How Much will you Charge to Ghostwrite My Book?

Potential clients always want to know how long it will take to turn the content they’re been collecting into a book and how much I will charge to ghostwrite it for them. “Can you at least give me a range?” they ask.

Not to answer like a two-handed economist, but it depends.  Before I can accurately scope my work effort, which is how I determine my fee, I’ll ask you some questions of my own.

Do you have a table of contents? This is not to say your outline will go unchanged, but the process of developing a table of contents  (TOC) forces you to think critically about what you really want to convey and how. Yes, I can help you develop your TOC as part of the overall project or as a preliminary engagement, but if your budget is tight this is a good place to put your sweat equity.

How well organized is your source material? Not just your original content, but also industry resources that you want to quote or refute. Is the source material pegged to chapters in your TOC? As I said above, the process of compiling your materials will serve you well.

What is the single most important point of your book? If you can’t state this in 200 words or less I can’t begin writing.  No worries, though, I can help. Rest assured, I won’t let you slide with something that isn’t crisp and cogent.

What are three skills or takeaways your reader will glean from the book? Maybe you have more than three, but you catch my drift.

What are your goals for the book? I want your book to meet your goals, too. Here’s a post on the goals I had for Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons from Friends Who Faced Cancer.

Start with a “Goldilocks Chapter”

Once you’ve got the outline, source material and reader objectives,  I’ll be able to price writing a Goldilocks Chapter.

What’s a Goldilocks Chapter? Remember the story of  Goldilocks and the Three Bears? One chair was too big, another was too small and the third was just right; one bowl of porridge too hot, another was too cold and the third was just right. In similar fashion, a Goldilocks Chapter isn’t the longest or shortest chapter in the book; it isn’t the introduction or the summary. It’s a chapter that represents both the the length and the level of difficulty of the average chapter in the book.  The Goldilocks Chapter will give us a feel for our working relationship and give me a mini project from which to price the entire book.

It should take two or three weeks to finalize your Goldilocks Chapter. We need time to let the chapter cool down before the final round of edits so we can approach it with fresh eyes, so don’t try to rush the process. I remember sitting down to read the final copy of a book I recently wrote, turning to my collaborator and saying “What in the world did I mean by that?”  You don’t catch errors like that when you write, edit and proof-read like a college kid turning in a term paper in the morning.

Average pricing for a Goldilocks Chapter

Let’s assume  you have a strong sense of what you want to say, how you want to say it, and you’ve done your research. Count on spending $2500 to get your Goldilocks chapter ghostwritten and edited. At the end of the Goldilocks Chapter project we’ll both know what’s ahead of us to finish the book.

This is the juncture at which you can take the chapter and include it in a book proposal or bring in another collaborator. I promise you, this is the best way I’ve found to start a project.

This does NOT mean that every chapter will cost $2500. They will not. There is a great deal of preliminary work in the Goldilocks Chapter that will help us both as we finish writing the book or book proposal. One is the process of transferring your voice to me. The book needs to sound like you–only better.

Once the Goldilocks Chapter is finished, the rest of the book will flow.

Average pricing for the rest of the book

I suggest budgeting $7500 for a 15k-word book, including edits, which I sub-contract (no one should edit their own work). I’ll sub-contract a graphics expert for graphs, charts and other illustrations, too (I’m a wordsmith, not a designer).

If your book runs to 30k words budget $12k, but let’s not get out ahead of ourselves with this budgeting business.

Let’s write that Goldilocks Chapter first.

Mark Twain, The First Blogger?

Can’t wait to sink my teeth into the new Autobiography of Mark Twain. I went to his birthplace, Hannibal, MO this summer on my road trip.

Reading reviews of this great work, which Twain wouldn’t allow to be published until 100 years after his death, I found this in a CBS News story about Twain’s decision to dictate, rather than write, the book.

The autobiography is highly unconventional, in many ways ultra-modern – not telling one straight story from birth until death, but skipping around.

“Mark Twain wants this autobiography to be random,” Hirst* said. “You know, he’s going to talk about what he wants to talk about on this day, change his mind and move onto the next thing.”

You heard that right . . . talk. One of the greatest writers in American history decided the best way to tell his own story was NOT to write it, but SPEAK it.

Daily dictations over four years, about whatever he found interesting that day.

So was Mark Twain the first BLOGGER?

“I would say that is exactly right,” Hirst said. “Partly a journal, partly a diary, and partly recollection. So yeah, I think of it as a kind of blog, a blog without a web!”

