So You Want to Hire a Ghostwriter: The Complete Buyer’s Guide | Live Business Presentation

This is the complete recording of a live presentation Richard Lowe delivered to a business networking audience on October 28, 2015, with audience questions included, lightly edited for readability. It is the earliest recording in the Richard Lowe on Air archive, capturing the hiring guidance he gave in his early ghostwriting years, with the pricing of that period. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

What a ghostwriter is, and why you’d want a book

Richard Lowe: My name is Richard Lowe, and I am a ghostwriter. The first thing everybody says is: what does a ghostwriter do? A ghostwriter writes a book for you, and you publish it under your name. If you hired me to write about your IRA service, you would be the author. I’m invisible; I don’t exist. There are contracts where the ghost is credited, “as told by,” but every contract I’ve been on, I’m hidden.

Why would you want a book? The super rich and the politicians write them because they want to be known. If you run a business, a book brands the business. I just wrote a sales book: a man building a course around his sales process, and the book explains the whole process in about a hundred pages, with stories of people who succeeded with it and people who failed without it. Ministers write books for their congregations; a ghostwriter friend of mine wrote one for a man who’d been a drug runner in the Vietnam War era, went to prison, and came out a minister, a book proving anybody can find the Lord, even him. And memoirs: I’m writing one for a man from Afghanistan who built the roads there. Just before the Soviets invaded, he got a phone call from a stranger: leave now, or they’re going to put you against a wall and shoot you, and your family. He hid in Afghanistan for a month, and at the bank, a teller who barely knew him warned: don’t withdraw your money, or they’ll know you’re leaving. He crossed the Durand Line into Pakistan, one of the most dangerous places on the planet, with nothing in his pocket. He’s in his seventies and wanted his memories down before he dies. We haven’t finished; he went back to Afghanistan.

Here’s the branding mechanics. You’re at your desk, your books behind you with your name and picture on the covers, and the client says: oh, you wrote a book. Instantly you’re the expert. You pull it off the shelf with a lot of flair, show a few passages, offer to sign a free copy, and you’ve got them halfway to the deal, just from the book. You are not going to make money selling it on Amazon; a few dollars maybe. The money comes from what the book sells: your business.

The ghostwriter as project manager

Richard Lowe: Book writing is very difficult. I’m on almost my 30th book [113+ authored and 54+ ghostwritten as of 2026], and it is one heck of a lot of work: multiple interviews, daily calls on the collaboration I’m running now, chapters revised over and over. You don’t have to write, but you do have to tell me what to write: your business, your stories, your process, and I build the chapters. One client right now sells a management service, and he wanted his book as a novel: a company without his methods, and how it became a multi-billion-dollar company with them. Novelizing how things work is more common than you’d think; we could novelize the IRA, follow a young couple through life to the ending your service made possible.

And here’s what to look for beyond the writing: a ghostwriter is a project manager. A book takes six weeks to six months, sometimes years, and the ghostwriter has to manage the project and manage you: your time, your interviews, your busy schedule. So watch them: were they on time for the meeting? Did they run the interview well? If not, move on, because you’ll be dealing with this person for a long time, and you don’t want the project to matter to them only when a payment is due. You’ve all worked with that consultant.

What is a book, really? Each paragraph should hook to the next: reader, read on. Each chapter hooks harder into the next. And at the end, the book hooks into the service being sold, and the reader is either sold or disqualified, which is also part of the purpose: moving the wrong prospects out of the way. And the ghostwriter writes all of it in your voice, not mine. The first chapters of any project are spent finding that voice: first person or third, stories or straight prose, casual or technical. The technical ones are the hardest; I worked with a medical lawyer, and oh my god, the words.

The statement of work, and the re-quote that protects you

Richard Lowe: It works on a work-for-hire basis: you own the copyrights and the finished project, like paying somebody to build a house. If the contract terminates early, you get everything done to that point, because you paid for it; a ghostwriter who won’t hand it over has no integrity, and you may feel free to bad-mouth him everywhere.

Before anything starts, the ghostwriter should give you a one-to-two-hour interview: what you’re trying to accomplish, who your market is, who the readers are, how you’ll brand yourself. And no price talk in that hour, because he cannot know yet. Then comes the statement of work, your contract: the book, its length, give or take, the word count, the phases, payment in advance per phase, and a termination clause. Anything not in that agreement, discussed or not, is fiction; oral agreements are worth the paper they’re written on. If the ghostwriter won’t produce one, or produces one missing the termination clause, the payment schedule, or the book’s scope: move on.

