Nancy Drew's Godfather...and Godmother

Before the big boys brought the pie-chart into publishing, Edward Stratemeyer--the man behind the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew et al--figured out how to give the public what it didn't know it wanted.
From The New Yorker:
"Stratemeyer would come up with a three-page plot for each book, describing locale, characters, time frame, and a basic story outline. He mailed this to a writer, who, for a fee ranging from fifty dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars, would write the thing up and—slam-bang!—send it back within a month. Stratemeyer checked the manuscripts for discrepancies, made sure that each book had exactly fifty jokes, and cut or expanded as needed. (Each series had a uniform length; the standard was twenty-five chapters.) He replaced the verb “said” with “exclaimed,” “cried,” “chorused,” and so forth, and made sure that cliffhangers punctuated the end of each chapter—usually framed as a question or an exclamation. Each series was published under a pseudonym that Stratemeyer owned."
If you're wondering who Carolyn Keene really was, Geoffrey Lapin investigated the subject pretty thoroughly in the late 1980s.
"Carolyn Keene was Edward Stratemeyer. Another source says that she was Harriet Adams. Yet others say that she was Edna Squire, Walter Karig, James Duncan Lawrence, Nancy Axelrad, Margaret Scherf, Grace Grote, and a plethora of others. What years of research have yielded is the fact that the one author who established both the original character of Nancy Drew and the characterization formula that has kept the young detective so popular is one Mildred A. Wirt Benson. Mrs. Benson had created a heroine exhibiting the values and personality that she herself had shown as a student at The University of Iowa."
Salon.com ran a brief interview with Benson in 1998.