“I’m 64. I’m not gonna create a business that scales. All I want to do is get what I can from it.”
I said that on a call in November 2024, in the middle of a long working session, and I meant every word of it. At 65 I mean it more, and something big doesn’t interest me. Could I build it? Probably, but whatever came out of that wouldn’t be ghostwriting anymore.
Every business coach on the planet wants you to scale. Hire people and build systems until the company runs without you. For plenty of businesses that advice is fine. For a ghostwriter it’s poison, and I’m sick of hearing it sold as the only grown-up way to run a practice. The day I stop doing the interviews and the writing myself, my clients stop getting the thing they paid for, and I stop doing the part of this job I love.
At an old counter diner, the cook takes your order, cracks your eggs on the grill in front of you and slides the plate across. If the toast is burnt, you tell him and he makes more. A chain restaurant works another way. The kid at the register never touches the food, and the person cooking it never sees your face. Both of them feed you. Only the cook at the counter knows how you like your eggs, and I intend to stay that cook.
What does scaling a ghostwriting business mean?
Scaling means revenue grows faster than the owner’s hours. In ghostwriting there’s one way to get there. You hire other writers and sell their time.
Agencies follow a familiar structure. A salesperson or account manager takes the first call and closes the deal. A project manager runs the schedule. The interviews and the drafting go to a contractor from a pool. That contractor is juggling books for other clients at the same time. An editor cleans up whatever comes back.
Meanwhile the owner of the company never has to read a page of your manuscript. That model makes money, and some agencies run it well. It still puts at least two people between you and the person writing your book.
Every layer in that structure gets paid out of your fee. The salesperson’s commission and the agency’s margin come out of the same check you write, and the writer doing the work gets whatever’s left. Ask yourself how much care a writer puts into a book when they’re paid the smallest slice of it and will never meet the person whose name goes on the cover.
That machine is familiar to me. I spent 33 years in enterprise technology, twenty of them as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services for a retailer. Scaling isn’t a mystery to me. I just don’t want it.
The 72-hour days are behind me
There were 72-hour days in my past, 72 hours straight with a couple of catnaps. Nobody should be proud of that.
In the fall of 2024 there were four books and multiple blogs on my plate at once, and for two weeks I’d been getting up at six in the morning and working through midnight to get them done. On that same call I admitted the schedule was going to burn me out pretty quick. I wasn’t complaining. I said I was realizing it more and more: I was 64, and I just couldn’t go like I used to.
A scaled business doesn’t fix that problem. It swaps one kind of midnight for another. In place of drafting chapters until midnight, you spend it managing contractors and calming down the client whose writer vanished in chapter seven. I’ve done management. I don’t want it back.
These days the work is more fun for me than it used to be. Nobody’s getting that in trade for a bigger number on a spreadsheet.
What does a ghostwriting agency cost the client?
It costs the client the relationship, and a ghostwritten book lives or dies on that relationship. I tell prospects the most important part of ghostwriting is the relationship, and most ghostwriting services fail because there isn’t one. You talk to a salesperson, and salespeople are always going to be nice. Then a writer in a foreign country writes your book, and you don’t know who that writer is. I wrote a whole piece about how you interviewed the salesperson while a stranger wrote your book, and nothing in it has changed.
The client’s voice goes next. Writing in somebody’s voice means becoming them for a while, and I get there through hours of interviews up front. I ask about the same event several different ways, because people misremember and blur events together.
By drafting time, the client has told me their stories in their own words more than once. Now hand all of that to a contractor who got a summary from a project manager who sat in on the kickoff call. Would you trust that book to sound like you? I wouldn’t. Capturing a client’s voice takes the person who did the listening.
Turnover costs the most. Agencies run on contractors, and contractors leave.
A lot of the books I take on were started by one to three earlier ghostwriters. The ghostwriters before me missed the schedule or never caught the voice, and the client comes to me still wanting the book they paid for. I hate that. Those people trusted a writer with their story and got let down.
Accountability is the last cost. When I’m the writer, I’m also the project manager. If the schedule slips, I call the client and ask what’s going on and how we get it back on track, the way any project manager would. I wrote about that habit in why a technical person needs a ghostwriter who gets tech. In an agency, that call comes from somebody who’s never read your chapters.
So who’s accountable when your book goes sideways? The account manager who sold it to you? The contractor you’ve never met?
A book is a long relationship between two adults, and you can’t hand a relationship to a subcontractor. – Richard LoweShare on X
What I hand off, and what I never will
Outsourcing has its place. A company I worked for taught me that outsourcing is the way to go when you can, and the management of a big server cluster I built there went to an outside firm that could run it well. Outsourcing the right work is good management.
