TL;DR: Most “should I hire a ghostwriter” articles are sales pieces dressed as advice. This one is the opposite. Real situations exist where hiring a ghostwriter is the wrong move, and you deserve to hear them named before anyone tries to sell you the service. Six of those situations follow, with the honest path for each one, including the cases where I’ll actively route you to coaching or to writing it yourself. If any of these fit, don’t hire me.
Free tool: How long would your book take, how big is it, and should you hire a ghostwriter or write it yourself? The Book Planner answers all three.
Telling someone not to hire me costs me a sale, and I’ll pay that price every time before I take a client the work can’t help. A bad fit burns the author’s money and months of both our lives on a book that was never going to land. If none of these situations fit you, the rest of this series will help you decide.
Why would a ghostwriter argue against hiring one?
You came looking for honest advice about whether to hire a ghostwriter, and most of what is online is a funnel. The cost article that tells you nothing about cost and routes you to a calendar booking. The “is it worth it” piece that concludes yes in every case. The case studies page that only shows the wins. I have all of those pages on my own site, so I’m not pretending I don’t run a business.
Nowhere is there an article naming the situations where the answer is no. That absence keeps the rest from being trustworthy.
Real situations exist where hiring a ghostwriter is the wrong move, and you deserve to hear them named.Share on X
So I’m writing the missing one. Six honest reasons not to hire a ghostwriter, including a few where I’ll point you to coaching, to a different kind of writer, or to just doing it yourself. If you fit any of them, you shouldn’t be my client. If you don’t, the rest of this series will help you decide whether you should.
Should you skip a ghostwriter if you can write and have the time?
You came looking for honest advice about whether to hire a ghostwriter, and most of what is online is a funnel.
Plenty of authors hire a ghostwriter because they assume they can’t write a book. Some are right, but a real number of them are wrong. They can write. They’ve written work that was useful and clear in their professional life. What they don’t have is the structure, the process, or a finished book on the shelf.
If you can write, and you have ten to fifteen hours a week for nine to eighteen months, the answer is to write the book yourself. (See the Book Planner’s five questions) The fee on a full ghostwriting project pays for skill plus time plus process.
Skill you may already have. Time and process are cheaper to buy as book coaching, where someone holds you to a schedule and edits your output. Ghostwriting replaces your output entirely, and you pay for that. Test the assumption first.
Try writing two thousand words a week for a month. If the work is good and the schedule holds, you don’t need to hire me. You need to keep going.
A person who can already do the work doesn’t need to pay somebody else to do it, and any ghostwriter who talks a capable writer out of trying is protecting a sale.
Do you need a ghostwriter for a book that is only for you?
Some books are commercial assets. Other books are personal projects whose value is in the writing itself. A memoir nobody but family will read. A working through of a grief you can’t work through any other way. A record of something you witnessed that you need to set down for your own sake before you forget the details.
You should write those books. The therapeutic value comes from the act of writing them, and handing that work to a ghostwriter gives away the very thing you needed from it. If you find yourself wanting the book to exist more than you want to write it, examine that. Sometimes it means you want the idea of having written instead of the experience of having written, and no service fixes that, mine included.
Write it yourself, badly if needed, and the book will do what it’s supposed to do for you. Hire a good editor afterward if you want to polish what you produced.
Should you hire a ghostwriter on a tight budget with no clear return?
Full ghostwriting is a serious investment. If that money is real to you and the book has no clear path to earning it back, hiring a ghostwriter is the wrong product. I’d hate to take a project where the author feels sick about the fee for the next two years, and I think a ghostwriter who pushes a stretched budget into a full contract is doing real harm.
The better path at that price point is working with a book coach.
The coaching tier runs at a fraction of full ghostwriting cost. You keep ownership of the writing. And you end up with the book plus a real upgrade in your skill as a writer. You can also start with a Book Discovery Intensive, a smaller engagement designed to nail down what the book should be before any writing happens.
Discovery clients who decide ghostwriting is right after that engagement get credit toward the larger project. Both are smaller, lower-risk ways into the work than handing over a full ghostwriting fee on a project whose return is uncertain.
