Eight months. That’s what you’re buying when you hire a ghostwriter, and almost none of it is writing. It’s conversations. Long ones, about things you’ve never told anybody, with someone you’ll be speaking to most weeks until the book is done. Nobody assesses eight months of that from an email thread. So the call is the only real evaluation either of us gets.
Why won’t a ghostwriter quote by email?
Because the price depends on things an email can’t tell me.
How much material you already have. Whether the story you think you’re telling is the one worth telling. How much shaping the book needs before anyone writes a word. Whether there are legal complications sitting in chapter four that nobody has mentioned yet. An email says: memoir, about 60,000 words, what’s your rate. I can give you a number for that, and the number will be wrong in one direction or the other. That helps nobody.
There’s a second reason and it’s the bigger one. I take a small number of clients a year.
If we don’t work well together, there’s no way out of that for either of us that doesn’t cost money and months. I need to know whether talking to you is going to be productive, and you need to know whether talking to me is going to be tolerable.
I’ve never ended a contract myself, and I give this hour a lot of the credit. On the call I tell every prospect that the book is a months-long relationship between two adults, with honest communication running both ways. Anybody who bristles at that sentence has told me something I needed to know.
What is a ghostwriter listening for?
Four things, and only one of them is about the book.
Can you hold a thread? I ask something open and let you run with it. Some people produce a story with a beginning, an end and something at stake, without being steered. Others start four stories and finish none. That’s not a character judgment, but it tells me what the interviews will cost, and whether sixty hours of them will produce a book or a pile.
Do you ask about the book or only about the price? Both are reasonable questions. What matters is the ratio. An author who spends fifty minutes on cost and ten on what the book should do has told me what he’s buying, and it isn’t a book.
Is there anything you haven’t told anyone? Not because I want the secret. Because a memoir with nothing in it that costs the author something is a brochure. If everything in the hour is already on your LinkedIn profile, we have a problem to discuss before we start.
Will you still want this in month six? The hardest one to read and the most important. New book projects arrive at maximum enthusiasm. My job is to guess what’s left when it’s February and you have a quarter to close and I need three hours of your time.
What should you assess about a ghostwriter on the first call?
Most authors waste their half of the hour. It runs in both directions.
Ask me what I’d cut. Describe the book and ask what I think doesn’t belong. If I agree with everything you say, I’m selling. You want someone who’ll tell you a chapter is weak in month two, while fixing it is still cheap. A writer who flatters you on the call will flatter you all the way to a bad book, and you’ll pay full price for it.
Ask what goes wrong on projects like yours. Everyone has a failure pattern. Mine involves clients whose schedules collapse. That’s why I talk about interview cadence early, and why I have views on how these projects get billed. A writer who claims nothing ever goes wrong hasn’t done enough of them.
Ask how they handle disagreement. You’ll disagree about something. Structure, most often, or a story you want in that doesn’t deserve its place. Ask what happens then, and listen for whether the answer respects your judgment or simply defers to it. Both are wrong.
Ask who does the writing. Obvious, and worth hearing out loud, including what role any tools play. I’ve written about how to interview a ghostwriter at more length, and the questions there are the ones I’d want asked of me.
The Ghostwriting Advantage
Everything the call skims over, at length: how to choose a ghostwriter, what the engagement involves month by month, and the questions worth asking before you sign anything.
What ends a ghostwriting discovery call?
Some things come up on a call and I know we’re finished, though I won’t say so in the moment.
Wanting the book to hurt somebody. Anger is workable material and I’ve turned a lot of it into good chapters, but an author whose goal is that one person reads one paragraph is writing a lawsuit. That conversation goes to whether it should be a novel instead, and if the book can’t be a novel, it goes nowhere.
Wanting me to write something untrue. Not shaping, not selective, untrue. It comes up more than you’d expect, and it’s always framed as simplification.
Contempt for the reader. When an author describes his audience as people who won’t notice, the book is already bad and I can’t fix it from inside. I won’t put months of my work behind somebody who’s planning to shortchange the people buying it.
Refusing the call itself. If someone won’t do an hour on video or phone before a five-figure engagement, that’s the whole answer.
What happens when I see a red flag
Nothing happens. That surprises people. I don’t send a rejection explaining what went wrong. I don’t counter-offer at a higher price to make it worth the trouble. I don’t refer them to someone else, because passing a difficult project to a colleague isn’t a favor to anyone.
I stop answering.
That reads as rude. Here’s the reasoning. A detailed rejection invites a negotiation, and I’m not negotiating, because the problem is also unkind in a way people miss: telling a man his story sounds vindictive, or that I think he’ll vanish in month three, is a verdict he didn’t ask for and can’t use. I’m one writer with one opinion, and I’d rather he take that project to somebody who sees it differently than carry my assessment around.
The silence is the message. Most people read it correctly.
How do you prepare for the call?
Less than you’d think, and not what you’d expect.
Don’t prepare a pitch. I’d rather hear you think than hear you perform. The polished version of your story is usually the least interesting one, because it’s been sanded down by retelling.
Do know what the book is for. Not the topic, the purpose. Legacy for your grandchildren, credibility in your industry, a record before memory goes, something you need to say. That answer shapes everything and it’s the one question I always ask.
Bring one story you’re not sure you should tell. You don’t have to tell it. Just know which one it is. Authors who can’t name one are usually not ready, and authors who name it in the first ten minutes are usually going to be a pleasure to work with. Have your calendar in your head. Not to schedule anything. So that when I ask how much time you can protect each week, the answer is real instead of optimistic.
What the hour costs
Nothing. That’s deliberate.
Some of these calls end with a project.
Some end with me telling someone they don’t need a ghostwriter. That happens often enough to mention: people who want to write it themselves and need permission, or a plan, or someone to say the story is worth the effort. Some end with a referral to a different kind of help entirely.
All of those are good outcomes, far better than a signed contract between two people who wouldn’t have chosen each other, grinding through eight months because neither wants to admit the mistake. Writers who skip this call to close faster set both sides up for exactly that, and I think it’s a lousy way to treat someone who’s about to trust you with their story.
If you want to see what the work itself involves before booking anything, my ghostwriting hub covers the process and my ghostwriting service covers what a full engagement includes.