So editing goes out. When a manuscript’s done, it goes to an editor I trust. She’s had six of my books so far, she handles every level of editing, and technical material doesn’t intimidate her. A formatter makes the interior look right, with photos and diagrams in grayscale, because color printing drives the price of a book way up. I don’t do artwork and I don’t do covers, so illustrators and designers handle those pieces. None of that work touches the client’s story or the client’s trust.
The interviews and the writing stay with me, every hour and every chapter. A client sits across from me and tells me about the divorce or the firing they still think was wrong. They tell me because they’ve spent hours with me and decided I’m safe. They didn’t decide a contractor in another time zone was safe. An agency outsources the very part I keep, and I think that’s a betrayal of the client dressed up as efficiency.
How many books can a solo ghostwriter write at once?
Six to eight clients a year is my number, with several books going at once, each at a different stage. One is in interviews while another is in drafting and a third is sitting with the editor.
I’ve run six books at the same time, and it’s doable. Ten is out of bounds.
My working day runs in blocks, with a client book in the morning and another in the evening and my own books squeezed into the afternoon when there’s room. When a client needs a book fast, that client becomes my only client or one of two. The fastest book I’ve written was 80,000 words in three months.
Drafting speed puts a hard limit on any solo writer. On some books my own target has been 500 words a day, five days a week. At that pace an 80,000-word book needs 160 working days of drafting, before any interviews. Run the numbers on any ghostwriter you’re considering. If someone working alone claims they’ll write your book in six weeks while carrying a full roster, ask them how. A person can only type so fast, and a writer with too many books open starts giving each of them less.
Capacity is the trade I made on purpose. A solo practice has a ceiling, and I like the ceiling.
Every client of mine gets the same writer from the first interview to the last chapter. When they call, they get me, and I already know where their book stands because I wrote the last chapter myself. Nobody has to go find a file or ask a contractor for a status report.
Is a solo ghostwriter riskier than a ghostwriting agency?
It’s a fair worry, and agencies love to raise it. One person means one point of failure. If the writer disappears, the book stalls.
How the project runs fixes most of that. Delivery comes chapter by chapter, so the client always has everything written so far and never sits waiting a year for one giant draft. Every interview gets recorded, and the contract keeps the recordings for three months after the project ends, so the raw material exists outside my head. The contract spells out what happens if either of us goes quiet. And no contract of mine has ever been ended from my side.
Look hard at what the agency’s safety net consists of. When their writer leaves, they assign a new one. That new writer is a stranger who never heard you talk, reading a transcript of somebody else’s interviews and guessing at your voice. You’ve just started over with less than you had on day one, and you’re paying for the privilege. Calling that a backup plan is generous.
Is that what you paid for?
What should you ask a ghostwriter before signing the contract?
Ask who will interview you, by name. Ask who will write the chapters, by name, and whether that’s the same person. Ask to talk to the writer before you sign, and if the company won’t let you, end the call. Ask how many other books that writer will be working on during yours, and what happens to your recordings and drafts if they leave the project.
Then spend real time with the person. With me, a client spends about ten hours in interviews early on, and by the end of that, they know whether I’m a jerk or a good guy who can write their book. One client had talked to more than a dozen ghostwriters before he hired me, and he told me I was the first one who treated him like a person.
No agency can match that without breaking its own model.
Pay attention to how the writer handles bad news, too. It’s very expensive to lie, so I don’t, and I want clients to tell me straight when something’s wrong, as I explain in I will tell you when your book idea is bad.
A book is a long relationship between two adults. If you don’t understand something, or something I wrote sounds wrong to you, you tell me and we work it out. Finding out when the project’s done helps nobody. We’re having a relationship, and that’s far more important than anything else.
I’ve written more about trust and feedback in collaborative writing if you want the long version, and my book The Ghostwriting Advantage walks through the whole process from the client’s side.
Small on purpose
The ghostwriting agencies are big, and I’ve got real competition. Fine. I’m not going to chase them by turning into one.
New ghostwriters are coming out in slews, too. People think ghostwriting’s an easy way to make a living, so they take a class and decide they’ve learned how to ghostwrite. Some of them will end up in an agency’s contractor pool, writing a stranger’s memoir from somebody else’s notes. That scares me for the clients.
Our industry’s obsession with scale has produced a lot of books written by people the author never met, sold by people who never read them, and I think that’s a damn shame for a trade built on trust.
I’ll stay small, take six to eight books a year, and know every client’s story well enough to tell it in their voice. If you want a book written by the person you talked to, start with the Ghostwriting Hub, then look at how my ghostwriting service works. Come sit at the counter. I’ll be the one cooking your eggs.
