For 15 years, I’ve led a professional double-life, working as editor, writer, author, and podcaster in plain public view, while also helping famous people produce their own books—memoirs, mostly—behind closed doors. This parallel professional existence was outed in 2014, when one of my more well-known clients told a reporter about the arrangement. At the time, this caused me headaches, as some readers wondered (not unreasonably) how my day-to-day editorial choices were being influenced by these side-hustles. But in the long run, it was a plus, because the disclosure brought in more clients.

It also brought inquiries from other writers, who wondered whether ghostwriting might be a viable means to supplement their own incomes. This month brought in a fresh round of messages, following on a prominent story involving one of the books I’d worked on being published by a state-run Chinese company. And while the controversy didn’t implicate me, it did provide the push I needed to set out my thoughts on ghostwriting in some kind of systematic way.

The simple way in which most people imagine this kind of work was captured well in episode 124 of that highly underrated animated children’s show Cupcake & Dino: General Services, in which the eponymous protagonists are hired to ghost the memoirs of action-film hero Greggy Naturo (“Star of the Caveblasters movies, the Cavehunter movies, and other movies with caves in them”). But as soon as the anthropomorphic cake and dinosaur begin interviewing Naturo, he reveals himself as an airheaded fraud—thus leaving Cupcake and Dino with no choice but to re-script the star’s life out of whole cloth.