One prospect who came to me never became a client, and it was for the best. He asked ghostwriter after ghostwriter for a free sample chapter, and he handed each of them a different chapter of his book. By the time the ghostwriters started talking to each other and caught on, he had his whole book written for free.
That’s just plain scamming the ghostwriter.
He took weeks of skilled work from a string of professionals and paid none of them a cent. Each one thought they were competing for a contract. None of them knew they were already working on the book. What did he think would happen when those writers compared notes? Did he care? Every one of them lost days they could have spent on a paying client’s book. Solo ghostwriters have rent to pay like anybody else, and a week spent on a stranger’s free chapter is a week of income that never arrives.
My answer to the free sample question never changes.
If you want a ghostwriter to write a sample chapter, you need to pay them for it. It’s not free. That’s a lot of work.
The free sample request comes from a real fear. Hiring a ghostwriter means handing a stranger serious money and months of your life on the strength of a few conversations, and nobody wants to find out in month four that the writer can’t write. Asking to see a chapter first feels like ordinary caution, and in most purchases it would be. You test-drive a car before you buy it, and a free chapter looks like the same thing.
Creative work has a long, ugly history with this request. Designers get asked to pitch logos on spec, and copywriters get asked for free headlines. Freelance marketplaces turned the habit into a business model, with dozens of writers bidding on one job and the cheapest audition winning. New ghostwriters feel the pressure worst, because they have no published books to point at and a free chapter looks like the only way in. The buyer walks off with the chapter, and the writer has lost a week learning that auditions don’t pay.
Should a ghostwriter write a free sample chapter?
No. A professional ghostwriter charges for every chapter, including the first one, and the ones who give chapters away for free are either desperate or planning to make it up somewhere else in the contract.
Prospects shop around, and they should. Some talk to 20 or 30 different ghostwriters before they pick one. Now picture every one of those prospects asking every one of those ghostwriters for a free chapter.
A ghostwriter who said yes to all of them would spend the year writing samples and never finish a paying book.
Run the numbers from the prospect’s side, too. Twenty ghostwriters each writing one free chapter adds up to twenty chapters. That’s a whole book. The chapter farmer figured that out. Plenty of honest prospects never do, and they ask for a free chapter with no idea what they’re asking for.
I take six to eight clients a year, and each of those books gets months of my attention. If I wrote free chapters for everyone who asked, the clients who pay me would be waiting on people who never intended to hire me.
That’s unfair to them, and I won’t do it.
You’ll find ghostwriters who offer free samples anyway. Ask yourself why.
A writer with a full calendar has no time to give away. A writer with an empty one has a reason for it, and you’ll want to know what that reason is before you hand over your story.
Why do ghostwriters charge for a sample chapter?
Because a sample chapter is a chapter.
It takes the same work as any other chapter in your book, and in some ways more, since the ghostwriter hasn’t learned your voice yet. A ghostwriter can’t write in your voice without interviewing you first, and interviewing you a lot. A ghostwriter who writes a chapter without interviews is writing in their own voice about your subject. That tells you nothing about how your book will sound. A ghostwriter who does the interviews properly has already put in hours of recorded conversation and drafting before you see a single page.
Then comes revision. You’ll read the chapter, react, and ask for changes, and a professional will make them. By the end, the ghostwriter has done a meaningful slice of your book. A request for that, free, asks a professional to work for nothing on the chance you’ll pick them over 29 other people.
Would you do that for your own job?
My article on why free ghostwriting, royalty splits and exposure deals don’t work goes further into the economics. A ghostwriter has nothing to sell except time, and every free chapter spends some of it. You also get a better sample when you pay for it. A ghostwriter working for free squeezes your chapter in between paying jobs, late at night and as fast as possible. A paid sample gets scheduled, interviewed properly and revised, the same way your book would be.
How much work goes into a ghostwriting sample chapter?
More than most prospects imagine.
On my projects, every book starts with an hour-long kickoff, and every interview after that gets recorded, on Zoom, on the phone or across a table in Safety Harbor. After each session I send the client a summary document so we both know what we covered. A chapter needs several of those sessions before a word of it gets drafted. Then comes the draft, and a revision once you’ve read it. Stack those hours up and a single chapter eats a week or two of a working ghostwriter’s calendar.
Could a ghostwriter skip all that and knock out a chapter in an afternoon? Sure, and you’d get an afternoon’s worth of writing in somebody else’s voice.
A sample like that measures how fast the writer types. It tells you nothing about whether they can write your book.
How do scammers use free ghostwriting samples to get a book written?
They split the book into chapters and hand each chapter to a different ghostwriter as a “sample.” Each writer thinks they’re auditioning. The scammer stitches the chapters together and walks away with a manuscript he never paid for. The prospect I described at the top ran exactly that play. The ghostwriters caught on only when they compared notes, and by then the book was done. Nobody got paid, because each writer had agreed to write a free sample and had delivered it.