And build in the re-quote. Nobody in their right mind can price a book from a one-hour conversation. So structure it: the first quarter of the project covers the interviews and the first chapters, and at the end of that quarter we sit down and I tell you the truth: the estimate was high, which has happened, or it’s actually twice what I quoted. At that point you’re only in for a quarter of the money, and you can stop, continue, or shrink the scope, three kinds of IRAs instead of forty. That protects you from the worse outcome: a ghostwriter who quoted $10,000, realizes it’s a $20,000 book, and quietly delivers you a $10,000 effort. Pay up front by phase, generally 25 percent; if a ghostwriter asks for more than 30 percent up front, forget it.

What a ghostwriter does not do

Richard Lowe: You’re paying for a manuscript. A ghostwriter is not a proofreader, who reads for grammar, and not a copy editor, who reads for content; you’ll hire those separately, and they’re far cheaper than ghostwriting. Not a formatter: Kindle, paperback, hardcover, Nook, and PDF each format differently, and for branding you’ll want the physical book in your hand, so that’s another specialist. Not a marketer: whether he says he can or not, he can’t; marketing is relationships and networking, nothing to do with writing, and if he offers it, refuse. Not a cover artist, though covers are cheap; this one was five dollars on Fiverr as a first stab. And not an indexer: ask a ghostwriter for an index and you’ll get every instance of every word, when a real index is the judgment of which instances matter to the reader, a whole different skill. Go into a book project without knowing all this, and at the end you’re holding a manuscript, angry, asking what you do with it now.

Vetting: samples in different voices

Richard Lowe: How do you know if a ghostwriter is any good, when non-disclosure hides their best work? Demand samples anyway: articles, papers, something. They should have books on Amazon; self-publishing is easy now, and if they haven’t bothered, I wouldn’t look at them in a positive light. That’s one reason I publish so many books on so many subjects: when you’re about to hire me for the $25,000 book, you’ll go straight to Amazon and find out whether I can write, in business books, in fiction, in everything, all in different styles. That last part is the test: I’m going to write your book as if you wrote it, and yours as if you wrote it, and every one is different. If you get five samples and they all read exactly the same: warning sign. References help too, where clients permit them; I keep a couple of phone numbers.

What it costs, stated flatly

Richard Lowe: Now the part you’re curious about. I am making a flat statement: if a ghostwriter charges less than $10,000 for a hundred-page book, he’s an amateur, a newbie, or desperate. Avoid them like the plague. Think roughly $100 a page. A hundred-page ebook, about 20,000 words, runs $10,000 to $15,000 for the ghostwriting alone, everything else on top. A 200-page book, novel territory, runs $25,000 to $50,000. That’s where it should be, and you should actually demand to pay a fair price, because this book is your face, your name, and your business on a cover, and you do not want it outsourced to the cheapest person on a cheapie website. It’s a business expense like remodeling the office, and it’s tax deductible.

I did projects for a thousand dollars when I started, and then I realized the important fact: it’s just as hard to get a thousand dollars as it is to get twenty thousand. So why on earth try for the thousand? And the thousand-dollar client is the bigger pain, because they don’t have the money. A friend once told me: I just got this cool tattoo, it cost me fifty bucks. And I thought: yeah. I can tell. Pay what the work is worth, in every business, and hire people who charge enough to be motivated to do it right.

Audience questions: blogging and blog-to-book

Audience member: How about blogging? Is that a good way to start?

Richard Lowe: I’m also a blogger, and there’s a strategy called blog-to-book: we write, say, two entries a month, $600 to $1,000 a month depending on scope, on subjects you feed me, and, critically, we plan from the beginning that they’ll become a book. Trying to assemble two years of wandering blog posts into a book after the fact is very difficult; written with the book in mind, it’s easy. At the end, a second small contract wraps them together and publishes. You spread the cost over a year or more instead of one big whack, you build readers along the way, and then the blog sells the book and the book sells the blog.

Audience member: We pay two companies for regulatory newsletters. Could those feed a blog?

Richard Lowe: Exactly that. You say: blog on this particular technicality, you’re 25 years old, what does an IRA mean for you; point me at the articles, give me a quick interview for the data, and I write them. And yes, I keep resources on tap: three proofreaders, copy editors, cover artists, whatever the project needs.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

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Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.