Authors & Audiences

#21 Ghostwriter L.A. Mitchell pulls back the curtain on publishing's best kept secret

Caroline Leech Season 1 Episode 21

Bestselling author L.A. Mitchell published her first story—a time travel short called THE LOST HIGHWAY—in 2008. Since then, she has published over 33 works of fiction and non-fiction as a ghostwriter. Her works include memoir, business non-fiction, self-help, young adult, women’s fiction, and—most prevalently—romance.

Spotlights have been turned recently on the craft of a ghostwriter following the publication of Prince Harry's autobiography, SPARE, by Penguin Random House. The prince readily acknowledges the involvement of "superstar ghostwriter", J.R. Moehringer, and yet many people have accused him of cheating because he didn't write the book himself. In this episode, experienced ghostwriter, L.A. Mitchell, pulls back the curtain on publishing's best kept secret, and shares her own processes for bringing someone else's voice to life. 

To find out more about Laura, visit her website, where you can sign up to both of her regular newsletters, or follow her on Instagram.

Published in her own name, Laura's new novel, FARTHERMOST - as she mentioned in the interview - is available on Kindle Vella, the new serialized story platform from Amazon, and you can read the first three episodes of FARTHERMOST for FREE here. 

FARTHERMOST: Five years past the End Times War, inside the bombed-out shell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, seventeen-year-old Ronin Black discovers a portal to a secret realm where all of art’s masterpieces, from doodles to Degas, blend into a vast canvas of shared emotion. Together with a motley band of art misfits, this thief-turned-guardian discovers that the key to restoring humanity is closer than he imagined. New episodes on Thursdays and Sundays.

While me may never learn which books she has ghosted, she did mention how much she had enjoyed PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee, a National Book Award finalist. If you haven't yet read this amazing book, please consider buying it from from Bookshop.org - Laura's favorite bookstore in Denver, The Tattered Cover, will receive a small fee from any purchase using this link, which will go towards the costs of keeping the store running. Many thanks.

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Music by Oleg Kirilkov - #We StandWithUkraine

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