How a Ghostwriting Project Works from Start to Finish

Every stage below comes from how I’ve run 54+ book projects, from the first conversation to the finished manuscript.

What happens in the first conversation with a ghostwriter?

Every project starts with a conversation. You schedule a call through my booking page and we talk about your book: what you want to write, who it’s for, what you want it to accomplish, and whether ghostwriting is the right path for your situation. For more, see how I ghostwrite a book from start to finish.

In this conversation I assess whether your project is one I can serve well.

Some book ideas need more development or a different format than the client originally envisioned, and some clients would be better served by coaching than ghostwriting. I’ll tell you which category your project falls into, even if the answer means I don’t get the work. For more, see What should my book be about?

If the project is a good fit, I put together a Statement of Work that covers everything: scope, deliverables, timeline, payment terms, confidentiality, copyright, revisions, and what happens if the project needs to change direction. You know exactly what you’re getting before you sign anything.

Once the agreement is signed, the project opens with an hour-long kickoff meeting. We settle who the book is for and what it has to do, and I give you one rule: don’t tell me anything you don’t want in the book. Months later I won’t remember which stories were meant to stay private, so the safest place to keep something out of the book is out of the interviews.

How Do Ghostwriting Interviews Work?

Heard elsewhere

A month of analysis interviews followed by eight to twelve months of writing is the shape of a full project, and Richard walked through his own schedule on Ghostwriting, Writing and Changing Careers.

Most people assume ghostwriting starts with writing. It starts with talking. Before I write a single word, we do one to three interviews per week via Zoom or phone. These interviews are the raw material I build your book from. I record and transcribe every call, with your agreement in the contract, so nothing gets lost and nobody needs to take notes. After each session you get a summary document of what we covered, produced from the transcript with AI’s help, so you can correct anything I misheard while it’s fresh. Those corrected summaries become the source I write the book from, so by the time I start a chapter, the person who lived the facts has already checked them.

How long the interviews run depends on how well I know your field. When I don’t know a damn thing about your business, it takes about a month of three or four sessions a week. A security book goes fast, because I spent my career in security.

The interviews serve multiple purposes. First, they uncover the stories, experiences, and insights that become the book’s content. Second, they teach me how you think and how you talk. That matters for making the book sound like you instead of like me. Third, they reveal material you didn’t know you had. The best content in most books comes from stories the client didn’t plan to tell, moments that emerge naturally in conversation when you stop trying to sound impressive and start talking about what happened. Each interview runs about 55 minutes, because I’ve found that meetings over an hour are mostly a waste of time. The kickoff gets 90 minutes on the calendar so nobody has to rush, though it usually runs about an hour.

I ask questions designed to get past your rehearsed talking points. Everyone has a polished version of their story. The polished version is usually the least interesting version. The good material is underneath it, in the details you skip when you’re trying to be concise, in the failures you’ve reframed as lessons, in the moments that changed how you think. My job in the interviews is to find that material and recognize its value even when you don’t. The facts are your job. You’re the knowledge source, because I don’t know your field, so you’re responsible for fact-checking what you give me. I’ll check what I can. I’ve written books on every subject, and I’m never the knowledge expert.

Why does the outline matter so much?

Once the interviews produce enough material, I build a detailed outline. It’s a structural blueprint that maps how the book’s argument or narrative develops across chapters, what goes where, what supports what, where the reader needs a story versus where they need analysis, and how each chapter keeps the reader going into the next one. After a project that didn’t go as smoothly as I wanted, I added a step I call a writing Bible, where Claude puts every interview in order with each useful snippet cited by file name and line number. The result runs about 300 pages, and when I tell clients I made it with AI, they’re fine with it. I learned the word Bible from David Gerrold’s book The Trouble with Tribbles, about writing that Star Trek episode. Star Trek had a huge series bible, and it’s quite fun to read.

You review and approve the outline before writing begins.

