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The current trend in new novels is dual authorship; one famous and the other not. I can understand the need for getting published by any means possible, but where do we draw the ethical line?

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At the lowest monetary price you'll go.

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Is it okay for an unknown novelist to ride the coattails of a well-known author?

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Sure. As long as the well-known novelist is okay with it.

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And is it ethical for an acclaimed novelist to tag his name onto someone else’s work?

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Sure. As long as the "someone else" is okay with it.

I don't really see this as an "ethical" argument. Tom Clancy has used his name on books that he didn't write, but I don't think that's unethical. It's more of a "brand name", and I don't think anyone is under any illusions as to proper authorship.

That being said, I also heard that sometimes the famous one, when it's a writer of some stature, has some story that just hasn't "jelled" and is happy to pass it over to a lesser-known (or not so lesser-known) writer and market the result as a collaboration...

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Ghost writing is even further across this particular line...

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But is that unethical? It's mostly done by celebrities and politicians, but is it really unethical? I mean, the book is still just a product, and I doubt readers really care one way or the other so is this a question to the author who didn't write the book?

So is it unethical for Shatner to claim authorship? Or is it just a marketing ploy by the publisher since even a casual reader knows who Shatner is? As KDW said, contracts are signed so that both parties know what they're getting into so I'm not sure who this hurts. Or does it actually have to "hurt" anyone for the process to be considered unethical?

And are there degrees of unethical behavior? Would there be a public outrage if Stephen King was found to NOT have written his own novels? Or a George RR Martin? My guess is that there would be, but does it actually hurt anyone, or make anyone change their minds about the product?

It's considered wrong for a singer not to be singing on their songs. So why wouldn't it be wrong for a writer not to be writing their books?

I have no issue with collaborations but I do think ghost writing is a lie. The famous person's name is put on the book to sell it, but it is not their work. They are lying to the public and taking credit for something that isn't theirs.

Lying is unethical, but are people outraged that William Shatner didn't actually write those novels? Or was everyone secretly aware anyway?

Ya'll better give up on writing fiction. William Shatner is an actor, also a profession where one pretends to be what/who they're not. In fact, most novels that are ghost-written are done so on a preexisting concept (TekWar was probably Shatner's idea).

How about Dean Koontz's Frankenstein? He's now the sole author listed on the new copies. I have the original copied which give credit to his co-authors: Kevin J. Anderson and Ed Gorman. That's a lie. Does anyone care?

Of course you gotta beware of some things. I can tell you the rumors that the two guys who were Milli Vanilli did not do their own singing started from Day One of their appearance. Besides that, singers and groups have always used side men and session musicians and backup singers, usually unbilled, usually unheralded.

And I'm also reminded of the quiz show scandals of the late 1950s, where everybody was supposedly scandalized by how Charles Van Doren and others were cheating on these shows...my mother tells me she and her friends always thought they were faking it on these shows all along. So how scandalized could everybody have been?

In most cases like that, it's considered "work for hire." Where the end product is owned by the publishing company or some other entity, not the writer. This is different from a typical writer's arrangement, where we're giving someone license to our creative product.

In work for hire arrangements, we're agreeing to produce work (usually to a detailed specification) and hand over the intellectual property of that work.

Authors do this quite a lot. I've read Dean Wesley Smith's blog for a while now and it's clear that some of what he does is work-for-hire. He often "rescues" another writer's work, where he's sent the in-progress manuscript and he rewrites it to completion, then sends it back to the publisher. The original writer gets the credit, he gets paid for his work. It seems that often he is prohibited by contract to mention which titles these are.

Note: Authors get PAID to do this work. It might not pay as well as royalties on a NYTimes bestseller, but I believe that some work-for-hire pays quite well, perhaps better than what we could make selling our own original fiction under our own names.

This is very common in business titles and, to some degree, categories like self-help or places where an expert or PhD as the author of the book is needed, but that person doesn't have the writing expertise to put all his/her ideas into a book form. There's a woman who comes occasionally to my in-person writer's group who is like this - she has a counseling process she uses with her clients in her clinic. She wants to write a book, but has failed in her attempts to do it. She wants to find a ghost writer but can't pay them, so she's kind of stuck.

