The division of labor looks simple on paper. You bring the expertise, the story, or the business knowledge, and the ghostwriter brings the craft that turns it into a manuscript that reads well and holds together structurally.
But hiring a ghostwriter isn’t like hiring a contractor to remodel your kitchen. You don’t hand over the keys and come back when it’s done. The best ghostwritten books come from active collaboration between the client and the writer. How you participate in that process directly affects the quality of the final product.
After 54+ ghostwritten books, I’ve learned what clients can do to get the best possible book out of the collaboration.
Why do the interviews matter so much to your ghostwriter?
The most useful thing you can do for your ghostwriter is show up to the interviews and talk.
I build books from those conversations, and nothing else a client gives me comes close in value. Your stories, your phrasing and the way you explain things once you’ve relaxed all come out of that time. A client who squeezes interviews between meetings like a chore ends up with a thinner book, and I don’t want that for anyone who’s trusted me with their story. One week in 2024 I had six no-shows from clients who’d already paid. They gave no notice and texted afterward to say how sorry they were. I used to get really upset about that, and now I figure life happens. A no-show still adds another hour to the project, so on hourly work I charge for it.
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The interview process is where the book gets built. This is where the ghostwriter captures your voice, your stories, your expertise, and the specific details that make your book yours instead of a generic treatment of your subject. For more, see powerful ways to make money from a book.
The best clients treat interviews like they matter. They show up prepared. They answer thoroughly. They tell the stories behind the stories. They share the details they think are too small to mention, because those details are usually what makes a chapter come alive. For more, see capturing the client’s voice.
If you rush through interviews, give surface-level answers, or cancel repeatedly, the ghostwriter has less material to work with. Less material means a thinner book. A thinner book means a product that doesn’t represent what you know and have experienced.
Why should you be honest with your ghostwriter about what you want?
Tell me what the book is for and when it has to exist. Hard deadlines are common in my work: a birthday, a conference, a startup launch. My fastest book was an 80,000-word communications book written in three months, so a tight date doesn’t scare me when I know it on day one. A date I learn about halfway through is a different story, and the book pays for the surprise.
Tell your ghostwriter what you want the book to accomplish. Is it a credential that positions you as an authority in your field? A memoir that captures your life for your family? A business book designed to generate leads? A manifesto that lays out your philosophy?
Each of these requires a different approach, and the sooner the ghostwriter understands the real goal, the better the book serves that goal. Clients who are vague about what they want end up with a book that doesn’t quite fit anywhere.
Say so early if you change your mind about the direction. A course correction at chapter three is manageable. A course correction at chapter fifteen means rewriting half the book.
How much should you trust the ghostwriting process?
Trust in the process starts with letting go of the idea that you’re a bad writer. Clients often apologize to me for their writing or tell me they can’t write, and I tell them that’s exactly why people hire a ghostwriter. Your job is to know the story. Mine is to put it on the page, and I can’t do my part while you’re second-guessing every sentence you say out loud. When a client suddenly wants more outside people to look at the draft, or starts asking whether they should do this at all, I read it as imposter syndrome, and it’s a bad sign. My test is simple: if you feel confident in what we’re doing, don’t send it out.
Writing a book takes time. A quality manuscript of 50,000 to 70,000 words takes months of interviews, writing, revision, and polish. The ghostwriter is being thorough.
The temptation is to check in constantly, ask for daily updates, or request to see chapters before they’re ready. This interrupts the writing process and can slow the project down. A good ghostwriter will give you regular updates and deliver chapters on the agreed schedule. Trust that schedule.
If something isn’t working, you’ll know when you see the first chapters. That’s when feedback matters most. Hold it during the drafting process, when the writer is still building momentum.
How do you give useful feedback during revision?
One memoir client read each chapter as it arrived and always came back to tell me what he loved about it. He’d point to the places where he felt I’d caught him in the moment, caught his real voice and the real agony he was under.
That told me exactly what to keep doing. Tell your ghostwriter what’s working as clearly as you tell them what isn’t, because a writer steers by both.
I treat the first sections of a book as a training exercise, kind of like training artificial intelligence, only you’re the one doing the training. Read them mostly for style. Is it too high? Is it too low? Make notes off to the side. “I don’t like this” gives me nothing to work with, so tell me what you don’t like. It’s past tense and you want present tense. It’s aimed at the wrong audience, and here’s the audience it should be. We’ll get it to the right style.
When you receive chapters for review, read them carefully and respond with specifics.
“I like it” is nice but not useful. “This chapter captures exactly how I felt during that period” is useful. “The section on supply chain management needs more detail about our vendor relationships” is useful. “Something feels off about chapter seven” followed by silence isn’t useful.
The revision process is where a good book becomes a great book. Your ghostwriter needs to know what landed, what missed, and what needs more depth. The more specific your feedback, the fewer revision cycles the book needs and the stronger the final product.
