Too many company histories read like punishment, written by committees terrified of saying anything a lawyer or a board member would dislike. Somebody paid real money for those books, and nobody reads them. It drives me up the wall, because a company that has lasted decades is sitting on some of the best stories anyone could ask for.
I’ve ghostwritten several books that a company paid for. Most were for small companies owned by the person who hired me, so nobody ever argued about who owned the finished book. The largest project of my career was a company-paid communications book for a bigger company. That company owned it, with the executive’s agreement. Company books have their own rules about who signs off and who owns the result, and they go wrong in predictable ways.
Picture the lobby of any company that’s been around for forty years. There’s a wall of framed photos: the founder in front of the first truck, a ribbon cutting, the softball team from 1987, a flooded warehouse. Employees walk past it every day, and almost none of them can tell you who’s in the pictures or why the flood mattered. A good company history puts names and stories to that wall.
Who writes company history books?
Four kinds of writers do: academic historians, firms that specialize in corporate histories, in-house communications staff, and ghostwriters. They produce very different books, so pick based on whose voice you want on the page.
A historian writes about your company from the outside, in the third person, with the independence to say things you won’t love. Specialist firms run the project as a full production, archive and design included, and the results range from excellent to glossy puff. In-house staff know the company cold. They also know who signs their paychecks, and it shows.
Ghostwriters write in the voice of the founder, the family or the organization itself. If you want the story told the way the person who built the company would tell it, over dinner, with the parts that still make him wince, that’s the job a ghostwriter does.
Can I hire a ghostwriter for a company history book?
Yes, and the process looks a lot like any book I write. It starts with a long run of interviews, because writing in someone’s voice means becoming them for a while. For a company book, that’s the founder first, then the people who were in the room: early employees, the first big customer, the partner who left, the banker who took the chance.
Every call is recorded, on Zoom, by phone, or in person on my tablet, and the contract says so. After each session I make a summary with AI’s help and send it back, so the company sees what’s been captured. The archive fills in what memory can’t. Old newsletters, annual reports, press clippings, product catalogs and those photos in the lobby all go on the table, and they settle arguments about dates that interviews never will.
People misremember, fold two events into one, and inflate or shrink what mattered. I ask about the same event several ways over several sessions to get to what happened. My article on the business book ghostwriting process covers how that works for business books in general.
Your side of the job is access. You need to open the archive, get the founder to commit to a regular interview slot, and introduce the writer to the people who’ll talk. If the founder keeps canceling, the book stalls, and no writer can fix that from the outside. Put the interviews on the founder’s calendar the way you’d book a board meeting, and protect them.
Who owns a company history book when the company pays for it?
Whoever the contract names. Settle it in writing before the first interview, because the day a founder retires or an executive leaves is a lousy day to discover nobody decided.
With a small company owned by the person hiring me, ownership has never been an issue, since the owner and the company are the same people. Larger companies are different. There it’s normal for the company to own the book, and the executive whose voice it’s written in should agree to that on paper. My article on who owns a company-paid ghostwritten book if you leave goes through the scenarios. Have a lawyer read the ownership clause before anyone signs.
Why are so many company history books boring?
Because somebody removed every failure. A company history with no near-bankruptcy and no year the founder almost quit is a brochure, and readers can smell it from the first page.
I probe for the failures and setbacks on purpose. Readers want the ups and downs and the recovery. A sanitized arc bores everyone, including the employees the book was supposedly written to inspire. The flooded warehouse on the lobby wall is the best story the company has, and the committee version cuts it because it makes the old operations manager look bad.
Committees kill these books. Every department gets a veto, and marketing adds adjectives until the prose reads like a press release. I hate what that process does to good material. Put one person in charge of approvals, give legal a real review for real risk, and keep everyone else’s opinions advisory. My article on writing about a business failing shows how much a setback adds to a book when you let it stay in.
Would you read a history of your own company that skipped the year it nearly died, and would anybody on your staff? Your employees already know the flood happened. When the official book pretends otherwise, you’ve told them the company still can’t be straight with them.
Can we hire someone to write our church history?
Yes. A church history works like any organizational history: interviews with the people who remember, an archive to check them against, and one person with the authority to approve the manuscript.
A church with any age on it has minutes, bulletins, membership directories, building-fund campaigns, anniversary programs and decades of photographs sitting in a closet somewhere. The members who’ve been in the pews longest carry the rest, like the split and the building project that nearly bankrupted the congregation.
