Zoella's Controversy

Zoella is a famous YouTube vlogger and is pretty much YouTube royalty with over 5,000,000 Subscribers on her YouTube channel, and is probably making more money than you and me combined. Recently, she released her first ever book "girl online" it's a fictional story about...something, I don't know, the actual story isn't important here, what is important, is who wrote the story. It's recently been revealed that Zoella, while she came up with the idea & characters, had a ghost writer do the actual book. Now if you don't know what a ghost writer is, it's when they hire someone to write the book for them, but another person gets all the credit, in this case, Zoella. Now this is a very common occurrence in literature and even when they don't use a ghost writer, editors and publishers will always be making changes to the finished product, that's just part of the system. What bothers me about cases like this is from a marketing stand point. Now like I said, i don't know what the book is about, I don't know if it's good or bad, but what I can tell you is that 90% of sales for this book, if not more, all came from the fact that Zoella's name was slapped on the cover. She's their main selling point here and yet, it wasn't even her that wrote it. Yes she came up with the characters but it's not her words, it's not her pacing, it's not her talent being used, just her ideas. She didn't write this book, someone else did, and when you're selling this based off of an author's name then that's pretty damn shitty. Now some people have pointed out to me that seeing as this is a very common practice then it's unfair to judge this based on a ghost writer, after all, what if someone like JK Rowling had a ghost writer on one of her new books, or had several editors go over and change things. But that's different because even though they're selling her books on her name, she & her team have still done work in the past that we can judge, we know that whoever is writing these books is a talented writer. Of course this is all hypothetical because I believe JK does write her own books, but I think i've made my point. You can't market this book from a new author with a pre-built fanbase when your marketing stand point is a lie and people are going in blind in buying this new book.

-Danny