Who Uses Ghostwriters? The People Behind the Books You’ve Read

Ask most people who uses a ghostwriter and they’ll name a celebrity or a politician. That’s the visible fraction. In my own practice, across 54+ ghostwritten books, the list looks very different: a founder whose book helped raise $30 million, a woman in her late seventies preserving a lifetime of dreams, a retired wrestler, an executive whose English was his second language, a father writing about a daughter he lost forty years ago.

Each group comes for a different reason, and I like that mix. The celebrity picture keeps a lot of people away, because it convinces a retired teacher or a small-business owner that ghostwriters are for somebody else, and their stories go unwritten.

Do executives and founders use ghostwriters?

More than any other group. Executives and founders know their subject cold and have no months to spare for a manuscript.

A book gives them authority that a website or a LinkedIn post can’t: something to hand a prospect, a board, an investor or a conference organizer. One of my clients used his book as the credibility behind a $30 million venture capital raise.

Sometimes the company pays. Most of my company-paid books came from small businesses owned by the person who hired me. The largest project of my career was a communications book for an executive at a larger company, where the company paid and owned the book. My article on who owns a company-paid book covers that arrangement.

Why do coaches and consultants hire ghostwriters?

Because a book does their selling for them. Coaches and consultants hand their books to prospective clients the way other people hand out business cards, and their consulting work grows because of it. Many build courses, workshops and keynotes on the book’s framework afterward. My article on turning a book into courses and talks covers that path.

I tell clients in this group they’re very unlikely to earn the fee back through book sales. The return comes from using the book as the foundation of their marketing, and the ones who treat it that way get far more out of it than the ones waiting on royalty statements.

Do athletes use ghostwriters?

Nearly all of them, and they’ve become a big part of my work lately.

I’ve written for a coach, a memoir of someone’s teenage years as a wrestler, an NFL book and others. What surprised me is how many of them want the book to make a point, about hardship, about turning points, about becoming a man, instead of retelling their stats. My article on how athletes work with a ghostwriter goes further.

Do ordinary families hire ghostwriters?

Yes, and they’re some of the most rewarding clients there are. Two of my memoir clients were 92 and 94 when we started. Doris Barker came to me in her late seventies wanting her lifetime of handwritten dreams preserved as a novel for her family. Others hire me to finish a late parent’s story from journals and letters, interviewing siblings instead of the person the book is about.

My own route into this work was a family story. I first heard my grandfather’s war at seventeen and later wrote it as Behind the Wire. Families rarely think their story is important enough for a book. They’re nearly always wrong.

Do people whose first language isn’t English use ghostwriters?

Often, and it’s a common reason people hire me. A couple of my clients couldn’t write in English at all. Their expertise and their stories didn’t depend on it, and the interviews went fine. Early in my career I wrote the memoir of an Afghan politician with his wife interpreting across a single long day of interviews.

Who hires a ghostwriter for a hard personal story?

People who’ve survived something and want it told, but can’t face writing it alone. Addiction and recovery, divorce, abuse, grief, a career that ended badly: these come up in the memoirs I write all the time. A ghostwriter gives them a listener, a structure and some distance from the material. One man who’d been abused as a boy told me the story in pieces across four interviews. He wanted it in the book, and it’s the heart of it.

I think a ghostwriter matters most on these books. Nobody who survived abuse or addiction should have to relive it alone at a keyboard to get it on the page, and a writer who rushes them or pushes for drama they haven’t offered does real harm.

Do celebrities and public figures use ghostwriters?

Of course, and they’re the ones people hear about. They’re a small fraction of the market, though. Public figures who publish through traditional publishers often keep the arrangement private. The three clients of mine who went to traditional publishers all kept my involvement quiet, and so have I.

Why are people who tried AI hiring ghostwriters?

Because the draft disappointed them. I see it more every month. Someone asks a chatbot for their memoir or their business book, gets three hundred smooth pages that could belong to anyone, and calls me. The missing ingredient is always the same: their own stories. Those only come out when somebody asks the right questions and listens to the answers.

Executives are the other half of it. They don’t want their name on a book that reads like a chatbot wrote it, and they don’t want to be associated with AI at all. They want a human touch, and that’s a big part of why my business is doing well while the headlines say AI is killing ghostwriting.

Who shouldn’t hire a ghostwriter?

Someone who wants a book mainly to punish another person.

I don’t write revenge memoirs, and every caller who wanted one has gone elsewhere. Someone who wants the book written for free in exchange for a share of future royalties. I turn that down too. And someone who isn’t willing to talk. A ghostwriter can supply the craft, but the book is built from what the author says, so an author who won’t show up for the interviews won’t get a good book.

Could a ghostwriter be right for you?

If you have something worth a book (expertise, a story or a family’s history) and the time, craft or distance to write it is missing, you’re exactly who uses a ghostwriter. For the definition itself, see what a ghostwriter is, and for the day-to-day work, what a ghostwriter really does.

The people I most want to reach are the ones who’ve decided their story is too small for a book. A founder with a funding round will find a ghostwriter without my help. A retired machinist with a lifetime of stories probably won’t unless somebody tells him the book is possible, and every year he waits is a year of details his family loses.

The Book Discovery Intensive is a smaller first step that ends with a strategy and a sample chapter in your voice, and my ghostwriting services cover the full book.

From the author

The Ghostwriting Advantage
Readers ready to join the people who use ghostwriters can start with The Ghostwriting Advantage. The book explains how to get your book written for you.

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