Deathly Hallows Book Discussion **LoTs Of Spoilers**

[Alex]

Originally Posted by BarTopDancer

Wait wait wait. When did Tom Clancy books start being written by a ghost writer?

He does not write the books in the OpCenter, Power Play, or Net Force series. When the Net Force series first started they didn't even mention the real author on the cover, but I believe they've changed this in the years since with it still being the case that "Tom Clancy's..." is in huge letters and the author's name is nice and small. In those first books the only mention would be something in the acknowledgments like "invaluable contribution[s] to the manuscript by Joe Blow" when in fact the invaluable contribution was that Joe Blow wrote it.

So there are the now acknowledged series in which Clancy has just licensed his name but rumors that other recent books have been ghostwritten as well.

So he's not quite in the V.C. Andrews camp (at least not until he dies) but is an example of whoring out the name. Asimov did something similar in his late years but I think the appropriate authorial credit was given much more prominently.

Robert Ludlum is another. His estate has published about a dozen new books since he died in 2001, supposedly based on unfinished manuscripts but no authorial credit is given