Business Book Ghostwriter for Experts and Entrepreneurs

Professional ghostwriting companies might charge as low as $15,000 to put a complete book together. They have a well defined process, book templates, and other standardized tools to allow them to operate a business model based on quantity.

Professional one-on-one ghostwriting starts at about $25,000 for someone who already has a couple of ghostwriting and heavy editing projects under their belt. This makes sense, as you’re paying a solo professional to devote a sizable amount of their working week to one project for the better part of a year, if not longer. Ghostwriters with a few more books behind them may ask for $35,000–$45,000.

When publishers look to bring a ghostwriter on board (while still using a fee-for-services approach), they expect to pay somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000. That seems to be about the equilibrium rate between writing a book that generates enough royalties to justify a ghostwriter while leaving enough profit on the table for the author.

Veteran ghostwriters with several books and probably some bylines to their credit often charge anywhere from $75,000 up to $150,000 or more. In every case I’ve seen (though I’ve not seen any kind of formal survey), these ghostwriters have a well-established niche they specialize in.

Once you reach ghostwriters charging $150,000 or so, you’re in rarified air. You usually find such fees for celebrity and/or celebrities’ ghostwriters where the publishers believe the book will be a major commercial success.

I offer value trades.

I'll happily exchange part of my fee for:

• 50% of the total fee paid upfront as your initial payment

• "with Derek Lewis" in the byline of all versions of the book—print, ebook, audio, and translations

• Outsourcing referrals for copyediting, proofreading, citation, and Chicago Manual of Style alignment

While I'm not flexible on the value I provide, I happily trade some things that I value more than you do for things that you value more than I do.

I'm also quite flexible on payment terms. I've had some authors who needed to stretch the project over 18 or 24 months instead of 12. If you really want to make this happen, we will find a way.

I promise I'm easy to work with.

No.

Here's why: as a service provider, my job is to subsume my wishes for your book and help you bring your vision to life. If we split royalties, my role fundamentally shifts. I'm no longer your midwife—I'm your business partner.

As partners, I'd have a stake in creating a commercially viable product. When I see opportunities to increase the book's financial viability that clash with your vision, we've got a serious problem. You'd be asking me to sacrifice potential earnings so you can get what you want.

That's a recipe for conflict.

By working as a service provider, our goals stay aligned instead of being set on a collision course.Description text goes here

No. And yes. And no.

I only offer publishing proposal writing for full ghostwriting projects. Even then, depending on the project, there's a decent chance we'll contract a professional publishing proposal writer to create it in conjunction with our work.

Here's the thing: I think of myself as publishing-adjacent rather than squarely in the publishing industry. Most of my authors don't care whether their book is commercially viable in the traditional sense. They're not writing to make money from royalties, and it's not a personal vanity project either.

They write the book for what the book sells, not for the book's sales: more clients, better clients, higher fees, longer contracts, customer loyalty, company culture, branding, and other such benefits.

Yes. While I am not a professional researcher, archivist, or historian, I do perform secondary and tertiary research to help you find the information and data needed to make your book relevant and credible.

For example, in Rebels of Reason with John Willis, we included 549 footnote citations drawn from scores of sources. This kind of thorough documentation strengthens your arguments, provides context for your ideas, and gives readers the resources to explore topics further on their own.

My research support typically includes:

• Finding supporting data and statistics to back up your claims

• Locating relevant case studies and examples that illustrate your points

• Tracking down credible sources for concepts you reference

• Verifying facts and details to ensure accuracy

The goal is to transform your expertise and insights into a well-documented, authoritative book that stands up to scrutiny and serves as a valuable resource for your readers.

Yes—with an Author Retreat.

Regardless of where you are in your book-writing journey, I suggest hiring me for an Author Retreat. Whether we end up working together as coach or ghostwriter, you'll walk away with clarity.

We'll figure out:

• What your book is really about

• Who you're writing it for

• How you should write it

• Its core message

• A plan for getting it written

The Author Retreat is designed to be standalone. It gives you clarity of vision, helps you figure out what you're doing, and delivers tangible outputs: tens of thousands of transcribed words organized into concepts, topics, stories, and narratives. You'll understand the publishing landscape and where your book fits.

What can you do with the Author Retreat?

For one, it gets you excited to start writing. If you want to write a book, writing itself isn't that hard—you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The "occurring" is what's hard.

With the Author Retreat, the ideas occur. You know what you're writing about, and that gives you excitement and enthusiasm. You'll be amazed at how much you want to write when you have clarity of vision.