We got talking about ghost writing and co-authorship in our writer's group recently and about how some writers are more like Brands these days. James Patterson (I think this is one example, I honestly don't read his work so I have no idea), Tom Clancy - they're just the brand name on the book, it tells you that you can expect a certain kind of fiction within the cover. The actual words are written by a variety of (competent, normal) writers. This seems to be the case with writers who are aging and who already have a big following. Perhaps they are mentoring the other writers.

I saw a co-author of...again I think it was James Patterson, at a writer's conference one time, and he said that exact thing - he was hired to work with Patterson, but he did most of the work, however he had enough interactions with Patterson to feel mentored and guided on the process. But this author was brought in to address a specific thing (his MS was in an editor or agent's slush pile, and the editor/agent held onto it for a year or two because, even though they didn't have a place for that particular book, they felt the author did a really good job portraying female characters. When this problem arose with a work-in-progress, they called this unknown, unpublished author, and had him work with Patterson on the novel.)

Like so many things in the world, it's just up to us, the consumers, to be aware of what it is we're buying.

In the end, does it really matter? So long as you enjoyed the book, does it matter who wrote it? Does it matter who gets the income from it? Maybe Shatner only gets pennies per book and the ghost writer gets more. More likely the ghost writer got a very fair sum during/at the completion of his/her writing time and feels fairly compensated. I wouldn't kick a paying writing assignment out the door, even if I didn't get top billing!

You decide what you're going to do or not do, and don't worry about what someone else has done, unless what they're doing qualifies as fraud or plagarism or libel.

Most writers who make a living at it are not big names, nor are they best sellers. Most write without ever seeing their own name as a byline. (Ever read a newspaper? Most newspaper content has no bylines at all.)

The case mentioned above of someone who knows it but who can't write it and therefore needs a ghost or at best a collaborator is much more common than readers, and apparently some writers, realize.

And I don't blame any writer for trying to make a living in a difficult field, credit or no.

But someone who knows the material, whose story the book is about, without whom there would be no book because it is the celebrity status that creates the interest, could be argued to have more claim to the words themselves. And the ghost writer could be argued to be more like an editor (albeit a heavy-duty editor) than a writer who creates the story, the characters, the dialogue, the world, etc.

If that weren't so, then why are there so many people out there who think they can ethically and legitimately approach writers and offer to give them "My Phenomenal Best-Selling Idea" if the writer will split the money 50-50 with them when the book sells off the charts?

Could it be egotistical as much as unethical? Of course, an honorable man might be more likely to insist that a ghost writer get some credit, and apparently something like that happens sometimes, too. Hence all the books by Ms. Someone Famous with Mr. Someone-Who Really-Can-Write.

More likely, some kind of manager took a pitch from a publisher "Hey, we've done some market research and we've seen that there is tremendous interest if Mr. Shatner were to publish science fiction. Would Mr. Shatner be interested in lending his name toward this effort? We'd bring in a writer to do the legwork, meet with Mr. Shatner a few times to develop the conceptual flow, but otherwise he'd just be loaning his name to the effort. Here's a sample of the contract we'd like to use..." (actually, this is likely to have been 3-4 meetings where the publisher is trying to woo the manager/agent dude, and negotiating terms like how many meetings, where the meetings would take place, payment terms, etc.)

For one thing, neither story is really about dragons. They're also the two longest stories in the book. One is really a novelette and the other is close.

The first is really a story about the Russian revolution and the assasination of Rasputin. Not a bad story, overall. But the dragons just feel tacked on. They don't really have anything to do with the story at all. It isn't even really a fantasy. Take away the dragons (which you could do without changing the core story much at all) and the only speculative element left is that Rasputin has a magical charm that keeps him from being killed, which is mentioned perhaps twice. This story also has three POV characters. One is written in first person an the other two in third person.

I think that's all a reader can ask - don't change the author(s) mid series.

Personally I never buy famousguy/newguy collabs. Not sure why - I'm sure I avoided some seriously good collabs. It just freaks me out not knowing who I'm really reading...