As Told To

Television director, filmmaker and author Adam Nimoy, the son of actor Leonard Nimoy, knows what it means to grow up in the chilling shadow of a famous father. He also knows what it means to tell a helluva story, and he does so in the pages of his new memoir  The Most Human: Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoy . The book explores the author's complicated relationship with his father and refl...

Michael Franklin is the co-founder and executive director of Speechwriters of Color , a community of expert and aspiring communicators helping to give voice to leaders at every level of the public, private and non-profit sectors. As a proud partner of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel , the organization has placed dozens of candidates in both full-time and contract roles as speechwr...

Ellis Henican— New York Times best-selling collaborator, Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist, and popular television news pundit—had perhaps the coolest side-gig of any of our podcast guests to date. He provided the voice of "Stormy" in the adult animated television series " SeaLab 2021 ," which ran on the Cartoon Network for four seasons.  This spring, he's also provided the "voice" for bo...

"Celebrity memoirs have always been my favorite book genre," reflects podcast guest Chelsea Devantez, the Emmy-nominated writer, comedian, director, and host of the celebrity book club podcast " Glamorous Trash ." "That is what happens when your nearest bookstore growing up is a Wal-Mart. That was my fate."  Chelsea is just out with a celebrity-adjacent memoir of her own, I Shouldn't Be Telling Yo...

"You gotta be the best on your worst day." Words to live by from the mother of Ronda Rousey, the mixed-martial-artist-turned-professional wrestler known as "the baddest woman on the planet." Rousey's mother happens to be first American to win a gold medal at the World Judo Championships, and she also happens to be the mother of podcast guest Maria Burns Ortiz, co-author of Rousey's just-published...

"Reading to me is like breathing," notes Zibby Owens, the creator and host of the Webby Award- winning podcast "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," who joins us on the podcast to discuss her lifelong love of reading and writing and her commitment to championing books and authors. Indeed, Zibby has built on the success of her podcast to become the publishing industry's "most powerful book-fluencer...

"This is an author who really has his finger on the way kids think,"  The New York Times says of podcast guest Todd Strasser, the author of over 150 books, including the award-winning young adult and middle-grade novels The Wave , Give a Boy a Gun , and Fallout . He is also the author of the wildly popular Help! I'm Trapped series of books for young readers, as well as several other best-selling s...

Veteran magazine journalist Genevieve Field joins us to discuss her mid-career pivot into ghostwriting, as she celebrates the success of her "Andy Award"-winning collaboration with Hollywood stuntwoman Kimberly Shannon Murphy.   Glimmer: A Story of Survival, Hope, and Healing , Murphy's unflinchingly honest account of intergenerational familial abuse, was honored this winter with an inaugural "And...

Seth Davis is a veteran sports journalist and broadcaster, and The New York Times best-selling author of Wooden: A Coach's Life and When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball . He is the co-author of the just-published memoir It's Hard for Me to Live with Me , written with NBA veteran and University of Kentucky basketball legend Rex Chapman—a book that transcends (and upends!) the s...

Veteran journalist and collaborator Mark Dagostino is the author of more than two dozen books written with some of our most compelling public figures. He has helped to write seven New York Times best-sellers, including the #1 best-selling  The Magnolia Story , with Chip & Joanna Gaines, co-stars of the hit HGTV show "Fixer Upper." Mark began his career at  The Boston Globe , as a general assignmen...

"What really amazed me here was that so many of the authors who submitted stories wrote something completely outside their genre," reflects best-selling author Douglas Preston, one of the project editors behind the dynamic new collaborative novel Fourteen Days . "This book is full of all kinds of weird stories."  Yes, it is. And so is podcast guest Douglas Preston, co-author of dozens of New York...

"Sometimes the truth is just too much, and sometimes it's not enough." That's a line from Sarah Tomlinson's new novel, The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers , the story of a young ghostwriter scratching at the truth that threatens the legend of the fictional rock band of the title.  A veteran journalist, essayist, music critic, ghostwriter, and memoirist, Sarah's work has appeared in The Boston G...

"How do you tell someone else's story, but make it authentic?" That's the question at the heart of this episode of As Told To: The Ghostwriting Podcast , which is really a repurposed, repackaged edition of a recent episode of Missing Pages , the critically-acclaimed investigative podcast hosted by renowned literary critic Bethanne Patrick—known to readers across social media as "The Book Maven." B...

