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Fans and foes alike have worked themselves into a speculative lather in recent weeks over the contents of Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life. Now that the book's Nov. 17 release has answered those questions, just one mystery remains: how the heck did the former Alaska governor pen the 413-page tome in just four months...
Palin's publisher says the answer is simple: hard work. "When she resigned as governor, she had a lot more time and was able to really devote herself full-time to writing the book," says Tina Andreadis, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins. "That's really all that there is." (See pictures of Sarah Palin...
...also this: Palin had help. Editorial sidekicks are par for the course in political memoirs, though ghostwriters say many pols are heavily involved in the writing process. Palin's assist came from Lynn Vincent, a writer for the Christian news magazine WORLD who has co-authored several other books. (Read about Sarah Palin's book tour...
...also helps to have a subject who knows what message she wants to get across. Palin was apparently clear from the start about her book's mission: "It will be nice through an unfiltered forum to get to speak truthfully about who we are and what we stand for and what Alaska is all about," she told the Anchorage Daily News in May, when the deal was first announced. Memoirists with fuzzier goals may find the process slowed by handlers or publishers who bicker over how the book should read, ghostwriters...
After interviewing the memoirist extensively, talking to family members, scrutinizing television appearances and mining speeches or other documents, a ghostwriter with the need for speed may enlist transcribers and fact checkers to expedite the process. But in the end, how quickly the book gets finished depends largely on the ghostwriter's drive to grind it out. "My friends used to joke about, I think it's Control plus F10 - [the computer shortcut that brings up] the word count," says Barbara Feinman Todd, who ghostwrote Hillary Clinton's 1996 best seller, It Takes a Village, among other books. Jenkins, meanwhile, recalls...