This is the most important approval in the entire process because the outline determines the book’s architecture. Changing a chapter’s content during writing is simple. Changing the book’s structure after half the chapters are written is expensive and time-consuming. The outline is where we get the architecture right. I learned this as a programmer. When I started, the ideal was 80% design and 20% coding. Do more design up front and you make fewer changes to the code later, with fewer bugs and fewer problems.

How are chapters written and delivered?

Once you approve the outline, I write. I deliver chapters as I complete them and revise them as we go, instead of saving them up for one massive review at the end. This gives you the opportunity to review each chapter while the material is fresh, provide feedback, and course-correct early if something isn’t working. The usual model has the writer do a pile of interviews, go off alone, and come back with a finished book. That leads to revision hell, because the book you get won’t be the book you wanted.

I write the first chapter or two and send them to you, and I want you to be ruthlessly honest. Mark them up. Tell me it sucks if it sucks. Fixing the voice in chapter one is a lot cheaper than finding out in chapter twelve that the whole book sounds wrong.

I set my rates by service, with milestone-based payments tied to project phases.

Current ghostwriting pricing is on the ghostwriting page. Books run from 20,000 to 90,000 words depending on the project. Payments are monthly, and you make them in advance of work. You’re not paying per chapter or per milestone tied to production. The monthly structure keeps the project moving steadily and gives both of us a predictable schedule. Because you pay in advance, you own everything I’ve completed to that point.

The writing itself draws from your interview material, supplemented by research where needed. Every chapter is written to sound like you. Some of my client work I write without AI at all, and I can turn out 2,500 words in a day because I gather the information first. Your summaries still need a careful read, because AI misrecords things when one of us stutters and sometimes hallucinates outright.

Not a generic professional voice. Not my voice. Yours. The interviews make this possible because I’ve spent hours listening to how you construct sentences, which words you favor, how you transition between ideas, and what your natural rhythm sounds like. I draft in passes, like the multipass in The Fifth Element. Pass one translates what you gave me into the book’s style. Pass two cleans it up. I add bullet points to break up the wall of text and cut ideas that came off the top of my head and don’t hold up. Pass three is you and me together.

How do revisions work in ghostwriting?

Chapters are revised throughout the writing process as you provide feedback on each delivery. Once the complete manuscript is finished, there’s one final revision pass. You read the entire document, make your corrections and notes, and return it to me. I incorporate that feedback into the final manuscript. That last pass is for things that ended up out of order or got missed. Little errors are a job for an editor. I’ve tried Claude and ChatGPT as editors, and both of them are bad at it.

Revision feedback works best when it’s specific. “Chapter six doesn’t feel right” gives me little to work with. “The story about the Chicago meeting needs more detail about what the board members said” gives me everything I need. Most clients learn the feedback process quickly and become effective collaborators by the second or third chapter review.

What Do You Own in a Ghostwriting Agreement?

I don’t understand ghostwriters who hold back rights or bargain over credit after the client has paid for the work. It’s your book. The contract should say so in plain words, and if a writer’s agreement leaves any doubt about who owns the manuscript, walk away before you sign.

J.R. Moehringer, who ghostwrote Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, described a fight over a single line in a May 2023 essay for The New Yorker. The passage covered a military training exercise in which Harry was held by mock captors, and Harry wanted to end it with the comeback he gave them. Moehringer thought the line would dilute the scene’s meaning and argued to cut it on a middle-of-the-night Zoom call, where, he wrote, he was starting to raise his voice.

Harry’s reason, according to the essay, was that people had belittled his intelligence all his life, and the line proved he’d kept his wits through a brutal exercise. In the end Harry agreed to cut it. Moehringer wrote that he later scolded himself for the heat he’d brought to the argument and reminded himself that it wasn’t his book.

That’s how I think the relationship should work. A ghostwriter owes the client a hard argument when he sees a problem, and the client gets the final word because the client owns the book. Moehringer won that round, and he still knew whose name was going on the cover.