*Quoting Robert Hirst, curator of the Mark Twain Papers at UC Berkeley, where a small army of editors has been laboring for six years to reconstruct the autobiography just as Twain wished it to be.

Speaking as a ghostwriter

I totally understand Twain’s decision to dictate his story, mostly from his bed in the four years before his death at age 74. He argued that speaking his recollections and opinions, rather than writing them down, allowed him to adopt a more natural, colloquial and frank tone, and Twain scholars who have seen the manuscript agree.

Working with clients on newsletters, blog posts, white papers and the like has taught me the benefit of unconstrained speech. I talk about it here.

Low-Jargon Financial Blogs & Newsletters

I write blogs and newsletters for attorneys, advisors and accountants. These professionals often need to provide complex information without making their clients’ eyes glaze over.

Professionals  with compliance/malpractice concerns  too often navigate the middle of the road where nothing meaningful is communicated. Some admit they hope readers will pick up the phone and call for clarification “on the clock.” Bad strategy.

Everyone faces this challenge of writing thorough-yet-understandable communications  from time to time. Here are writing tips for newsletter or blog writers who aspire to communicate without using jargon on one hand, or dumbing down the message on the other.

It’s a conversation, not a treatise

• Provide links to jargon, technical definitions and 50-cent SAT words like “treatise.” This way, everyone can get as much info as they need on their own and your writing doesn’t bog down
• Don’t mistake your articles for term papers!
  • Use headers, bolds and links to enable (gasp) skimming
  • Avoid passive voice; use active voice
  • Write to the appropriate reading level of your audience
    • Run your copy through a fog index calculator (tells the number of years of education needed to understand what you’ve written)
    • If you use Google Docs, click Tools>Word Count and find the analysis at the bottom
• You’re not a professor
  • Don’t try to tell everything you know about the subject. Pare it down to the essentials
  • For weighty topics, write a series of short articles
  • Provide an intro to the topic in your newsletter and link to your blog/elsewhere for details. If you can find a video (or make one yourself) your audience will be grateful. Here’s how one of my clients does it
  • Leverage industry videos and handouts (be sure to comply with licensing and copyrights)

Engage readers

• Invite them to leave comments and comment on those of others
• Offer a free worksheet to help them apply the information to their lives — invite them to review the information with you off the clock, if appropriate
• Ask readers to weigh in on a topic by linking to a survey that gives them the option to see how their answers compare to those of other respondents
• Poll readers for future articles on similar/related subjects

Brains need variety

• 

  This infographic is from a parody site

  Use stories – our brains are wired for stories -and people “find” themselves in them.

• Use case studies for the same reasons

• Link to a narrated presentation deck or video to stimulate the story-receptive part of readers’ brains. One of my clients does this very well

• Use  infographics or produce your own charts and tables. FlowingData is a great resource to learn about them and you might find one to use there

What techniques have you or others used to make complex information digestible? What have you seen out there that turns you off? 

Working with a Ghostwriter

Used to be the word “ghostwriter” conjured images of a wily hack with a battered Olivetti sitting at a Hollywood swimming pool coaxing confidences from a star.

Lately the word has gotten traction in the music world (evidently lots of rappers use them). Politicians have always used ghosts — a recent Christian Science Monitor story estimated 90% of politicians’ books are “heavily ghostwritten.”

Now businesspeople are convinced they need to be content producers to drive search engine results and keep their names top of mind with customers. This makes my job as a business ghostwriter easier to explain, but there are lots of misconceptions out there about what we do, how we work, and how we’re paid. In case you’re thinking about hiring a ghostwriter, this might help you think things through.

Q:  What kind of work can you give to a ghostwriter?

A: There is no professional organization that certifies ghostwriters. Generally speaking we can write anything on your behalf. The devil lies in the details of how well a ghostwriter works with you, whether they know your field well enough to hit the ground running, and whether you can agree on a fee structure.

As a financial ghostwriter I craft presentations and management letters. I write blog posts, newsletters, white papers, articles and (soon) books. Each writer will produce each type of publication with differing levels of proficiency.

Do you want to rough out a topic then turn it over to a ghostwriter? Or does the sight of a blank page drain your mind completely? Working with a ghostwriter is a partnership, so begin your quest by identifying your needs, working preferences and limitations. These will determine the offsetting strengths to look for in your writing partner.

Q: What do I look for in a business ghostwriter?

