What Is Ghostwriting? How It Works and Who Uses It
Ghostwriting means hiring a professional writer to create a book, or other written work, on your behalf. Your name goes on the cover. The ghostwriter’s name doesn’t. You provide the ideas, expertise, and vision. The ghostwriter turns those into a finished manuscript.
Ghostwriting is simple: you hire a professional writer to create a book (or other written work) on your behalf.Share on X
My job isn’t to write my book. It’s to write yours. That means capturing your voice, your perspective, and your ideas in a way that reads as if you wrote it yourself. The best ghostwriting is invisible. The reader should never suspect someone else held the pen. For more, see Do Ghostwriters Get Credit? How Authorship Works in Professional Ghostwriting and Do Ghostwriters Get Paid Royalties? How Ghostwriting Payment Actually Works.
How Ghostwriting Works
The process starts with a consultation where you and the ghostwriter discuss your project: what the book is about, who it’s for, what you want it to accomplish, and whether the two of you are a good fit to work together. Compatibility matters. You’ll be collaborating closely for months.
Once you agree on scope, timeline, and pricing, you sign a contract that includes a nondisclosure agreement. The NDA protects your confidentiality. The decision to disclose that you used a ghostwriter is yours alone.
The ghostwriter interviews you, sometimes over many sessions, to extract the material that will become the book. For nonfiction, this means your expertise, frameworks, case studies, and stories. For fiction, it means your concept, characters, plot, and the story you want to tell. For memoir, it means your memories, experiences, and the meaning you’ve drawn from them.
The ghostwriter uses interview material and additional research to draft the manuscript, sending chapters to you for review as the project progresses. You provide feedback. The ghostwriter revises. This cycle repeats until the manuscript is finished and you’re satisfied with it.
The result is a complete, polished manuscript ready for editing, proofreading, cover design, and publication. Some ghostwriters help with these steps. Others hand off the completed manuscript and their work is done.
Who Hires Ghostwriters?
Across 54+ ghostwritten books, the common thread has never been that the client can’t write. It’s that writing a book is the wrong use of their next six months, or that they want the book to match the standard of everything else they put their name on.
- Executives and C-suite leaders use books to establish authority in their industry, support career advancement, and differentiate themselves from competitors.
- Entrepreneurs and CEOs use books to showcase their methods, attract clients, and build credibility with investors. One of my clients used his book to help raise over $30 million in venture capital.
- Consultants and coaches use books as client acquisition tools. The book demonstrates their framework, and prospects who read it arrive at the first meeting already understanding the consultant’s approach.
- Doctors and healthcare professionals use books to educate patients, establish thought leadership in their specialty, and build referral networks.
- Military veterans and survivors of traumatic experiences use books to process and share their stories. My first book was my grandfather’s WWII memoir, written from his journals and interviews when I was seventeen.
- Public figures and politicians use books to communicate their platform, their story, and their vision to a broader audience.
- Subject matter experts in any field use books to document specialized knowledge that would otherwise exist only in their heads.
If you have expertise worth sharing and a book would serve your goals, and writing it yourself is not going to happen, that’s the problem I solve.
What Ghostwriters Write
Books are the most common ghostwriting project, but ghostwriters also produce book proposals, articles, speeches, white papers, and other long-form content. My practice focuses on books and book proposals. I write nonfiction (business, memoir, technical, self-help) and fiction (novels across multiple genres).
What It Costs
You can find current ghostwriting pricing on the ghostwriting page. Payment is milestone-based with monthly advances. Book proposal pricing is determined by scope. You can find current rates on the book proposal page. You own the manuscript completely upon final payment.
The 2024 Business Book ROI Study found that ghostwritten books produced four times the revenue of self-written ones, with median revenue of $92,500. The investment pays back through speaking engagements, consulting opportunities, and credibility effects that generate business long after publication.
The book on this: The Ghostwriting Advantage is 48 chapters on the whole arrangement: what a ghostwriter does, what it costs, and what the finished book is supposed to do for you afterward.
For a detailed guide to evaluating ghostwriters, see How to Hire a Ghostwriter: 14 Questions to Ask Before You Sign. For examples of client outcomes, see the ghostwriting case studies.
If you’d like to discuss your project, schedule a free consultation.