Palin's book, others feature a ghostwriter's touch

What do Sarah Palin and Bill Clinton have in common? Both are book authors but neither wrote their memoirs completely on their own.

Ghostwriter, collaborator, co-author. These sidekick writers go by many names, but they all serve the same purpose: to get the book finished. A true ghostwriter gets no public credit for the work but in reality there are varying degrees of involvement by these pinch writers.

With the announcement that Palin's memoir "Going Rogue: An America Life" is due out in November, conversation turned to who helped Palin write the book. Politico says it's Lynn Vincent, a writer for the conservative Christian World Magazine.

An autobiographer by proxy, if you will. Shocking? Not really. Most modern political memoirs have some kind of ghostwriter attached.

Ronald Reagan's "An American Life" is one famous example. When reviewing his autobiography, the conservative National Review said Reagan's "talented ghost" Robert Lindsey "captures his tone of voice perfectly." But he complained, it was "not the inside story."

No matter. Reagan joked at a press conference for the book, "I hear it's a terrific book! One of these days I'm going to read it myself."

A ghostwriter’s involvement can range from writing the whole book using interviews of the “author” to a more authentic collaboration. Sen. Ted Kennedy’s posthumously released memoir, “True Compass,” benefitted from something more akin to the latter arrangement. In an interview with NPR, the book’s publisher Jonathan Karp said "all the important material" was Kennedy's, while his collaborator, Ron Powers, was working with "rich material, and it really is Senator Kennedy's work."

Both Bill and Hillary Clinton used some kind of ghosties for their books too. When "My Life" was released, Bill said he wrote it longhand. (Kids, you know when your dad grabs this thing called a pen and puts it to paper instead of sitting at the computer? That's longhand.) But he acknowledged in the, ahem, acknowledgements of the book that someone named Justin Cooper spent two years working with him on research, catching errors and ultimately transcribing the manuscript from Clinton's "scrawl." Clinton said Cooper sometimes knew what Clinton wanted to say better than he did.

The subject of Hillary's ghostwriter caused something of a kerfuffle when her book "It Takes A Village" was released. Georgetown University journalism professor Barbara Feinman Todd was hired to work on the then first lady's book. Her work was not acknowledged publicly initially, people caught on and pundits questioned just how much Mrs. Clinton actually wrote. Todd said that she and Mrs. Clinton "produced drafts in a round-robin style." And added, "Like any first lady, Mrs. Clinton had an extremely hectic schedule and writing a book without assistance would have been logistically impossible."

Alan Greenspan publicly took on Peter Petre to co-author his book. Much of what John McCain writes has had Mark Salter's hands on it.

It's a fairly common practice. No shame in getting some assistance. It just makes one wonder how first person are these first-person accounts of history?

-- Erin Green is a contributor to the Yahoo! News Blog.