Over The Counter

A pharmacist tells how to keep your family healthy -- and what to do when it isn't

(Focus on the Family, 1989)

My only venture into ghostwriting started before Hallowe'en in 1987. While I was doing the dishes on October 7, I had a call from Mr. Christian (his real name) of James Dobson's Focus on the Family. He said he was in desperate need of a ghostwriter for a pharmacist named Dan Little (a friend of James Dobson) and that I was highly recommended. If I would drop everything for three months to produce a practical and inspirational book about pharmacies and pharmaceuticals for spring release, I would get a $2,000 advance when I started, and the final $4,000 within thirty days of mid-January book completion. I was already swamped, but he said that Focus (with an annual budget of $30 million) had just moved into new corporate headquarters in my area; perhaps I would end up doing lots of ghostwriting for them for $6,000 or more per book. Little did I guess that this apparent cure-all for my financial ailments was a prescription for disaster.

Mr. Christian asked if I had a computer, and when he learned that I still used a typewriter he said I must buy a computer immediately. I didn't like that and said to call back in a few days, but he threw me off guard by saying that he had to report my final answer at a major executive meeting early the next morning. That seemed like an odd way to do business, but because of my keen interest in chemistry and health, I gave in and agreed. He claimed that we now had a binding oral contract.

I immediately dropped the class I was taking, put away the book I was writing, and bought my first computer for $3000. (They were very expensive back then.) I drove to the lavish Focus headquarters so Dan and Betty Little could meet me and I could pick up the company's outline for the book. Everything seemed fine.

With the outline as my guide, I plunged in and spent three solid weeks on research and writing. Then to my dismay I was told to forget that outline and start again with a completely different one that James Dobson had written on Halloween. After three weeks of wasted work and a $3,000 investment, I had no check for $2,000, no contract, and no input from Dan Little. I felt betrayed, but I decided that by now I could not afford to quit.

During the second month I studied seventeen books about drugstore products and worked day and night at the computer screen. Still no interviews and no advance. I turned the first chapter in on schedule, and it was warmly accepted by my editor. But when I called week after week to try to set up appointments with Dan, Betty was sweetly evasive at first ("I'm so sorry, just call back again tomorrow" or "He's watching a game on TV") and later hostile ("Dan has no time for you.") My editor was as bewildered as I, because Dan kept assuring her that he was willing to be interviewed. In mid-November Betty suddenly called to tell me that although she and Dan had not seen any of my writing, they rejected it. My editor was as shocked as I was and urged me to continue, promising that she could handle the situation.

Although I was never granted one interview with Dan, even by telephone, I was given bulky transcriptions of garbled reflections he tape-recorded from time to time. To my dismay, his main focus was on trivia like the various flavors of coughdrops and his family's food preferences. When he dropped in to visit the office once, James Dobson took him out to lunch.

In its promotional literature, Focus claimed to pay all its bills in 30 days, but my requests for the contract and the first $2,000 were ignored until I literally grovelled for it as a Christmas emergency. By then I had been working on the book for ten weeks at my own expense and had most of it finished. I was eager for the mid-January payment of $4,000 and intensely eager to be through with working for Focus.

I turned the book in on time, my editor was happy with it, and she accepted it. We both thought all was well. But to my horror, I was notified that Dan was demanding a rewrite and he had veto power. Focus was in no hurry to publish the book after all. Furthermore, Dan was not the only person who could veto it; when I asked, I was simply told that "everyone" (unnamed) connected to the book had to approve before I could be paid. If I had afforded to hire a lawyer to get my money for me, I would have done so.

I promptly shortened and dumbed down the book as directed. From then on I fulfilled every new request along the way, partly as an experiment to see how far things would go. With every revision, the book said less and Dan liked it better. He decided that his real purpose in the book was--in his words--to explore his personality. (He was perfectly happy to explore his personality at my expense.) As I see it, in order to get the $6,000 I had been promised, I ended up doing $24,000 worth of work.

Seven months after my editor accepted the book, I succeeded in persuading Focus to send me my check for $4,000, but they made me promise to go on with revisions of the revisions. When Halloween came around again, my study was still piled with Dan Little clutter demanding attention. I had just received fifty more pages of goofy memoirs to turn into a whole new chapter he decided he wanted. To make matters worse, my competent editor was replaced by one who was incompetent.

By the time the book was published in 1989 I absolutely refused to have my name on it as co-author because I didn't want any readers of my other writing to waste their money on it. And I didn't want it to damage my reputation. So I demanded that a fictitious name be used instead of mine, and Focus called me Faye Lind.

Here are things I learned the hard way:

1. The emergency recruitment ploy and rush start is a common scam. My advice to other writers: "Never use an electric typewriter while you are soaking in the tub, and never do a minute's ghostwriting until your check has arrived."

2. Do not agree to an oral contract; it is theoretically valid, but for a ghostwriter it is not worth the paper it should have been written on.

3. A company's book plan may satisfy a would-be celebrity until the book is written; then he is apt to think of a counterplan. The unwary real writer can also be trapped in the middle -- unpaid -- until several people behind the scenes are individually satisfied.

4. Ghostwriters don't always know why they were hired. Sometimes ghostwriters are called in merely to sustain illusions or to subsidize other people's hidden agendas.