Why Successful People Use Ghostwriters

I’ve ghostwritten more than fifty books. My clients’ books have helped them raise over $30 million in venture capital. Land TEDx speaking engagements. Secure traditional publishing deals. Build businesses that didn’t exist before the book came out. More on the ROI of a ghostwritten book. None of those books have my name on them. That’s the job.

Most articles about ghostwriting fixate on celebrity tell-alls and the Hardy Boys, and I find that coverage a little insulting to the people I work with. The ghostwriting business I know is an executive with twenty years of expertise and no time to write, sitting down with me for months so we can turn what’s in their head into a book that changes their career. I’m proud of that work, and nobody who hires it should feel a flicker of shame about it.

Why Do Successful People Use Ghostwriters?

The assumption is that people hire ghostwriters because they can’t write. Some can’t. Most can. They hire ghostwriters because writing a book takes six months to a year of focused effort, and they’re running companies, managing teams, and building businesses. The numbers don’t work. A CEO who bills at $500 an hour isn’t going to spend 800 hours writing a book. They’re going to hire someone who does this professionally and spend those 800 hours doing what they’re best at. For more, see why successful people need memoirs and national ghostwriters week.

The other reason is craft. Knowing your subject deeply and writing about it well are two different skills.

I’ve worked with clients who are brilliant speakers, people who can hold a room for an hour without notes, and who freeze in front of a blank document. The expertise is there and the storytelling structure isn’t, and there’s no shame in that. A ghostwriter supplies the architecture that turns raw knowledge and experience into a narrative that holds a reader from chapter one to the last page.

There’s also the voice problem. Most people who try to write their own books end up sounding nothing like themselves. They shift into formal academic mode, or corporate presentation mode, or the stiff unnatural voice people use when they know they’re being recorded. A good ghostwriter captures how a client talks, with the rhythms, the humor and the way they explain things when they’re relaxed and passionate about their subject, and puts that on the page. The best compliment I get is “this sounds exactly like me.” It should.

What does a ghostwritten book do for a business?

A book is the single most powerful credibility tool in business. Nothing else comes close. A website says you exist. A LinkedIn profile says you have a job. A book says you’re the authority. When a potential client is choosing between two consultants and one of them wrote the book on the subject, that’s not a close decision.

I’ve watched this play out dozens of times.

A client publishes a book and suddenly they’re getting invited to speak at conferences they couldn’t get into as an attendee. Podcast hosts reach out to them. Journalists call them for expert quotes. Venture capitalists take meetings they wouldn’t have taken before. The book didn’t make them smarter. It made their expertise visible and credible in a way that no amount of social media posting or content marketing can replicate.

I tell clients up front that they’re very unlikely to earn back what they spend through book sales. The return comes from using the book as the foundation of their marketing: the talks, the contracts and the meetings that open because the book exists. Anyone who promises you royalties will cover the cost is selling you a fantasy.

One client used his book to raise venture capital. He walked into investor meetings with a published book that laid out his vision, his market analysis, and his strategy in detail.

The book made the case before he said a word. Investors had already read it. They came to the meeting pre-sold on the concept. That’s what a book does that a pitch deck can’t.

Another client turned a book into a TEDx talk, and the talk led to a consulting practice that didn’t exist before the book came out. That client went from someone with expertise to someone with a platform. I love watching that shift, because people with a platform stop waiting for opportunities and start choosing among them.

Which famous books were ghostwritten?

The ghostwriting examples that get the most attention are the obvious ones. Journalist Tony Schwartz, who spent eighteen months shadowing Trump and listening to his phone calls to capture the voice, ghostwrote Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.”

The book sold over a million copies and cemented Trump’s image as a dealmaker decades before he ran for office. Whatever you think of Trump, that book accomplished exactly what a ghostwritten business book is supposed to accomplish: it turned expertise (or at least the perception of expertise) into a permanent public identity.

The children’s book world runs on ghostwriting. The Hardy Boys series was attributed to Franklin W. Dixon, a name that never belonged to a real person. Dozens of writers produced those books under the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Nancy Drew, credited to Carolyn Keene, was the same arrangement. R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps children’s horror series used ghostwriters for multiple entries in the franchise. These series sold hundreds of millions of copies collectively.

Celebrity and franchise ghostwriting is a different business from mine. Those projects are about volume and brand extension.

The ghostwriting I do takes one person’s specific expertise and turns it into one book that changes their professional life, and if that book comes out wrong, their name sits on the mistake for the rest of their career. A syndicate pen name never has to live with anything.

How does a ghostwriter work with a busy executive?

Every ghostwriting project I take starts with interviews.

Not a questionnaire. Not a form. Long conversations where I’m listening for the stories, the insights, and the voice that will make the book work. Some clients know exactly what they want to say. Others know they have a book in them but can’t articulate the structure. Either way, the interviews are where the book reveals itself.

From the interviews, I build an outline that serves both the content and the client’s business goals.

A book is a strategic document. Which chapters establish credibility? Which ones show methodology? Where does the client’s personal story go, and how much of it serves the reader versus the author’s ego? These decisions matter because they determine whether the book becomes a business asset or an expensive vanity project that sits in boxes in the garage.

Then I write. Draft chapters go to the client for review, and we revise. We argue sometimes, and I welcome it, because the best books come from clients who push back when something doesn’t sound right. The process typically takes four to eight months from first interview to final manuscript, depending on the complexity of the subject and the client’s availability for interviews and review. (See the free Book Planner)

The finished book sounds like the client wrote it, because in a real sense they did. The ideas are theirs. The expertise is theirs. The stories are theirs. What I provide is the craft: the structure, the pacing, the narrative technique that turns raw material into something a reader can’t put down.

What should you really ask about a ghostwritten book?

People always ask whether ghostwriting is ethical. I think that’s the wrong question, because it treats the hired help as the scandal. The question that matters is whether the expertise in the book is real. If a surgeon with thirty years of experience hires a writer to help communicate that experience in book form, the knowledge is real. The surgeon did the work and the writer translated it. I call that collaboration, and I’d call a book of borrowed expertise a fraud no matter who typed it.

Every CEO who gives a speech written by a speechwriter, every politician who publishes an op-ed drafted by staff, every executive who has a communications team polish their annual letter to shareholders is doing the same thing. Ghostwriting is how experts communicate their expertise at scale. Without it, most of those books would never get written, and the expertise would stay locked in one person’s head, out of reach of the people who need it.

Ghostwriting goes back centuries, because writing well is one specialized skill, having something worth saying is another, and very few people have both. What I can’t stand is watching someone with real expertise sit on it for a decade because they’ve decided hiring help is cheating. Their competitors aren’t waiting, and the readers who needed that book never get it.

If you’ve got expertise worth sharing and you want to turn it into a book that builds your authority, generates leads, and opens doors that are currently closed, let’s talk about what that looks like.

From the author

The Ghostwriting Advantage
If you’re weighing a ghostwriter for your own book, The Ghostwriting Advantage walks you through how to get it written for you. It draws on the 54+ books I’ve ghostwritten.

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