Do THIS *Before* You Hire a Ghostwriter...

A Ghostwriter Spills the Tea...

It’s not a secret that I’ve been a ghostwriter for a very long time. I started out as a staff writer, which was a fancy way of saying I wrote romance and suspense for a company that paid me to produce work which they then sold under a corporate pen name. I wrote between 15,000-60,000 words a month for this company for over two years, consistently creating quality content on books that are still out there today.

I LOVED ghostwriting for this company. I was paid quickly and fairly on completion of the work, and I was part of a team that had a critical stake in writing to-market stories that readers could not put down. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun doing it. I also learned to write efficiently. To study the market and to understand reader expectations of the sub-genre I was writing in.

Since then, many more projects and clients have come my way. I’ve ghostwritten in almost every genre, including nonfiction. The truth is that it’s hard to write, and it’s even harder to consistently write a volume of good quality books.

If you’re in groups for writers on social media, you may have seen the rise of the recommendation that writers—and people who don’t write but who want to share in a piece of the publishing pie—hire ghostwriters.

Let’s set aside the moral reasons why some people are opposed to ghostwriting. I’ll tackle those in another post, and will explain my inside perspective on the clients I work with, why I do it, and why your beliefs about the use of ghostwriters may be based on incomplete information.

In this post, I want to provide a simple reality check for anyone considering hiring a ghostwriter—no matter what motivates you to do it!

ANYONE can call themself a ghostwriter; hire someone who READS in your sub-genre

Just like anyone can be a writer, anyone can also be a ghostwriter. If you’re thinking about hiring someone, check not only that person’s qualifications but that person’s reading habits. Do they read in the genre you want them to write in? You should be able to have a robust conversation with your ghostwriter about the nuances of the books they read.

The genre that ghostwriter reads is not enough. There is a big difference between a psychological suspense and a procedural mystery. Does your ghostwriter understand that nuances that a B-plot should bring to the work? What POV do they recommend writing in and what other books in the sub-genre are written with that same point of view? Urban fantasy romance and contemporary romance are two different things. Likewise, prescriptive nonfiction follows a very different structure from memoir.

If you don’t feel like your ghostwriter has read more than you have in your preferred sub-genre and understands more about the story you want to tell than you do, don’t trust your time, money, and brand to that writer!

Set a REALISTIC budget

I’ve been hired to edit ghostwritten work as an editor, and some of the work I’ve seen has been unbelievably bad. And I’m not talking about the quality of the writing. Writing quality is subjective up to a point. What I’m referring to is a work that doesn’t include the expectations that a highly engaged consumer of that work will demand from your book.

Think you can hire a cheap romance ghostwriter to churn out a couple novellas? Great. But does that novella include tropes, pacing, and the voice that romance writers expect to see? How does the ghostwriter handle issues of intimacy, consent, and protection? Romance readers know how their favorite books handle these topics, and if your ghostwriter can’t answer those questions, you have a problem—and it’s likely a budget problem.

Think about the numbers this way. I’ve been editing romance and writing professionally for over 12 years. I know my functional writing speed and I know how long it takes me to plot and execute a book depending on the genre, the length, the voice, and other factors.

Let’s pick a number out of a hat—something with easy math, but these numbers are LOW for the purpose of this example.

If it takes me 40 hours or one work week to write a 50,000-word romance novel, that’s one whole week of my time. How much would you willingly work one whole week for?

If you’re hiring a ghostwriters as a freelancer (meaning you’re not paying $50,000-100,000 to a company who vets and hires the ghostwriter for you, handles the legal contract that conveys copyright and outlines payment terms, revision policies, etc.) that means that person needs to pay for overhead, legal, infrastructure (secure payment processors, etc.) as well as for their time and expertise.

A critical flaw in the conversations I see online right now is that *anyone* can make money publishing even *meh* books by hiring cheap ghostwriters to fill an author brand with content.

Really? Is that true? Do your favorite authors put out a lot of crap books fast? Or do they publish consistent books of a quality that brings you into their brand and keeps you coming back to buy their next release?

If the numbers look too good to be true, they are. Plain and simple. Yes, you can hire a cheap ghostwriter, just like you can hire a cheap editor, a cheap cover artist, a cheap marketer. But what is your goal? If you want to make money in publishing, you need to understand that the product is what you’re selling. You get what you pay for when you hire a ghostwriter. No ghostwriter I know charges $300 or $500 to produce even a short novella (under 40,000 words).

The trade-off for authors who cannot write their own books for whatever reason is buying that talent. But throwing good money into promoting a bad book can lead to the opposite of the outcome you’re looking for.

I could make a top twenty list of things you need to do before you hire a ghostwriter for your book. But I’ll leave you with just a top three for today. Here’s the last but also the most important.

Assess Why You’re Doing This at all

So many writers cram in writing time between kids’ naps, on their lunch break at work, or early in the mornings before the demands of the day pull them away. It takes years of practice and study to become a good writer, let alone to become an author who can consistently produce profitable books for a brand. If you want to shortcut the time and effort this process requires, know that you can’t shortcut the time and effort your ghostwriter went into developing those skills.

Why do you want to hire a ghostwriter? Do you want to learn to write but don’t have the patience or time? Do you want to have just one story told and not learn the process yourself? Do you have a limitation in your life or health that prevents you from doing the work yourself? Do you want to develop a passive income stream that is built on cheap to produce products?

If you fall into that last category, I would urge you to talk to other writers. Exceptionally good books with great marketing, editing, and covers fail to turn a profit for their publishers/authors. Publishing is not a get-rich quick strategy. Yes, books can provide a stable income over time with volume, quality, marketing, and a million other small things that change from year to year. There is no single secret sauce to making a ton of money in publishing.

But there are many ways to lose money in publishing. Hiring ill-trained, under-qualified, or simply ineffective ghostwriters is absolutely one of them.

If you have interest in becoming a ghostwriter, or are looking to hire one, please feel free to hit me up with questions. I’m happy to guide you in the right direction before you plunk down your hard earned pennies—I mean dollars!!