Pick a decision-maker before you pick a writer. A church history committee of eight can produce a lovely book, or it can argue for two years over whose family gets a photo, and the difference is whether one person has the final say.
Tell the writer up front how the congregation wants hard chapters handled, like a split or a painful departure, so nobody is surprised at the draft stage. If your deadline is an anniversary, start well ahead of it, because the oldest members are your best sources and they’re the ones you can least afford to wait on. I hate watching a congregation lose its oldest members before anyone recorded them.
How do you write a community or town history book?
Start with the local historical society, the public library and whatever digitized newspapers your town has, then find the residents who remember. Clubs, civic groups, volunteer fire departments and neighborhoods all have histories worth a book, and they share one problem: nobody owns the project.
Find the owner first. A community history needs a sponsor who signs the contract and approves the manuscript, whether that’s the historical society or a local business that wants its name on the acknowledgments page.
Record the oldest residents first, even before the contract is signed, on a phone in somebody’s living room if that’s all you’ve got. A ghostwriter can build chapters from those recordings later, and nobody can build anything from a memory that’s gone. Towns wait too long all the time, and the last person who saw the old mill running dies before anyone asks her about it.
You also need to decide who the book is for. A history for longtime residents can assume they know where the old mill stood. One meant for newcomers and schoolkids has to explain it. Pick the reader before the interviews start, because it changes the questions.
Choose a voice early, too. A town history works in the third person, as a local historian would write it, or in the voice of a longtime resident walking you through what changed. The second one’s more fun to read and harder to write.
Can a ghostwriter write a family business succession story?
Yes, and it makes a strong book for a family business if both generations are willing to tell the truth about the handoff.
Succession stories have natural tension. The founder built something and has to let go of it. Whoever comes next grew up in the business, got compared to the founder every day, and has to prove the place won’t die with the old man. The good material is in the old customer who wouldn’t deal with the daughter and the year the founder kept coming in after he’d officially retired.
Two voices in one book takes planning. You can write it in the founder’s voice with the successor’s chapters set apart, or tell it from the successor’s side looking back. My article on two people writing one book with one ghostwriter covers how that works in the interviews and in the contract.
Watch the anger. Succession brings up old hurts, and a founder who felt pushed out or a successor who felt smothered will want to settle scores on the page. I handle it the way I handle divorce material: talk the client down and coach a balanced rewording. The balanced version is fairer and legally safer. Your customers will read the book too, and they’ll trust a family that treats its own people decently on the page.
What drives the cost of a company history book?
Length drives my price directly. I price by the word, my contracts set an “up to” word count, and a longer book means a change order. Other ghostwriters quote per project, per page or by the hour, and some set project minimums because interviews and research don’t shrink as fast as the word count does. After length come the number of interviews, the size of the archive that needs sorting, how many rounds of approval the organization requires, and any hard date like an anniversary or a conference.
Approvals cost more than companies expect. Every extra reviewer adds rounds, and a contract that caps revision rounds will charge for the extras. Design, editing and printing sit on top of the writing, and photo-heavy histories cost more to lay out. My article on what a ghostwriter costs and what moves the price covers the factors, and my current rates are on the ghostwriting service page. Ask your accountant about deducting it. Many of my clients have deducted the fee, and my article on whether a ghostwriter is tax deductible covers the basics.
Deadlines move the price too. My fastest book was an 80,000-word communications book in three months, and rush books carry a higher rate and a larger down payment. Anniversaries, conferences and industry events all make hard dates, so tell the writer yours on the first call.
Be wary of agencies here. A salesperson sells you the anniversary book, then hands it to writers you never meet, and your founder spends his interviews explaining the company to somebody who’ll be gone before the draft is finished. That bait and switch makes me furious, and it’s why I tell anyone who’ll listen to hire an experienced solo ghostwriter.
How should an organization start a history book project?
Answer four questions in a single meeting: whose voice tells the story, who owns the finished book, who has the final say on the manuscript, and what date it has to be ready for. Then book the founder’s first interview, or the oldest member’s, before the calendar fills up.
The Book Discovery Intensive is how I start with organizations that want the book written for them, and the Ghostwriting Hub has the rest of what I’ve written on hiring a ghostwriter. If someone inside the organization wants to write it with help, my book coaching will keep the project from stalling in committee.
A committee-built, lawyered-to-death history is a damn waste of a good story and good money. Do it properly, with the failures left in. The next new hire who walks through the lobby will stop at that wall of photos and know exactly who’s standing in front of the first truck, and why the flood still gets talked about at the holiday party.
