Writers signed away their rights to royalties and bylines in exchange for a flat fee. The Stratemeyer Syndicate helped prove that book packaging with ghostwriters could be incredibly profitable-for managers and owners, at least. “Edward Stratemeyer was a genius,” says Greenberg. Though you might expect a writer collective to support writers the way labor unions support laborers, the Stratemeyer Syndicate's central aim was simply to produce a huge number of books at the lowest possible cost. In 1905, a prolific writer named Edward Stratemeyer founded a network of freelance writers and editors. The industry that churns out children's books has changed surprisingly little in the last century. “I have no idea where they were,” she says. “You have to keep feeding the machine,” she says.Īlice Leonhardt, who wrote Nancy Drew books for Megabooks, never even met the intermediaries who passed on her manuscripts to the publisher.

Greenberg edited hundreds of Nancy Drew mysteries after they came in from book packagers, and suspects she worked on more books in the series (approximately 300) than anyone else. “Hiring a book packager is a way of hiring staff without putting them on your payroll,” explains Anne Greenberg, who worked for Simon & Schuster from 1986 to 2002, when Lampton was writing. Then they deliver manuscripts to the publisher, who rewrite and polish them to produce the final book. They develop new story ideas, recruit and manage freelance writers, and edit the first drafts of series books. They're phantoms,” he says.īook packagers are a kind of outsourced labor, not unlike factories in China or tech-support centers in Mumbai. “There were other people, looking at your books, making comments. When Lampton mailed in drafts, they came back with comments written in several colors. He sent his books not to a publisher but to a packager called Megabooks-effectively a conduit between the writer and the publisher, Simon & Schuster.

“You're usually in touch with one person, the editor,” says Christopher Lampton, who wrote 11 Hardy Boys books in the 1980s.

If writing seems like a lonely profession, try ghostwriting children's books.

Carolyn keene author