The saying that truth is stranger than fiction certainly applies to Pamela Anderson's latest career move.
The former Baywatch beach babe is being paid $250,000 (€200,000) in a two-novel deal with Simon & Schuster. This is a whack-load of money for any first-time novelist, but it's especially eyebrow-raising in Anderson's case. Why? Because she's not writing the books - already called Above The Waist and Below The Belt - herself. The plot and characters will be hers, she says, but somebody else will write the novels for her.
Ghostwriting is nothing new: celebrities regularly work with "ghosts" when they put together their autobiographies: they have stories to tell but perhaps not the ability to tell it. The big difference is that these ghostwriters work with facts. Ghostwriting a novel - a creative genre - is an extraordinary concept: the point of fiction is the style in which it is written; the voice of the writer.
It's not the first time the concept has hit the headlines. The model Naomi Campbell did the same thing in 1994 with Swan, a novel set in the fashion world and ghostwritten by Caroline Upcher. Despite all the publicity it bombed - and was widely derided.
Simon & Schuster's London office says there are no plan to publish Anderson's novels on this side of the Atlantic.
Marianne Gunn O'Connor, the agent who represents Cecelia Ahern, says ghosted novels are not an area she's interested in representing. "I don't understand it at all. If it was a non-fiction book, yes, but not novels. And actually, given that she is a celebrity, $250,000 for two books isn't that much, because she'll get it over three or four years."
"It's novelty publishing, no doubt about that," says Joseph Hoban, marketing manager of New Island Books, whose latest publication, Christine Dwyer Hickey's Tatty, has earned good reviews. "But why her? I could understand if they'd asked Oprah \ to do it, because of her book club; everyone would run out and buy that book. You could say that Swan was published in a time of the excesses of the early 1990s, but it didn't work, so why do it again? I'm intrigued by whom they'll market these books to. Pamela Anderson's fan base are teenage boys and 20-something males - and they are not natural book-buyers or readers of women's fiction."
Treasa Coady, the founder of TownHouse Dublin, whose latest title is the anthology Irish Girls Are Back In Town, says: "It's celebrity publishing. It reminds me, though: The Piano was first a film and then someone [Kate Pullinger, using Jane Campion's screenplay\] was paid to ghostwrite the novel afterwards. So somebody was paid to put words to a character who didn't speak. We will never be doing that. TownHouse chooses its authors from those who can actually write themselves."
Rosita Boland
