Ghostwriter conflicts; Kindle’s AI rights grab; secondhand royalties: Newsletter 17 December 2025

Newsletter 129. Strategies for principled ghostwriters, Kindle enables AI queries, the polarization risk of closer social connections, plus three people to follow and three books to read.

Who wins when a ghostwriter disagrees with a client?

Sometimes ghostwriters and their clients have a serious disagreement. I’m not talking about the Oxford Comma (although as serious as that is, there’s usually room to work it out).

I’m talking about questions that change what a book is and whether it should even exist.

Questions like these:

• Is the audience a narrow group or a broad one?
• Is this a 150-page book or a 450-page book?
• What is the main idea?
• How visible is the author’s first person experience (in books that are not memoirs)?
• Do we include facts, quotes, or numbers that cannot be substantiated or are probably false?
• Do we recommend unethical behavior?
• Could what we are writing harm some people? Do we care about that?
• Could what we are writing irreparably harm the author’s reputation? Do we care about that?

The simplistic answer here is that since the author client pays the ghostwriter, the ghostwriter should do whatever the author wants. And I am sure there are some writers who are willing to do just that. It’s a paycheck: You tell me what you want and I write it.

But writers like that aren’t very good.

Quality writers care about what they create. The best ghostwriters are committed to the book. Since they will probably be working on it for a year or more, they become attached to the integrity of the book and the power of the idea. Regardless of how much you get paid, if you’re the main collaborator on a creative project of that magnitude, you tend to become committed to it and care about the quality of what you create.

So it’s not so easy to just say, “Okay, we’ll do it your way,” if you feel in your heart that the author client is making a serious mistake.

So what can you do if you’re a ghostwriter and you have a serious disagreement with the author? Here are some alternatives:

• Ask for more money. Not recommended. If there’s a number for which you’re willing to sell your integrity, you’ll never be at peace with the result. Paying a writer more to write what they don’t believe is a bad deal for the client, too. (For me, at least, there is no price you can pay me to lie for you.)
• Find a creative solution that bridges the gap. As I wrote yesterday, one job of the writer is to create a synthesis of otherwise contradictory ideas. If you can manage this, you’ll be satisfying the audience, the client, and the integrity of the book with an even more powerful idea. It’s a great trick if you can manage it.
• Appeal to logic. This is my most effective tactic. Logical arguments can be based on the book’s internal consistency, facts in the world, data about other similar books, or any other set of facts that you and your client agree on. Even books about emotion live within a world of facts and logic. The authors I work with tend to respect such arguments.
• Appeal to the audience. There is really only one question that matters for nonfiction books: Is this the most valuable set of content for the reader? An argument that starts with “The audience needs . . . ” is more effective than one that starts with, “I, your writing collaborator, recommend . . . ” If you and your author client agree on who the audience is, appealing to the audience is often effective.
• Appeal to a respected third party. Write things the way that your author client asks, on the condition that you can get an outside expert (the editor at your publisher, the editor at your ghostwriting agency, or a respected colleague) to weigh in. If the third party agrees with you, the client will go along. If the third party agrees with the client, it’s time to admit you were wrong.
• Threaten to quit. This is the worst possible outcome. Quitting leaves you without revenue and the client without a collaborator. It likely damages your reputation. It may require lawyers to resolve. Even if the threat gets your client to relent, you’ll be damaging the required trust between author and ghostwriter. But if you can find no way to live with what your author client is requiring of you, this may be the only remaining path for you. It’s a lot better to design a process that surfaces such irretrievable disagreements at the start, because if it happens midway, it’s a lot messier.

Even if a client pays me six figures, I work for the truth first, the audience second, and the book third — and the client fourth. That may not seem like the right way to work when you are getting so much money.

But in the end you’re hiring my brain, my heart, and my inextinguishable desire to make a positive difference in the world, on your behalf. If that sounds valuable to you, there’s probably no disagreement so serious that we can’t work it out.

News for writers and other who think

Amazon’s Kindle has implemented a feature called “Ask This Book” that allows readers to ask a question and get an AI-generated answer. It’s positioned as enabling simple catch-up type questions (“Who was Alden again, and when did he come back from the dead?”). But they didn’t ask authors’ or copyright holders’ permission to implement this feature, and rights holders cannot opt out. Amazon is a reseller of content, not a collaborator — in my view, they have no right to do this.

Gregory Mone shares an overview of how ghostwriters are using AI, on the Gotham Ghostwriters blog.

Aaron Shulman asks if authors are losing something when they accelerate research work with AI. Regrettably, I think there’s very little remaining defense for slow research. The question is, how will authors retain the depth of understanding that traditional research used to create for them?

The French Publishers Association wants to compensate authors for used book sales. Unfortunately, that ship sailed long ago. In the US, current law says once you buy content you can do almost anything you want with it (The First Sale Doctrine.)

Hardly anyone is buying Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir “American Canto” about, among other things, her affair with RFK, Jr. Apparently people have no interest in crap written on an iPhone. Word of mouth kills bad books quickly.

A psychology paper makes the counterintuitive case that greater social connection leads to more political polarization.

Three people to follow

James Gibbons , insightful writing coach

Jason Keath , breakthrough digital marketing thinker

Neri Karra Sillaman, Ph.D. , author of Pioneers, a celebrated book on immigrant entrepreneurs

Three books to read

Trust at a Distance: 6 Strategies for Managing in Remote Workspaces by David Horsager and Peggy Kendall (Berrett-Koehler, 2025). Why go back to the office? Make remote work work better.

Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton by Martha Ackmann (St. Martin’s, 2025). The incredible story of an American icon.

Python for Excel Users: Know Excel? You Can Learn Python by Tracy Stephens (No Starch Press, 2025). A practical exploration of the thesis that spreadsheets are the gateway drug to coding.