Chapter farming isn’t the only version. The same trick works with a free outline handed to a cheaper writer, or a free book proposal used to pitch agents without the ghostwriter.
The pattern is the same every time. The prospect wants the ghostwriter’s work, and the audition is the delivery method.
I’ve written about other scams aimed at writers, including a ghostwriting scam that nearly fooled me. Any request for substantial free work, from a stranger you’ve never spoken to live, deserves suspicion. I require a phone or Zoom call before any deal, and I treat email-only negotiation as a scam signal.
If you want a ghostwriter to write a sample chapter, pay for it. A chapter is work, and a free chapter is a gift you had no right to ask for. – Richard LoweShare on X
What should I ask a ghostwriter for instead of a free sample?
Ask for proof that already exists. A professional ghostwriter has plenty of it, even with most of their client work locked under nondisclosure agreements.
Start with published samples. Plenty of ghostwriters have written books under their own names, or have client books they’re cleared to show. I send prospects the Look Inside of a book I’m allowed to show. That gives them several chapters of finished, edited prose without anyone writing a word for free. You can read it on your phone in ten minutes and form an opinion about the writing.
Ask about the writer’s own books too. I’ve written 113+ books under my own name, and any prospect can read any of them. A ghostwriter with no books of their own and no client books they can show has very little to prove their skill with, and you should weigh that.
Then ask for references and case studies. A reference who’s agreed to talk to prospects can tell you whether deadlines held and whether the finished book sounded like them. Case studies describe the role and the goal of past projects without naming the client. The guide to vetting a ghostwriter when NDAs hide the portfolio lists more ways to check a writer’s work.
Last, pay for a planning session. The case for that is in why a paid Book Discovery Intensive beats a free consult. My Book Discovery Intensive is a paid first engagement where we work through your book together before you commit to the whole project. You come away with a plan and a clear sense of how I work, and nobody gets used.
Can a paid ghostwriting sample chapter go into my finished book?
It should, if you hire the same ghostwriter. You paid for it, and the contract should say you own it.
A paid sample that becomes chapter one saves you money on the full project, because the ghostwriter doesn’t have to write that chapter twice.
If you don’t hire that ghostwriter, you still own what you paid for, assuming the agreement says so. Get that in writing before the sample starts. A writer who wants payment for the sample and wants to keep the rights to it is asking for the best of both worlds, and you shouldn’t agree.
What should a paid sample cost you? Expect the ghostwriter’s normal rate for that many words. A sample priced far below the book rate is a discount the writer will want back later, and one priced far above it comes from a writer who doesn’t want the job. The rate belongs in the quote, so ask for it in writing.
Revision expectations belong in the agreement too. Decide up front how many rounds of changes the sample includes. One round is fair for a sample, since you’re testing whether the voice lands, and a ghostwriter who can’t get close after one round of your feedback isn’t the right fit.
How do I judge a ghostwriter’s voice without a sample chapter?
Listen to the questions they ask you on the first call. A ghostwriter who asks how you talk and what words you’d never use is already working on your voice. A ghostwriter who talks about themselves for an hour isn’t.
My one-hour call before I quote a book exists for that reason. You get to hear how I work, and I get to hear enough of your story to know whether I can write it. Neither of us writes anything for free, and both of us know more at the end than a sample chapter would have told us.
Read their published work for range. A ghostwriter who’s written a surgeon’s book and a family memoir sounds different in each. That range tells you more than a single chapter written for you in a hurry. The list of questions to ask a ghostwriter about voice and style covers the rest.
And pay attention to chapter-by-chapter delivery. I deliver books one chapter at a time, so a client reads chapter one within weeks of starting and can tell me right away if the voice is off. A current client cried reading her first chapter and told me I’d caught her perfectly. That kind of check, early in a paid project, does everything a free sample was supposed to do.
What does a ghostwriter’s refusal to write free samples tell me?
It tells you the ghostwriter values their time and will value yours. A writer who refuses to work for free is a writer who can afford to turn down bad deals, and that’s the kind of writer you want holding your story for six months.
If a ghostwriter refuses and you’re offended, look at the request from the other side. You’re asking a professional to do days of skilled work on speculation, for a prospect who’s promised nothing.
You wouldn’t ask a lawyer to draft your contract for free to see if you like the style.
You also learn how the writer handles pressure. A ghostwriter who caves and writes a free chapter because you pushed will cave again when your deadline slips or a relative objects to a chapter. You want someone who holds a line politely, because you’ll need that spine on your side once the book gets hard.
Read what the ghostwriters on your list have already published, and pay for any work you want to see before you hire. The Ghostwriting Hub covers the rest of the hiring process, and my ghostwriting services page explains how I take a book from first call to finished manuscript. That prospect got his book written for free, and I’d bet it read like a book written by a crowd of strangers, because it was.