Don’t disappear during the review cycle. If you take three weeks to respond to each chapter, a six-month project becomes a twelve-month project. Your ghostwriter has blocked time for your project. When you delay, that time goes to other clients.
What materials should you give your ghostwriter?
Give me whatever you have, including the drafts you’re embarrassed by. More and more clients come to me with a book they tried to write with AI that turned out badly, and others bring handwritten pages. I treat all of it as secondary material. The book still gets built from our interviews, but a failed draft can show me what you were reaching for when the words wouldn’t come.
Share your speeches, presentations, articles, previous interviews, or any existing content related to your book’s subject matter with your ghostwriter early. This material provides additional source material, helps the writer understand your existing voice, and can turn up stories or ideas you might not think to mention in interviews.
The best ghostwritten books in the world fail if the client publishes and then does nothing.
Clients who hand over a folder of twenty years of keynote speeches give their ghostwriter a goldmine. Clients who say “I’ll get that to you later” and never do are leaving quality on the table.
What Can Your Ghostwriter Not Do for You?
I deliver the manuscript as a solid draft. I don’t design covers, and I refer clients to editors I trust for the final polish. For clients who want it, I also offer a publishing package. What I can’t supply are the parts of the book only you have: the decisions you made, what they cost you and what you’d do differently. If you hold those back, I won’t invent them, and the book will be thinner for it.
Your ghostwriter writes the book. That’s the job. What happens after the book is written is your responsibility.
Promoting the book and building a platform around it. Using it to generate speaking engagements, consulting leads, or media appearances. Sharing it with your network. Getting it into the hands of the right people. All of that falls on you.
The best ghostwritten books in the world fail if the client publishes and then does nothing. Your ghostwriter can advise you on publishing strategy and point you in the right direction, but the promotional energy has to come from you. It’s your book, your name on the cover, and your audience to reach.
Should you review your ghostwriter publicly?
Loved the book? Say so where other authors can see it. Doris, the author of Gators in the Soup, put it this way: “The moment I held my book in my hands, it reminded me of the first time I held my child.” One sentence like that tells a nervous first-time author more than any sales page I could write.
Once your book is published, leave a review on Amazon. Ask people who read it to do the same. Reviews drive visibility. A book with zero reviews is invisible to potential readers no matter how good it is.
This is the simplest thing you can do to support the investment you made in having the book written. Five minutes of your time can determine whether the book gets discovered or sits unnoticed in a catalog.
My take
Show up for your ghostwriter, because the book depends on you as much as on them. Give honest answers in the interviews and real material to work from. Give specific feedback in revision. Once the book is out, post a review on Amazon and ask readers to do the same. Five minutes of your time can decide if the book gets found or sits unseen in a catalog.
How can you recommend your ghostwriter if the book is confidential?
Confidentiality runs deep in this work. I tell prospects on the first call that they’re under nondisclosure, and my statement of work marks everything proprietary. A few clients wanted a signed NDA before our first hour-long meeting. The worry my clients bring is about other people learning their idea before publication, so after the book is out, you decide how much to say. A private introduction to a friend does the job without revealing a word of what we built together.
| Stage | What helps | What hurts |
|---|---|---|
| Interviews | Show up prepared, answer thoroughly, share the small details | Surface answers, rushing, repeated cancellations or no-shows |
| Goals and deadlines | Say what the book is for and any hard date on day one | Vague goals, or a deadline revealed halfway through |
| Changes of direction | Say so early; chapter three is manageable | A course correction at chapter fifteen |
| Drafting | Trust the agreed schedule and regular updates | Constant check-ins and daily update requests |
| Revision | Specific notes on what works and what doesn’t | “I don’t like this” or weeks of silence per chapter |
| Materials | Speeches, presentations, articles, even failed drafts | “I’ll get that to you later” and never sending it |
| After publication | Promote the book, review it, refer friends privately | Publishing and then doing nothing |
If you’re happy with the book, tell people. The best ghostwriting clients come from referrals. When a colleague mentions wanting to write a book, that’s your opportunity to connect them with the person who made yours happen.
Ghostwriters can’t promote themselves the way other professionals can. The nature of the work is confidential. Most of my best client relationships started because a previous client said “You should talk to Richard.”
The book on this: The Ghostwriting Advantage is 48 chapters on the whole relationship, including what a client can do that makes the book better and what only you can supply.
A client who vanishes for weeks and comes back unhappy with the voice has usually starved the book of the interviews it needed, and those months don’t come back. The clients who show up, say what they want and tell me what’s working end up holding the book they imagined. An engaged client also ends up at the front of the line. When I’m pushing to finish several books at once, the client who’s engaging gets my time first, and the ones who’ve gone disconnected get pushed back.
Schedule a free consultation to discuss your book project.
Clients who want the full picture of working with a ghostwriter can read The Ghostwriting Advantage. I wrote it to show how a book gets written for you and what your part in it looks like.
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