Capturing the Client’s Voice: How Ghostwriting Actually Works

How does a ghostwriter capture a client’s voice?

Capturing a client’s voice is the hardest part of this work, and it’s where amateurs are found out. After ghostwriting 54+ books, I can tell you that voice capture is a process that starts before I write a single word and continues through every chapter.

What Does “Voice” Mean in Ghostwriting?

Voice is the full pattern of how a person communicates. The words they choose and the words they avoid. Short declarative sentences or long flowing ones. Humor or straight seriousness. Stories first or data first. Formal or conversational. Voice includes the client’s personality, their worldview, their comfort level with vulnerability, and their relationship with their audience. A retired military officer communicates differently than a tech startup founder, even when they’re making the same point. A surgeon writes differently than a motivational speaker. The content might overlap, but the voice is completely different.

A ghostwriter who makes the retired officer and the startup founder sound like the same person has one voice and rents it to everybody. I think that’s lazy work, and the client pays for it every time someone who knows him opens the book and hears a stranger.

My job is to find every element of that pattern and reproduce it consistently enough that the client reads the manuscript and thinks, “That sounds exactly like me.” One of my goals is to make sure the client is in the book, with their speaking style and their beliefs married into it. A pretend version or a made-up version of them is no good to anybody, and the interviews are there to prove it’s them.

How Does a Ghostwriter Capture Your Voice?

Extended interviews before writing begins. I don’t start with an outline. I start with conversations. Multiple interviews, often several hours each, where the client talks about their topic, their experience, their opinions, and their audience. During these interviews I’m collecting information, and I’m also listening to how they express themselves. What phrases do they repeat? Do they tell stories or cite research? Do they use industry jargon or avoid it? Are they direct or diplomatic? The content of what they say matters, but the way they say it matters more for voice capture. I let those sessions ramble and stay conversational on purpose. Part of the reason I talk the way I do in them is that the recording picks up the client’s style, so the AI that processes the transcript learns it too.

Listening to existing recordings. If a client has podcast appearances, conference presentations, interviews, or video content, I consume all of it before writing. These recordings reveal the client’s natural voice in ways that a structured interview sometimes doesn’t. People relax on podcasts. They get passionate during keynotes. They joke with interviewers. That relaxed, natural communication is closer to their real voice than anything they’d produce in a formal setting.

Reading their existing writing. Emails, blog posts, social media, previous articles, internal memos. Anything the client has written in their own words gives me data points about their voice. Even a client who says “I’m not a writer” has written thousands of emails, and those emails have a voice. I don’t care what it is. A sample shows me the patterns, even if we never use a word of it, and the readers shape the voice too. (See also how I lock in a client’s voice a few pages at a time) If the book is for engineers, it can run more technical.

Identifying what they’re not. Voice capture is partly about knowing what to avoid. A client who never uses profanity shouldn’t have edgy language in their book. A client who speaks plainly shouldn’t have flowery prose. A client who’s known for humor shouldn’t have a dry, academic tone. Knowing what the client isn’t prevents me from imposing my own voice or a generic “book voice” onto their manuscript.

The generic book voice is the one I fight hardest. It’s polished, pleasant and belongs to nobody. Writers fall back on it because it’s safe for them, and it leaves the client with a book that could carry anyone’s name on the cover. I won’t hand a client that book.

How does a ghostwriter calibrate the voice over the first chapters?

I don’t write the whole manuscript and then ask whether it sounds right. I did that once, early on, and I’m not doing it again. Instead, I write the first chapter and send it to the client for review with one question: does this sound like you?

The client’s feedback on that first chapter is the most important feedback in the entire project.

They’ll tell me what feels right and what feels off. “I wouldn’t say it that way.” “That’s too formal for me.” “I’d use a story here instead of a statistic.” “This paragraph sounds like me, but this one doesn’t.” Each correction sharpens my understanding of their voice.

I revise from that feedback, send it back, and repeat until the client says, “Yes, that’s me.” Once the first chapter is calibrated, the rest of the manuscript runs on the voice we established. Some clients approve the voice on the first try, and I’ve had others take five or six rounds. It takes what it takes.

