What’s your all-time favourite rhyme? Mine, I think, is Cole Porter’s moment of blazing genius in ‘You’re the Top’, when he rhymes ‘Fred Astaire’ with ‘camembert’. Tell us the rhyme that tickles your fancy and you could win this week’s United Ghostwriters Ask-the-Ghost competition. It’s a prize worth having, too—the chance to spend up to 30 minutes on the phone or face-to-face on Zoom getting frank, down-to-earth answers to all the questions you want to ask.

How much? How long? How many rewrites? What happens if it starts to go wrong? What are the chances of getting a lucrative publishing deal? The questions keep on coming.

How do I find the right collaborator? How much of my time must I set aside? Should I be looking for a writer of dazzling, coruscating genius or a quick, careful professional who will check all the facts and deliver the finished manuscript bang on schedule? And do I have to choose—or might I really get both?

It doesn’t matter whether your particular project is a non-fiction business book, a showbiz memoir, a tale of survival against impossible odds, a history of British glass-blowing or the story of your hometown football club. A top ghost will listen, ask questions, get immersed in your topic and become, for a few short months, a genuine expert in the field.

A year later, he or she will have forgotten almost all of it. But that’s essential for survival; there’s a limit to how much clutter one head should even try to hold.

Non-fiction has traditionally been the ghostwriter’s domain, though it’s sometimes suggested that books like Prince Harry’s Spare and Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal may exist in a world of augmented—or at least heavily doctored—reality.

What’s certainly becoming more evident now, though, is the demand for co-writers who can handle fiction. I don’t do this stuff myself, as it would not be playing to my strengths. But several of our United Ghostwriters stars have impressive track records of fiction written under their own names, as well as collaborations with authors who know their burning ambitions to tell new stories are not matched by the technical ability to shape, structure and pace a novel.

Anyway, to get back to rhymes and this week’s competition, there are some wonderfully artful specimens in songs from the 1950s and 1960s. I dimly remember my mother’s soundtrack LP of My Fair Lady, where someone was poetically rude about a Hungarian who was making a nuisance of himself and who was referred to initially as ‘that hairy hound from Budapest’. The verse continued: ‘Never leaving us alone, never have I ever known a ruder pest.’

And, of course, Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote the magnificent ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’, in which the female singer grumbles poetically: ‘What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia/And when you do, he’ll never phone ya…’

So it’s over to you. Just dig out the rhyme that leaves you gasping with delight and send it in to us at contact@unitedghostwriters.co.uk. We’ll be looking at—and enjoying—every entry. And if yours is the winner, you’ll have half an hour of one-to-one time with a star ghostwriter who’ll happily spill the beans about everything you want to know about this curious business of ours.    

Ian Shircore is the author of the strictly non-fiction Conspiracy, which has just reached 100,000 sales