Ghost Reader is the reader unknown, the one who reads a book anonymously, who invisibly borrows it from a friend or communal library or maybe finds it in a charity box, who neither recommends nor denounces it to others. The Ghost Reader is the one whose name isn't on a library card the book was borrowed under, or an Amazon order it was purchased through, the one who doesn't send a note to the author or follow him/her on social media, the one whose thoughts about a book leave no trace.
To the writer, Ghost Reader is a phantom, a fleeting figure imagined like all those familiar literary characters that do and do not exist. Ghost Reader may have attended a book's launch, sitting at the back during the reading and saying nothing, before slipping away with the author's words forever scooped into her neural circuitry .. but s/he might on the other hand never have existed.
Some readers send messages to authors, ask questions, write reviews, reveal their identities. Any author's glad to hear from them of course, but the best true follower, the one who really "gets" her themes and characters is the Ideal Reader who looms large in her writerly mind. Ghost Reader is the mirror image of Ghost Writer, and like that participant in the publishing world might well remain Anonymous forever.
