15) Tom Clancy

How many hurried travellers pick up a Tom Clancy's Op-Centre or Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell paperback from an airport bookshop in the belief that they are getting something, y'know, written by Tom Clancy, only to discover on the plane that it was tossed out by a ghostwriter? They are just two of the "brands" created by Clancy and his publishers to cash in on the novelist's name, with lesser-known authors hired to do the actual writing. Some do not even get their name on the cover, enduring the double indignity of having their work credited to both Clancy and a pseudonym.