Kevin Anderson is one of the publishing industry's leading authorities on ghostwriting and editorial development. As the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Kevin Anderson & Associates , a Manhattan-based firm that specializes in developing collaborative projects, he is uniquely positioned to weigh in on what it takes to write a best-selling book. His firm represents over 200 widely-published writ...

"I'm quite good at detaching and passing the tissues and just listening," says Andrew Crofts, one of the world's most prolific ghostwriters, on his ability to help his clients share their most intimate, most harrowing, most traumatic experiences in the pages of their memoirs.  As the author or co-author of more than eighty books, including a dozen Sunday Times best-sellers, Andrew is well-known in...

"Voices of their generation. Except for Greta Thunberg. And Malala. Amanda Gorman . . .you know what, I take it back." — Jimmy Fallon That's high praise for the comedy writing duo of Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold, from their former boss at NBC's "The Tonight Show," where our podcast guests became the two youngest writers in that program's storied history and earned a shared spot on Variety's " P...

George McFly's A Match Made in Space , from "Back to the Future"… Hank Moody's God Hates Us All ," from "Californication " … Dr. Frederick Frankenstein's How I Did It , from "Young Frankenstein"… Some of our best-loved movies and television shows feature books written by one of the lead characters. In many cases, the publication of those "books" becomes a central plot point or a running gag. ( Thi...

"If I'm developing a recipe for a client, or for my own books, I'm all about people telling me what they think about it, what it invokes for them, what they would do differently," notes New York Times best-selling cookbook author Adeena Sussman about the collaborative nature of preparing recipes for readers. If there's anybody who knows what it means work in partnership in the kitchen, it's Adeena...

Rennie Dyball is an award-winning journalist, ghostwriter, middle-grade novelist and children's book author who's found a way to marry her lifelong interest in horses with her many and varied talents as a writer. Together with her co-author Piper Klemm, she created the popular Show Strides series of equestrian-themed novels for middle grade readers—originally published by The Plaid Horse and soon...

"I've been obsessed with the corrosive power of secrets since my first novel," reflects the best-selling novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro, a writer who has been mining her own secrets since she first put pen to paper. In a far-ranging, free-wheeling interview with host Daniel Paisner, pulled from a "Book & Author Luncheon" program sponsored by the Friends of the Port Washington (N.Y.) Library i...

Lindsey Jacobellis is the most dominant athlete in the history of women's snowboardcross—a thrilling head-to-head sport that made its Olympic debut at the 2006 games in Torino, when Lindsey also stepped to the Olympic stage for the first time. And yet the inaugural running of the event was nearly her undoing. At 20 years old, Lindsey had a commanding lead heading into the final stretch of the meda...

"Sometimes I'm asked if I'll ever write a book," notes actor, playwright and singer-songwriter Jeff Daniels, "and I always answer that I already have. It's in my songs." This is true. But now it's also true that the stuff of Jeff Daniels's life is on delightful display in the Audible Originals memoir " Alive and Well Enough "—a collection of stories, musings and songs that invites listeners into t...

Dina Kraft is a veteran foreign correspondent based in Tel Aviv, where she co-hosts the influential podcast "Groundwork," sharing stories about Palestinians and Israelis working to change the status quo. She began her overseas career in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press and has written and reported for a number of publications, including The New York Times , The Christian Science Monito...

Novelist, screenwriter, producer and publisher Lee Goldberg knows what it is to work in collaboration. He has helped to write and produce a number of television shows, including "seaQuest" and "Monk," and he also served as a supervising producer and executive producer of the long-running series "Diagnosis Murder," starring Dick Van Dyke.   While working on "Monk" and "Diagnosis Murder," he wrote s...

This episode originally aired on June 21, 2022. If there's anyone who knows what it's like to be invited into "the kingdom of knowing," to borrow a phrase from journalist Richard Ben Cramer, it's podcast guest Barbara Feinman Todd, who graduated from  The Washington Post Style desk to work as a researcher, book doctor, editor and spirit guide on books with Bob Woodward ( Veil ) and Carl Bernstein...