Zoella’s ghostwriter Siobhan Curham speaks out over controversy

Siobhan Curham, the children’s author who unexpectedly found herself in the spotlight this week after it emerged that she helped YouTube star Zoe Sugg write her first novel Girl Online, has spoken out for the first time after receiving a barrage of online abuse.

Penguin and Sugg clarified earlier this week that Sugg, the 24-year-old beauty blogger and vlogger known as Zoella, had written her record-breaking debut with the help of Curham. “For the doubters out there, of course I was going to have help from Penguin’s editorial team in telling my story, which I talked about from the beginning,” said Sugg on Sunday.

The young writer had been attacked for failing to explicitly state that she did not write the book alone, despite thanking Curham in the acknowledgments of Girl Online for having been with her “every step of the way”. On Monday, she announced that she would be “taking a few days out and off the internet because it’s clouding up my brain”, subsequently adding that: “I AM NOT QUITTING YOUTUBE. Yet again, twisting stuff to gain views. Sad.”

Curham, an author in her own right and an editorial consultant, went online on Wednesday to say that she was “receiving messages from complete strangers accusing me of things that are a million miles from the truth”, and that her family was “becoming furious and distraught at some of the comments about me on Twitter”.

She did not, she wrote on her blog, work on the book to “get rich” – reports have suggested that ghostwriters for Girl Online were offered between £7,000 and £8,000. Nor did she do it to “get famous”, saying that she did not know that her full name would be in the book, that “I did not invite any of this attention upon myself”, and that “I’m not remotely interested in cashing in on someone else’s fame”.

“I love writing books and I love helping others write books. And I especially love being involved in the creation of books that help others. Books that deal with real and serious issues such as cyber-bullying, homophobia and anxiety. Books like Girl Online,” wrote Curham on her blog.

“I was hugely impressed that, when given the dream opportunity of a book deal with Penguin, Zoe Sugg chose to create a storyline that dealt with these serious issues – out of a desire to help her fans. And, when I was offered the opportunity to help Zoe, I also saw the opportunity to help get important and empowering messages across to her incredibly huge fanbase. Messages about self-belief, anxiety, sexuality and – oh the irony – online hate.”

Curham noted that she “did have some issues with how the project was managed”, and that it would be “really healthy to have a broader debate about transparency in celebrity publishing”. “But please don’t blame Zoe personally for a practice that has been going on for years,” she wrote, pointing out that the huge sales of the novel, which is 2014’s fastest-selling book and which is sitting on top of the UK Official Top 50 for the second straight week, meant that “bookstores such as Waterstones are ending the year on healthy profits”, and that “Penguin, and many other publishers around the world, are now able to afford to offer more unknown writers book deals”.

“Whether you like it or not, this is the financial reality of today’s publishing industry,” wrote Curham, asking readers to focus instead on the issues such as bullying, mental health and homophobia at the heart of Girl Online. “Surely statistics such as these are what we should all be getting outraged about?” she ended.