One client cursed a lot and wanted that in his book. My first draft didn’t have any, because I don’t write that way, so he told me exactly which words he wanted. I sent the next version full of them. His verdict: that was a little too much.

I still send every chapter for review, and I still listen for voice drift. Drift happens when a ghostwriter gets comfortable and starts writing in his own style instead of the client’s.

J.R. Moehringer ghostwrote Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, and in May 2023 he wrote about the job in a long essay for The New Yorker.

One story in it is a fight. Harry wanted to keep a comeback he’d delivered during his military training after someone insulted his mother. Moehringer thought the line didn’t belong in the book, and he pushed hard enough that the argument got heated.

Afterward, by his own account, he second-guessed the heat he’d brought to it. He scolded himself, “It’s not your comeback. It’s not your mother.” Then, “for the thousandth time” in his career, he reminded himself, “It’s not your effing book,” a line Deadline picked up from the essay.

I think every ghostwriter should tape that sentence above the desk. Moehringer is as good as anyone working in this business, and he still caught his own ego trying to steer somebody else’s memoir. The client’s reviews of those early chapters are how I catch mine.

Why does voice vary so much from client to client?

From the podcast

Urmi Hossain wrote a memoir spanning two cultures and describes her own identity in a line that carries the whole book, on Leaders and Their Stories: I consider myself Italian by birth and Bengali by blood. Voice lives in exactly that kind of formulation. Nobody else would arrive at that sentence, and that makes it hers.

To illustrate how dramatically voice changes from client to client, here’s the same basic idea expressed in different client voices: The idea: “We need to improve our sales strategy.”

1. Direct and blunt: “Our sales strategy isn’t working. We need to fix it now, not next quarter.”
2. Formal executive: “It’s essential that we prioritize a complete review and enhancement of our current sales methodology.”
3. Casual entrepreneur: “Hey, our sales approach needs some work. Let’s figure out what’s broken and fix it.” (For more on how a ghostwriter captures any voice, hear Richard on the Doug Thompson Podcast.)
4. Storytelling coach: “Last month I watched a client lose a deal they should have closed in ten minutes. That’s when I realized our whole approach to sales conversations needed to change.”
5. Data-driven analyst: “Our close rate dropped 12% over the last two quarters. The data points to three specific failures in our sales process that we can address immediately.”
6. Motivational speaker: “What if I told you that every ‘no’ your team hears is actually a sign that you’re one conversation away from transforming your entire sales pipeline?”

Same message. Six completely different voices. A ghostwriter who writes in one style can serve one kind of client, and most of them never admit that’s the limit they’re working inside. The ability to shift between these voices, sometimes within the same week when working on multiple projects, is what the job demands.

Why does voice matter for your book’s success?

A book that sounds like you builds trust with your audience.

Your readers, clients, and prospects already know how you communicate from your speaking, your emails, your social media, and your conversations. If the book sounds different, they notice. They might not be able to articulate what’s wrong, but they’ll feel a disconnect between the person they know and the person on the page.

That disconnect costs you the thing you wrote the book for. If you’re publishing to build authority, a book in someone else’s voice tells your audience you handed off your thinking along with the typing. If you’re publishing to attract clients, the prospect who reads it and then meets you will notice the gap when you finally sit down together. I don’t want any client of mine walking into that meeting.

Voice consistency makes a ghostwritten book feel real instead of manufactured, and it’s why my clients’ books bring in speaking invitations, media coverage and client inquiries. The book sounds like the real person, so prospects trust that the real person will deliver what it promises. A ghostwriter who delivers a book in his own voice has taken the client’s money and handed back somebody else’s book, and I think that’s one of the worst failures in this business.

For more on how a book builds your professional authority, see How a Book Builds Your Brand Identity. To understand the full ghostwriting process from consultation to finished manuscript, see What’s Ghostwriting? If you’d like to discuss how your voice would translate into a book, schedule a consultation.

From the author

The Ghostwriting Advantage
Voice is the center of the work, and The Ghostwriting Advantage covers the rest of it. I wrote the book to explain how to get your book written for you.

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