Before I typed a word as a professional ghostwriter I was a photographer, specifically of dancers. Nearly a decade of movement, color and performance, and around twelve hundred shows.
That work produced annual parties where anywhere from a hundred to two hundred and sixty dancers gathered. One year I rented a pirate shop. Another I booked a town hall and brought in live performers and catering.
One of the people I photographed most was Marjhani, a bold and wildly creative dancer with a bone through her nose and tattoos that once made my conservative side wince. We became friends, and through her and others I learned to stop reading the surface of a person as the story.
That’s the thing I still use every working day. If you have ever wondered whether your story is too much, too strange, or too ordinary, it isn’t. It’s yours, and that’s what makes it worth telling.
The rest of the path was less obvious. It started in a server room.
How does somebody go from computer operations to ghostwriting?
By walking away from thirty-three years of it.
Twenty of those years I ran computer operations for a major national retailer. Massive systems, disaster recovery, cybersecurity, an infrastructure of around five thousand machines. I was the person who got called on Christmas Eve, on my birthday, and once while my wife lay dying, because the systems didn’t care what else was happening.
Underneath all of it I’d kept something. At seventeen I interviewed my grandfather about the war and wrote a small book about his capture. That was the first real storytelling I ever did and it stayed with me for decades while I did something else.
So after those decades I left, moved to Florida, and took a job with a ghostwriting firm. The pay was poor and the workload was heavy, and my boss was clear that I’d never make it on my own.
The pay was poor and the workload was heavy, and my boss was clear that I’d never make it on my own.Share on X
Within a week of quitting I’d twenty-five thousand dollars in contracts.
The book on this: The Ghostwriting Advantage walks all five ways to get a book written, including the one that involves nobody but you, with the costs, the failure modes and where the industry hides its money.
Should a ghostwriter explain the alternatives to hiring one?
Because a book that only described the service I provide would be a brochure.
There are five ways to get a book written. Do it yourself. Writing coaching. Book coaching. Ghostwriting. And a fifth. I sell four of them, and the book walks all five with the same seriousness, including the one that involves nobody but the reader.
That isn’t generosity. It’s the only way the recommendations mean anything. If every route leads to hiring me, a reader has no reason to trust the comparison, and they shouldn’t.
Doing it yourself is the correct answer for a meaningful number of people, and telling them so is more useful to them and, over time, better for me than the alternative.
What does a book do for a professional?
It depends entirely on how it’s treated, and the difference isn’t subtle.
Treated as a business decision, a book opens doors, produces revenue, and builds something that outlasts trends and algorithms. Treated as a bucket-list item or a hope, it does very little.
I’ve watched both happen. The same investment, the same quality of writing, and completely different outcomes, decided by whether anybody planned what the book was supposed to accomplish before it was written.
So the answer to whether a book can change your life is yes, with conditions, and the conditions are most of what this book is about.
What does the industry not tell you?
Where the money hides and how projects fail.
There are chapters on the actual cost of ghostwriting and what a client is paying for, on payment structures, and on the difference between a cheap ghostwriter, a professional and a celebrity-tier one. That’s a real distinction, not a pricing tier.
Then a chapter on the hybrid shop. That’s where the money hides, and one on how ghostwriting projects fail. Not the theoretical failure modes. The specific ones I’ve watched.
There’s also a chapter on what no model can do, and one on the trade nobody escapes. Speed, cost, or quality, choose two. Every arrangement in this industry is somebody’s answer to that, and knowing which two you’ve chosen is worth more than any amount of due diligence afterward.
Do you already have a personal brand?
Because you do, and you haven’t written a word of it.
Whatever people say about you in rooms you aren’t in is your brand. It exists whether or not you participate in constructing it, and it was assembled from a LinkedIn headline you wrote in ten minutes, a conference bio somebody else wrote about you, one project that went badly, one that went well, and whatever a competitor implied last quarter.
You didn’t author any of that. It’s being authored for you, continuously, by people working from partial information with no particular interest in accuracy.
The part that matters is what silence does. The default isn’t neutral. Silence isn’t the absence of a narrative. Silence is somebody else’s narrative running unopposed.
How do ghostwriting projects fail?
Not the way anybody expects, and usually not through the writer.
I have never had a project blow up in an argument. That isn’t luck and it isn’t a boast. I screen for the relationship in the first hour, and a relationship that holds will absorb almost anything. You dislike how a chapter turned out, we discuss it, and either I fix it or you understand why it’s the way it’s. That conversation is the job, not a crisis.
Projects do fail. The most common way is that the client vanishes.
The emails stop. No fight, no complaint, no dispute about a chapter. One week there’s a project and the next there’s silence, and it happens more than anybody in this industry likes to admit.
Writing that chapter honestly means writing about clients instead of about ghostwriters. That’s uncomfortable, and it’s the only version worth publishing.
What’s the hybrid ghostwriting shop problem?
Two unrelated decisions collapsed into one number.
A hybrid publisher takes your money, publishes your book, and gives you higher royalties and your rights in return. That’s a legitimate business and some of them are very good at it.
A hybrid shop that also sells you the ghostwriting is a different animal, and it’s where the largest cheques in this industry get written with the least scrutiny attached to them.
There are two separate decisions inside a book. Who writes it and who publishes it. They have nothing to do with each other. A bundle folds them into one contract and one figure, and a single figure is close to impossible to evaluate.
The chapter breaks out what each component costs when purchased separately. That’s the only way to find out what you’re being charged for.
What stops people from writing their book?
Rarely the thing they name.
The barriers chapter opens with somebody who has the expertise, the stories and the insight, watching newer competitors with a few years in the field get recognized as the experts. Those competitors aren’t better at the work. They have a book and he doesn’t.
He’s told himself for years that he’ll write one. Every time he sits down, something stops him, and at first he blames timing, because work never slows down.
Timing is almost never the actual obstacle. That’s why there’s a separate chapter on hesitations. A person who lacks time makes a different decision from a person who’s avoiding something, and they look identical from outside and feel identical from inside.
What makes a ghostwriting project work?
The relationship, and there’s a chapter arguing that it’s the product.
That sounds like something a ghostwriter would say and it survives examination. The manuscript is the deliverable. What produces a manuscript worth having is a long sequence of conversations in which somebody tells you things they haven’t told other people, and that only happens under specific conditions.
Which is why the chapters on finding the right ghostwriter and on what to get in writing sit next to it. Distinguishing a professional from a mill is a skill, and so is knowing what an agreement must contain before anybody starts.
I have also said no to work. There was an FBI informant who wanted to name mafia members in his memoir, and that’s a project that could have got somebody killed. Knowing which projects to decline is part of the job that nobody advertises.