Can you hire a ghostwriter if you can’t commit the time?
Authors sometimes assume hiring a ghostwriter means handing off the project entirely. It doesn’t. A book in your voice requires you in the interviews.
You on the revision calls. You reading drafts and telling the writer when something is off. The author time on a ghostwritten book runs roughly thirty to sixty hours across the project, sometimes more, and that time can’t be delegated.
Wait if you don’t have those hours, or if the period when you’d have them is six months out.
I tell prospects on the first call that a book is a months-long relationship between two adults, with clear communication running both ways, and nobody can hold up their end of that from behind a stack of rescheduled interviews. Start anyway and you get a book that doesn’t sound like you, or one that stalls. Book the project when your calendar will hold.
What if you want the idea of a book more than the book?
This one is harder to name, because the author rarely knows it about himself. The pattern is recognizable from the outside. The author wants to be the kind of person who has written a book. They want the credibility, the launch, the speaking opportunities, the moment of holding it. What they don’t want, when the work begins, is to do any of the work, including the work that only they can do.
If that’s the situation, no ghostwriter solves it, because the book isn’t your real goal. The real goal is a feeling about yourself, and the book is the symbol you’ve attached to that feeling. A ghostwriter can produce the symbol, but if the underlying motivation won’t show up for the interviews, the book ends up shallow because the author wasn’t in it.
A better use of your time is to figure out what you want and go after it directly. It may well turn out to be something other than a book. If the book is still what you want once you’ve figured that out, the project will go well, and I’ll be glad to hear from you.
When does your subject need a specialist ghostwriter?
Most ghostwriters are generalists who specialize in capturing voice and structure across many topics. That works for the vast majority of nonfiction books, including business, memoir, professional knowledge, and most thought leadership. It doesn’t work for a small number of highly technical projects where the writer needs deep expertise in the subject itself.
The book on this: The Ghostwriting Advantage is 48 chapters on the decision, including the projects where hiring one is the wrong call and you should write it yourself.
If you’re a research scientist writing a popular book on your own field, or a working physician explaining a specific protocol, or a software architect documenting a system, a generalist ghostwriter can do good work but may not be the best fit. The right answer in those cases is sometimes a domain specialist who also writes, or a co-author arrangement where a writer with the relevant background does the work. I’ve written elsewhere about when a ghostwriter’s lack of field knowledge matters and when it doesn’t.
For most projects, voice and structure win. For the narrow technical category, deep subject expertise sometimes wins instead.
A generalist who takes on a highly technical book they can’t follow is doing the author a disservice, and I think the right move is to say so before anyone signs a contract.
My take
If you can write the book yourself and have the time, do it. If the book is for you alone or the budget has no clear return, skip the ghostwriter. When what you want is the feeling of having written a book, no writer can fix that, because you won’t show up for the interviews. Figure out what you want first. A research scientist writing about their own field should look for a domain specialist who also writes. Hire a ghostwriter when none of these fit.
When does the case against a ghostwriter not apply?
Read through the six reasons above, and if none of them describes you, the case against doesn’t apply, and the case for ghostwriting is worth taking seriously. You’re likely an executive, consultant, professional, or memoir author whose book is meant to do real work in your business or your life, who has the budget and the time but not the skill or the bandwidth, and who’s going to benefit considerably from working with someone whose job is finishing books.
The rest of this series walks through the objections that come up for that author, one at a time. The remaining articles won’t be sales pieces either. They’ll be honest answers to the worries you have.
If you’re still unsure, the Book Discovery Intensive is a smaller commitment that tells you whether a full book makes sense.
Be wary of any ghostwriter who tells you everyone should hire a ghostwriter, because that advice serves their calendar and ignores your situation. I’d much prefer to lose you to coaching or to your own keyboard than take a fee for a book that should never have been handed off.
If you decide a ghostwriter does fit, The Ghostwriting Advantage is my book on how to get your book written for you and how to work with the writer you pick.
