Week 7 Prompt: Author Mills - Good or Evil?

I think the concept of “author mills” and “ghostwriters” is so interesting, and is also not limited to writing books. There are all kinds of creative outputs that function similarly; quantity over quality, credit not given where it is due, etc. The most similar case I have experienced in my own life could probably be called a “composer mill.” My fiancé writes music for films; he gets paid for it, but his name has yet to be included on the credits sequence. What he works on is fairly small scale, but it happens on a much larger scale in Hollywood; when you see a film score credited to someone like Hans Zimmer or Michael Giacchino, these days they have dozens of ghostwriters helping them flesh out the scores they are writing in, effectively having composers attempt to clone their style and work. That is how they are able to maintain working on multiple movies at the same time. Eventually, some of their ghostwriters may get a name for themselves but their work sounds an awful lot like the mill they started at. Not only that, but as these big-name composers write for more and more movies, their work sounds, in my opinion, less unique and more generic.

 

I digress, but based on what I know about mills, they aren’t all bad. They provide paid work for creators who are trying to get their foot in the door while earning some income. I think that James Patterson is probably at the point where he doesn’t really care if his work is unique anymore, because it sells. However, I do think it is unfair that these ghostwriters go uncredited. Credit should be given where it is due, and I don’t think it’s right to withhold that in any industry.

 

On the flip side, I did a little reading up on author mills, and I found out that they are not all upfront about what they do. Some mills, which function just as a way of publishing lots of small books with limited print runs, seem like an ordinary, legitimate publisher at first. They make it difficult to discern whether they are a mill or not. These kinds of mills rely heavily on the self-promotion of the authors they hire, who will be hurt if they don’t promote their own books. These mills also often produce books that are poorly edited and unprofessional-looking. (This is one of the sites I read up on: https://victoriastrauss.com/advice/author-mills/)

 

Personally, I think the creative world would be better off if this kind of production did not exist. It has become so hard for self-employed creators to get work and make a name for themselves, and these mills and ghostwriting scenarios make it even more difficult.