4 Tips For Writers On Working With Celebrity Clients
Some of the things you may encounter when your client list includes high profile and public figures
Ghostwriting is one of the relatively few occupations that may involve regularly interfacing with clients who are well-known to the public. Here are some tips on working with this interesting clientele. Photo by Abdel Rahman Abu Baker from Pexels
Relatively few industries and occupations may involve the possibility to rub shoulders — or at least exchange Zoom greetings — with people in the public eye.
Public relations is one of those. Being an LA-based executive assistant is probably another good strategy if that’s your end game. And oddly, being a book ghostwriter is another — for relatively few private individuals have the unusual confluence of large sums of cash lying around and interesting life stories worth capturing in print.
To regurgitate a trite cliché, celebrities are but regular people who got famous. Nevertheless, there are a couple of useful things to know about working with them. From early lessons learned during a handful of encounters, here are a few of those.
Celebrities have retinues
Perhaps the most salient difference between us commonfolk and our celebrity brethren is that celebrities tend to have retinues while we … well don’t (sorry to burst the bubble but it’s really me writing this blog post and answering emails — I kid).
What this means, in practice, is that navigating sometimes labyrinth layers of gatekeepers is par for the course when working with publicly-known figures.
The higher the stature of a public figure, the more likely they are to have different figures helping out with different parts of their life in different geographies.
This (possibly segmented) retinue might include executive assistants, public relations managers, and unofficial jacks of all trade. These are the individuals the celebrity might actually spend most of their time interfacing with.
Before that’s a requirement, though, celebs-in-the-making answer their own email and (we presume) do their own laundry and dishes.They’re just like us!
What you need to know as a writer: Who their gatekeepers are and how to work with them.
Celebrities place a premium on discretion
Celebrity culture remains a staple of fascination for the general public — and by extension the media.
Many celebrities are an accidentally forwarded email or two away from having something they don’t want public accidentally slip through that rigorously guarded net of confidentiality.
If you’re a naturally private and guarded person, your innate sense of discretion is likely to be an asset. If you’re a blabbermouth, things could get difficult.
At a minimum, expect to be signing plenty of NDAs and confidentiality agreements. As a book ghostwriter, this can put us in a difficult position because we need to promote or at least share our past work in order to land more of it. So it may be necessary to push back on some unworkable contract clauses.
What you need to know as a writer: Don’t get drunk and brag to your friends that you’re ghosting for Britney (or tweet the same) if your NDA or contract precludes you from disclosing the writing relationship until the book has gone to market (or forever!). Things have a weird habit of boomeranging back to people.
Celebrities value their time
The life of a celebrity or high profile individual — think a Fortune 100 CEO — can be an insanely busy one.
They tend, disproportionately, to be early risers. Although athletes during off-season and actors between shoots can have schedules that are surprisingly accommodating. Like happens to all of us, to an extent, life tends to get busy in fits and spurts — then goes relatively quiet just as it was getting frantic.
Nevertheless, it’s prudent to assume that they’re always pretty busy unless you know that they’re really not. The key to communicating with them is therefore mastering the art of being succinct:
- Communicate essential information before extraneous information. The inverted pyramid style commonly used by newspaper journalists is actually a pretty good guide for structuring communications generally — especially to VBPs (very busy people). Work on the assumption your messages won’t be read in their entirety so get the crucial stuff out of the way first.
- Brief-writing is a prized skill. Get good at putting together digests and snapshots.
- One favorite trick I picked up from an Israeli startup founder is using the series of tags that the US army does in emails. These allow the recipient to quickly glance at the communication and see what kind of action is required. Always assume that your emails are being read on a mobile device. So preface rather than suffix your content tags. This way a PA can quickly bounce over something time-sensitive or hold something for a weekly sync. I use [Time-sensitive] as a supplementary tag for this reason even though it’s not an “official” tag in the US military system.
How to Write Email with Military Precision
In the military, a poorly formatted email may be the difference between mission accomplished and mission failure… hbr.org
What you need to know as a writer: How to communicate succintly with your client even if that’s not necessarily your natural writing style.
Celebrities are mission-led individuals
Who becomes famous?
Sometimes, reality TV stars make it big.
But more commonly that fame tends to be ephemeral — until the next TV show supplants it in the ratings. Their fame is short-lived and often millennial-centric.
The type of individuals who get famous, stay that way, and tend to be notorious across demographics, are (again, disproportionately) those fulfilling some important mission in life.
This little nugget is key to understanding a commonality often encountered in their otherwise heterogeneous and sometimes idiosyncratic personalities.
Whether they’re about acting or about screenwriting or about some business mission, it’s that mission that propels them to get up in the morning and towards achieving the highest levels of success.
Figuring out what the about is is the key to relating well to them — which is an essential requirement for a successful principal-ghostwriter relationship.
Otherwise, as just about everybody knows, celebrities are just ordinary people — with a few quirky exceptions such as that many people know their names, they get creepy fan mail on the regular, and sometimes can’t go out to buy groceries without getting mobbed by people wanting a selfie or an autograph.
What you need to know as a client: Understand your client and what they’re ‘about.’ If you share a genuine interest in that mission, that can form the basis for a successful collaboration.