As Told To

Award-winning music journalist, critic and artist development consultant Holly Gleason returns to the podcast for a solo outing to discuss her eclectic and electric career as one of the music industry's leading voices. Over the years, she has written for Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Playboy, Spin, and the Miami Herald. 

Holly's most recent collaboration, the #1 New York Times...

As a freelance writer, Jenna Glatzer has lent her voice to books, articles, essays, blog posts, scripts—even greeting cards and doormats, she's proud to say.

She is the author or co-author of more than 35 books, many of them written in collaboration with some of our leading actors, athletes, CEOs, models, reality television stars, medical professionals and news personalities. Oh, and Celine Dion! (How's that for a ghostwriting cred...

What makes a good New Yorker cartoon? More to the point, who makes a good New Yorker cartoon?

In our latest episode of As Told To: The Ghostwriting Podcast, we visit with the magazine's self-described "toonsome twosome," the cartooning team of Bizzy Coy and Lia Strasser, and discover what it takes to tap the talents of a like-minded soul to help you discover your best creative self. 

"It wa...

"This is the best book about how it used to be," writes the influential music critic and record industry analysts Bob Lefsetz, in praise of Paul Rappaport's wild ride of a memoir, Gliders Over Hollywood: Airships, Airplay and the Art of Rock Promotion. "[It's] the only book I can remember that truly details what it was like inside the star factory."

"It's off the record until it's on the page."

That's a line from our As Told To podcast conversation with award-winning author/ghostwriter Joanne Gordon, reflecting on the level of trust that exists between author and subject in a successful book collaboration.

A former staff writer and contributing editor at Forbes, where she wrote about management, career, and workplace issues, Joanne is ...

This episode originally aired on June 7, 2022.

Two-time Emmy Award-winner Bruce Vilanch has written jokes for Bob Hope, Lily Tomlin, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and virtually every Hollywood star to grace the Academy Awards stage from 1989 – 2014. 

As one of the entertainment industry's most sought-after joke writers, the actor, comedian an...

Join podcast host Daniel Paisner as he moderates a panel discussion at the second annual Gathering of the Ghosts ghostwriting conference earlier this year.  

Dan is joined by former As Told To guests Jodi Lipper, Lisa Dickey, and Ellen Daly, as the veteran collaborators compare notes on craft and process—a fun, spirited, insightful reflection on the very many ways authors and journalists are writing in collaboration. 

Learn more:

"As a ghostwriter, I've trained my ear to listen for what's really there or not there, to discern what's underneath or between someone's words," writes veteran collaborator Samantha Rose, in her stirring, soaring new memoir Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter's Memoir. "I hear what's implied, what's withheld…"

Samantha's gifts as a storyteller are very much on display in the pages of her new book—a heartbrea...

Nelson and Alex DeMille's The Tin Men is an electrifying read and a chillingly timely one," writes The New York Times best-selling novelist Megan Abbott of the third and final father-son collaboration in the Scott Brodie & Maggie Taylor series. "[It's] both a master-class in suspense and a haunting exploration of the dangers and costs of a surrender to technology, an abandonment of the human."

Yes, it is...

Student journalist and first-time documentary filmmaker Matthew Winkler joins us to discuss his work on a film chronicling the life and career of Joya Sherrill, an unsung American jazz vocalist who wrote the lyrics to the Billy Strayhorn standard, "Take the A Train," made famous by the Duke Ellington orchestra.

Matthew came across Sherrill's name during his freshman year at Tufts University, while doing research for Boston Globe jo...