A: You need to find someone who knows enough about your field that they can focus on production. You might also need to find a writer experienced with Chicago Manual of Style, MLA, etc. That said,  if you find a great writer they can learn the styles. A good ghost won’t upcharge you for coming up the learning curve, provided there’s sufficient upside for the writer.

You might also need help devising an editorial calendar or other marketing/public relations capabilities, so be sure to ask your writer if they can provide that expertise. In today’s social media environment a ghostwriter should have a working understanding of how search engine optimization works, but beware the writer who tries to convince you that writing in a stilted style to feed the search bots will serve you well with human readers.

Q: Where do I look for a qualified ghostwriter?

A: Tap your professional circles first. With so many corporate communications departments being downsized, domain experts who write well are a LinkedIn search away. Whether they can effectively ghost for you is another matter. My advice is to start with domain experts and then refine the search by chemistry, mutually-acceptable work styles, pricing, etc.

Q: How much will a ghostwriter charge?

A: Your business ghostwriter will charge in the range of a self-employed accountant in private practice.  Specialists in other subject areas will differ, but this will give you an idea of how to budget.

Start by asking yourself the qualifications someone would need to write intelligently about your field. (For example, could a nurse write about biotech?)  Put a number on what that person would make working for an employer full time. That’s just a start. You can’t just divide that by 2080 annual working hours; you must add something for administration and overhead costs, and allow that of a 40 hour week, about 25 is actually billable (the other fifteen are spent in client acquisition, proposals, professional development and administrivia). The accountant study shows similar productivity.

Let’s crunch numbers. Say you want an MBA Who Writes Like An English Major with a background in finance. Let’s assume that person would earn $100k in their field. OK, add the employer-paid taxes, employer-subsidized health insurance and two weeks of vacation and the result is about a 20% bump over base salary. We’re at $120k. Divide that by 2080 “standard” work hours a year and you get $58/hour. For reasons explained above, the $58 would translate to more like $94/hour when they actually get on the clock.

Q: Will ghostwriters work at a fixed rate?

A: When you hire a writer with domain expertise, they’ll likely bid your project on a flat fee or bid a price per (accepted) page. This will take some pre-work on your part defining the scope of the project and giving the writer sufficient source material to get to work.

Q: How will a ghostwriter price my project?

A: The more organized and efficient you are, the less you’ll pay the writer. If you have all your research compiled and outline your expectations up front (number of pages/slides/word count) the writer can adequately estimate their work effort.

Your personal organization and efficiency plays a big role in keeping the project on budget, too. An experienced writer will devise a project timeline with deadlines and expectations for YOU.  You’ll have to uphold your end to keep the contracted price and schedule. If the contract says you get one editorial pass and one line edit pass, you’ve got to make best use of each. If you get to the line edit round and start moving big chunks around or inserting more copy, chances are your writer will need to charge you for that editorial re-work. A line edit consists of tweaking for clarity and correctness, not re-drafting. I find that clients often want to make changes after copy they’ve approved has been handed over to the graphic designer/desktop publisher; such re-work is not in scope.

There are some professional pay guidelines out there for different types of writing/editing on a project and page basis.

Q: Do I have to work with a ghostwriter face-to-face?

A: Each project drives the tactical means for getting it done. If I’m writing a white paper, the client provides me with the source material, we discuss relative weighting of the topics and the general outline and I take it from there, circling back for commentary, elucidation, additional source material, etc. Many of my blog and newsletter clients will forward news updates from their professional organizations for me to base a commentary upon. While I’m pretty flexible, I can’t speak for other writers.

I have to learn the client’s “voice” to emulate it. A client should never sound like a stranger in real life to someone who’s been reading their work. I prefer that my clients use digital recorder as much as possible; the digital file is easily attached to email.  Not only do I learn how they speak, I also glean from their inflection what matters to them most and any key words or phrases that they favor.

Most people say more when speaking than when writing.  Clients may think they have two articles for their newsletter but they start talking, I might “hear” three articles for the current edition and another for a blog post or future newsletter.  Occasionally a client will be in the middle of answering a question when something pops up that we can use later.

Q: How to proceed?

A: I suggest you audition one or two potential writing partners. Already writing a newsletter? Give the writer an earlier version and ask what they’d do differently. Never written one before? Give the writer three news topics and see what they want from you before they begin writing and how they would propose to learn your voice. I will sometimes offer to do an audition piece without charge and then if the client hires me I’ll bill them for the work.

More questions? Give me a call and we’ll discuss your particular project: 704-907-2811