Because payments are monthly and in advance, you own everything I’ve completed to the current point in the project.

Once all payments are complete, all rights to the manuscript belong solely to you. The copyright is yours. The content is yours. I retain no rights or claims to the material. This is standard in professional ghostwriting and it’s explicit in the agreement.

Confidentiality works the same way. I don’t discuss your project publicly or claim authorship unless you give written permission. Your book is your book. My involvement is between us unless you choose otherwise.

What happens when the book changes direction?

I expect a book to change while we write it, and I’d worry about one that didn’t. The interviews turn up material neither of us knew about at the start, and a good book follows it. What protects you is getting every change in writing.

Books evolve during the writing process. A chapter that seemed essential in the outline turns out to be redundant. A story you planned to include becomes one you’d rather leave out. The audience shifts as you clarify your thinking. These changes are normal, and the process accommodates them.

I note smaller changes in email, and the client must acknowledge them. This keeps both of us aligned and creates a written record of decisions made during the project.

Larger changes, ones that affect the book’s word count, structure, or direction, require an addendum to the Statement of Work. Both parties sign the addendum before the changes take effect. If the scope of the project increases, additional payment may be needed. You’re never surprised by additional costs because nothing changes without a signed agreement.

How many months does a ghostwriting project take from start to finish?

Plenty of clients come to me with a hard deadline: a birthday, a conference, a company launch. I can often meet one, but a rush book costs more, because for those months you become one of my only clients and everyone else waits. I can carry up to about six book clients at a time. That count includes my own marketing, because I can’t let that drop. Past that point things start to go freako, because I’m changing gears too much. I’m glad I chose this career, since it gives me the lifestyle I like, and I could do it into old age.

A typical project runs four to eight months of active work, plus a month for revisions, then an editor for final polish.

The first month or two is primarily interviews with some early writing. The middle months are active chapter production and delivery. The final phase covers the complete manuscript review and final revision pass.

The timeline depends partly on you. Clients who are available for regular interviews and provide prompt feedback on chapters keep the project moving. Clients whose schedules make interviews difficult or who take weeks to review chapters extend the timeline proportionally. I adjust in good faith, but I can’t deliver on time if the collaboration stalls on your end.

What do you get when the manuscript is finished?

Every manuscript needs a fresh editor’s eyes before it goes to print, mine included. A ghostwriter who tells you otherwise is cutting a corner, and the typos end up in your reviews with your name on the cover.

My deliverable is a complete, professionally written manuscript in Microsoft Word format, along with an author bio and Amazon book description. Simple formatting is included: chapter layout, headings, and table of contents. Since we revise chapter by chapter as we go, the finished text goes straight to an editor I work with. After that, you might want a formatter for fancier work, like grayscale photos and little decorations around the sides of the pages.

Publishing, cover design, professional editing for final polish, and book promotion are separate from the ghostwriting engagement. I recommend professional line editing and copyediting before publication. When the manuscript is done, I hand it to an editor, one I recommend or one you already work with, and my publishing service can take it from there if you want help getting it into print, and my AI-Enhanced Book Promotion Handbook covers the promotion side in detail. I still keep a master to-do list for every book project, about 40 items covering the writing, the publishing and the marketing, all of it work I’ve done before. I rarely send it out, because the couple of clients who saw it said, “That’s a lot!”

How do you start a ghostwriting project?

I want every client to understand what they’re buying before they sign anything, and I think a ghostwriter who stays vague about the process is usually hiding something about it.

If you’re considering a ghostwritten book, schedule a conversation. No commitment, no pressure. If you’d like to see the process work before committing to a whole book, the Book Discovery Intensive runs the first stages on a small scale and ends with a sample chapter. For the calendar view of all this, see what happens week by week, and for the money side, how payments are structured. We talk about your book, your goals, and whether this process is the right fit for your situation. You’ll know exactly what you’re getting into before you make any decisions.

Ghostwriting Process FAQ