Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 66 APRIL 2020 I N - D E P T H PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOUG LEVY Kevin Anderson has a million great stories he can't tell you. There are the ones about working shoulder-to-shoulder with A-list supermodels, Silicon Valley tycoons, professional athletes, prominent politicians, and TV stars. There's the one about the eccentric billionaire who insisted on meeting with Anderson's team in a Barnes & Noble travel section within an hour of first speaking to him on the phone, and then hosted the team a week later at his private penthouse for a celebrity-studded 10-course dinner. There's the man accused and acquitted of a terrible crime who, Anderson ultimately decided, was probably guilty. And there's the would-be bestselling author who insisted on sending Anderson pictures of himself dressed up like a wizard in front of neon laser backdrops. Kevin Anderson & Associates, the ghost- writing and editorial services company Anderson founded, is nearly as much about discretion as it is about books. Some projects are completely confidential. For others, he is allowed to use the ambiguous phrase "worked on" (as in: "Yes, we worked on that project") but can't say his team "wrote" the book. And for some, Anderson and his team get full credit for their workâeven if their name is in a dramati- cally smaller font than that of the author. "Authors sometimes worry about the optics of giving credit to a ghostwriter, and they don't want readers to think that someone else really took over the project," Anderson explains. "But the fact of the matter is, the author really is the author. We're just a very sophisticated pen. It's the author's idea, their In a little more than a decade, a small academic tutoring service has bloomed into a ghostwriting company with a stable of 150 writers and editors. BY CALVIN HENNICK GHOST STORIES Kevin Anderson's company worked with a host of celebrities to tell their stories.