn’t read it, just because I don’t care about political autobiographies, but if I had to made the call as to whether or not it would go bestseller, I’d vote ‘yes’.
Let’s face facts. Palin and other people still regard her political career as viable. So this will not “look back at my career” memoir. This will be a campaign biography which means that every time Palin mentions some event that happened in her life she’ll be reminded of how she applied her political and moral beliefs to that situation with a long digression of what those political and moral beliefs are. When she talks about getting married, there’ll be a long passage about the sanctity of straight marriage. When she talks about being Mayor of Wasilla, there’ll be a long passage of how she supports lowering taxes. When she talks about her children being born, there’ll be a long passage about her pro-life views. When she talks about hunting a moose, there’ll be a long passage about gun rights.
And don’t forget, she has a special needs child. That’s a good 100 pages right there, as this would cover multiple political statements (per Little Nemo’s post).
