Shop Talk: Ghostwriter Dan Paisner On Working With Stars, CEOs and Whoopi
Ghostwriters are having a moment. As a recent New York Times article about a one-day conference for these oft-hidden scribes points out, the event “took place at a moment when ghostwriting is in high demand and gaining recognition as an art form of its own, after years of operating largely in the shadows.”
One of the most prolific of these stealth wordsmiths is Daniel Paisner. Since ghosting his first memoir in the mid-eighties, Dan has written nearly 80 books, 17 of them New York Times bestsellers, and many of them memoirs on which his name appears in small print or not at all. His clients/co-authors have included some of the biggest names in sports, including Serena Williams and Missy Franklin, as well as CEO Daymond John, former Ohio governor John Kasich, EDM producer/DJ Steve Aoki, actress Whoopie Goldberg, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, and many more.
Dan is also a novelist, and in 2022 published his fourth novel, a comic crime caper called Balloon Dog, about the theft of a multi-million-dollar Jeff Koons sculpture. He is also the author of several works of nonfiction and hosts a podcast, As Told To, where he interviews fellow ghostwriter/authors. We talked to Dan about changes in the industry, how he gets his clients to open up, and the state of CEO memoirs.
Helm: How have things changed in the ghostwriting business since you started out in the mid-eighties?
Dan Paisner: When I started doing this, there really were only a handful of writers who did this as their stock and trade. That’s the piece that’s changed. If you look across the bookshelf at a bookstore, if you can find a bookstore, then you’ll probably see the same number of nonfiction titles that show evidence of a helping hand of some kind or another as you did 40 years ago. The difference now, I think, is that more and more people are getting credit for that for that work and being acknowledged for that work.
Helm: Do you have any tricks when you feel like you’re not getting enough access?
DP: What you need is patience. You need to wait for your opening and to pick your spots. And to know that everybody who goes down this road wants to share their story and it just takes them a while to recognize what’s at play in sharing their story. A lot of these stars are used to sitting down for a 15-minute interview and then moving on to the next one, especially if they have a media day for promoting a movie or whatever it is. This requires a little bit of a deeper dive and a little bit of a more substantive, introspective look at the stuff of their life. And if they’re a closed book at the start, my trick really is knowing that somehow I’ll get them to be an open book by the time we’re done. But there are no real sleights of hand at play. It’s really just a matter of being patient and developing a rapport and picking your spots.
You need to wait for your opening and to pick your spots. And to know that everybody who goes down this road wants to share their story and it just takes them a while to recognize what’s at play in sharing their story.
Helm: Is your process for getting to know someone and getting into their world different for everyone?
DP: Yes, it’s absolutely different each time out. You take what they give you in terms of time but also in terms of their openness. And you go from there. So I kind of like to slow roll the process. I’ve worked with people who are hard chargers: they’re very successful people so they come from a place of knowing that if they have a task in front of you, you bang it out, you knock it out, 12-hour days, 14-hour days, 15-hour days. These books don’t happen like that. I would much rather work with somebody for two or three hours a day, maybe two or three days in a row and then we take off two or three weeks and I go and digest what they’ve shared with me and see if I can give it some shape. And then I go back and see them again and we go at it again. I find if you sit with someone for a long day the stories they share in hours three and four are less vibrant. They’re less detailed. They’re less personal than the stories they share in hours one and hours two. People flag. It’s hard to talk about yourself for longer than an hour.
Helm: I feel like the age of the celebrity CEO is upon us. Have you had more CEOs and executives approach you now than before?
DP: I have, since COVID actually. I think what you saw as a result of the shutdown is that people became more reflective. They had more time on their hands suddenly. With every successful person, whether you’re a CEO or you’re somebody else who’s innovated in your field, there were more people telling you, “Hey, you should write a book.” Suddenly in 2020 people had time on their hands. So I did start to get more and more calls from folks who fit that description.
Helm: After you’ve submitted a draft, have you ever felt that maybe the person barely glanced at it and just kind of signed off on it? Or do most clients go over it very carefully?
DP: Again, everybody is different. Some people do really want to get involved. I actually love when that happens. I’ll leave holes in a manuscript. So when you talk about finishing a draft, that term is relative. My draft is a draft in the same way that Mad Libs is a draft. I’ll leave holes in my narrative because I want the subject I’m working with to fill in some of the blanks as he or she is reading. I’ll leave out their emotion. I’ll ask them questions in this final draft manuscript, with the idea being that they’ll mark up these pages in a way that makes them their own. And there’s a certain pride of authorship that emerges at the other side of that. At the other end, they truly did write this book. Because they did. They’re just not writing it in the way you or I might understand writing a book.
The Helm would like to thank Dan for sharing his time with us. You can find out more him at his website danielpaisner.com. You can also find him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter/X. His podcast can be heard on Apple Podasts at As Told To.
