“Nobody can write 20 books in a year.”
“You’re obviously not writing the books yourself.”
“Real authors don’t use ghostwriters.”
Is Stephen King a real author? How bout H.P. Lovecraft? Tom Clancy?
The author of the Jason Bourne series?
They all had professional writing assistants and so do I.
I don’t call my writers “ghost” writers though, for they don’t slip away into the night or lurk in the darkness.
In fact, let me shine a light on some of the writers I work with:
Annika Hanson
A native of Scotland, Annika is an expert at capturing corrupted innocence. I often have her work with younger girls, innocent and virginal until she turns them into rabid sex maniacs.
Of the many books she’s written with me, the most popular so far has been Submissive Nanny, a story about a girl who gets a job a nanny only to be turned into a sexy plaything. Annika doesn’t shy away from girl-on-girl sex and is particularly skilled at writing threesome scenes.
My latest collaboration with her, Indecent Temptations, is set in her native Scotland, in the northeastern town of Inverness. Her depictions of the local landscape and small-town culture have been instrumental in helping me turn that book into a work of art.
Kaila Krayewski
A Canadian living on the tropical island of Koh Samui in Thailand, Kaila is an accomplished writer, journalist and travel blogger. Through her blog, the Blonde Traveler, she helps recent college graduates earn an income as writers while they backpack through Asia.
I first met Kaila at her quirky island office: a colorful townhouse that she calls The Content Castle.
It was one of Kaila’s team members who helped me develop my Style Guide, a detailed set of writing instructions. Instructions such as: start each chapter with a bang, keep paragraphs short and punchy, mix high vocabulary with crude slang, and recap relevant details so the reader doesn’t have to remember stuff. I use the Style Guide to train all my other writers to make sure that each of my books maintain a consistent Viktor Redreich feel.
Christine Chapel
A sassy English girl living in Sweden, Christine is a master in the art of erotic prose. All the books she’s helped me with are dripping with sex and overflowing with delicious emotion.
I usually ask her to write from the perspective of an older woman involved with a younger man, and she did an absolutely stunning job of it in the book Dangerous Desires: a scandalous tale of a Swedish woman and her illicit affair with a dangerous Middle Eastern immigrant.
Christine provided me with incredible insight into Swedish culture. The conflict between feminists and traditionalists, the challenges of accommodating the huge influx of immigrants flooding into Sweden from distant lands, and the role of men in modern Sweden. Christine’s help on that book made it something far more juicy, powerful and relevant than anything I could have written on my own.
Rain Robinson
Born and raised on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, Rain likes her men rough, tough and sexual. She’s helped turn my male protagonists into panty-wetting beasts who women just can’t resist throwing themselves at.
Her work on amping up my epic 350+ page novel Trixie Provoked has helped turn that book into one of my most widely read works to date. If you like your romances raunchy, you’ll love what Rain does.
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Those who say that real authors don’t work with professional writers are probably the same people who say that real authors don’t mix past and future tense in the same book. Or that real authors avoid the word “said”, or that the oxford comma is the only grammatically correct kind of comma.
Quite frankly there are no fixed rules for “real authors”.
If an author enjoys the slow-and-steady process of writing every part of a book by himself or herself, then so be it. If an author prefers to outline, collaborate, and outsource before polishing up the final work, then it’s his or her right to do so. Everyone has a different way of doing things. There’s no right or wrong.
The only thing a real author needs to do is write.
Right?