NEW NANCY DREW GAME 2015 SERIES
First, they free writers from having to market and brand themselves, since they’re writing for series that have been established for decades. There are a few benefits in writing for packagers, of course. Because ghostwriters and freelance editors do most of the work, packagers push down the considerable expenses of literary labor: They don't need to offer health insurance, vacation time, or office space. Readers rarely hear about book packagers, yet they're responsible for some of the most successful fiction series in existence, from Sweet Valley High to Goosebumps to For Dummies. That same year, Stratemeyer died in New Jersey, by then not so much a writer as a tycoon. It debuted Tom Swift in 1910, followed by The Hardy Boys in 1927, and Nancy Drew in 1930. (Early on, it was around $100 per book.) The syndicate launched dozens of series, guessing that only a few would be hits. Writers signed away their rights to royalties and bylines in exchange for a flat fee. The Stratemeyer Syndicate helped prove that book packaging with ghostwriters could be incredibly profitable-for managers and owners, at least. “Edward Stratemeyer was a genius,” says Greenberg. Though you might expect a writer collective to support writers the way labor unions support laborers, the Stratemeyer Syndicate's central aim was simply to produce a huge number of books at the lowest possible cost. In 1905, a prolific writer named Edward Stratemeyer founded a network of freelance writers and editors. The industry that churns out children's books has changed surprisingly little in the last century. “I have no idea where they were,” she says. “You have to keep feeding the machine,” she says.Īlice Leonhardt, who wrote Nancy Drew books for Megabooks, never even met the intermediaries who passed on her manuscripts to the publisher. Greenberg edited hundreds of Nancy Drew mysteries after they came in from book packagers, and suspects she worked on more books in the series (approximately 300) than anyone else. “Hiring a book packager is a way of hiring staff without putting them on your payroll,” explains Anne Greenberg, who worked for Simon & Schuster from 1986 to 2002, when Lampton was writing. Then they deliver manuscripts to the publisher, who rewrite and polish them to produce the final book. They develop new story ideas, recruit and manage freelance writers, and edit the first drafts of series books. They're phantoms,” he says.īook packagers are a kind of outsourced labor, not unlike factories in China or tech-support centers in Mumbai. “There were other people, looking at your books, making comments. When Lampton mailed in drafts, they came back with comments written in several colors. He sent his books not to a publisher but to a packager called Megabooks-effectively a conduit between the writer and the publisher, Simon & Schuster. “You're usually in touch with one person, the editor,” says Christopher Lampton, who wrote 11 Hardy Boys books in the 1980s. If writing seems like a lonely profession, try ghostwriting children's books. Read more: Writing in someone else’s world The solution was an assembly line that made millions by turning writers into anonymous freelancers-a business model that is central to the Internet age. They’re still here because their creators found a way to minimize cost, maximize output, and standardize creativity.
The secret behind the longevity of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys is simple.
But the main modern achievement of the series is simply that it continues to exist. A few things have changed, though-characters listen to MP3 players and reference science-fiction movies, and Hardy Boys chapters (oddly) alternate between the first-person perspectives of Frank and Joe. The novels bear the same pseudonyms as the originals: Franklin W. The Holiday-Rom-Com Fantasy Has Nothing to Do With Romance Megan GarberĮighty-five years have passed since readers first encountered both the Hardy Boys and their teen-detective counterpart, Nancy Drew, yet new books continue to be released several times a year.
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