You can also use the retreat content as the basis for presentations, courses, business lines, products and services, blog posts, white papers, and more. Your clarity of ideas becomes immediately useful in client conversations, employee conversations, marketing, and branding.

The Author Retreat experience:

For my business authors, an Author Retreat is cathartic. For many, it's the first time in their lives that someone has sat down and asked them about their experiences, their life, their stories—and actually listened.

My ignorance is my superpower. It forces me to say, "I don't understand why you did that," or "Can you explain why that's important? From the outside looking in, it doesn't seem significant."

More than once, my authors have said it almost felt like therapy—except without the judgment.

I'm genetically encoded to be curious. I love business and entrepreneurship. I love efficiency and effectiveness. I'm genuinely interested in learning how my authors have found ways to do things better, to question industry assumptions, to create something new.

For plenty of people, doing the grunt work of trying to figure out what investment strategy will maximize company cash flow might seem boring. But I find it fascinating for all those reasons I listed. I've even made tax law fun to read.

DescriptioYes. I also offer:

• Manuscript consulting – If you already have a draft or are well into your writing process, we can work together to strengthen what you've already created.

• Author coaching – Ongoing guidance and accountability as you write your book yourself.

• Virtual Author Retreats – Intensive remote sessions to help you clarify your book's direction and create momentum.

• Standalone Author Retreats – In-person intensive sessions designed to give you clarity and get your ideas flowing.

Each option gives you flexibility to work with me in the way that best fits your needs and budget.n text goes here

My guarantee: We are not finished with your work until we are both in love with your book.

Having a flat fee allows me to focus on quality instead of hitting arbitrary milestones and deadlines.

Some projects do go a few months beyond. When that happens, my author and I work out an arrangement—often they keep all or a significant portion of the last invoice, because it's good business.

There was a project where the author was not nearly as far along in the development of their ideas as I initially understood. It wasn't until the Author Retreat, when we started digging down, that I realized how much work had to be done. But that wasn't deception on their part—that was on me. I got excited by the prospect of the project and the travel it would entail to an exotic locale. I should have stayed more objective and really looked at what they were doing and where they were in their thought process.

He was a young entrepreneur. He'd had some success. He had the money. He just didn't have the experience to know that his ideas weren't quite ready for primetime.

But we worked together, and we created a great book that was honestly what he had originally envisioned, and he was thrilled.

What should have been a 12-month project stretched out over two and a half years, and the majority of that time was spent by the author refining his ideas and figuring out what to say. Having a flat fee did come back to bite me because I put in much more time than I'd planned. But at the end of the project, I'd made an agreement. I stuck to my agreement. He recognized that I'd gone above and beyond what we'd originally agreed to, went to his board, and convinced them to fund me a bonus that pretty much compensated for the extra time.

It all worked out in the end.

Other projects finish in fewer than twelve months. When that happens, we adjust the payment schedule accordingly. It works out for me because I'm free to take on another client, and I've never had an author try to stiff me for the remainder. All of my authors are people of integrity.

The beauty of this approach: quality matters more than the calendar.

A potential client once asked me, “Derek, what excites you about a book project? What do you look for in a client?” The answer is twofold: 1. economic impact and 2. intellectual challenge.

I ghostwrite and collaborate on business books because I believe better business advice leads to better business decisions which, in turn, lead to a higher quality of life.

The deeper and broader the economic impact of the book, the more excited I am about helping the people the book will reach. Business Insights is a good example. It teaches salespeople how to use data to analyze retail stores’ sales to come to realizations about what’s happening on their store shelves. The result is collectively millions of dollars that don’t go to waste (as well as lowering retail stores’ physical waste). Instead of bad decisions that lead to a negative economic impact, better decisions lead to positive economic gains.

I also like an intellectual challenge. Part of the reason I love ghostwriting is that I constantly get to delve into a whole world of knowledge and expertise I may not even have known existed. I especially enjoy the work of trying to figure out how to put the book together in a way that makes it easy and intriguing (or maybe even entertaining) for the readers. Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge is a prime example. In order to tell the story of how Dr. Edwards Deming created his System of Profound Knowledge, the author and I did prodigious secondary and tertiary research and readings as we chased the multiple bunny trails and dove deep into the rabbit holes surrounding Deming’s life, influence, and influences. It was exhausting yet exhilarating.

At the end of the day, working with a ghostwriter is a financial decision. You have to be able to financially justify the cost.

For my authors—because I do business books—they're often able to justify it with the benefits their book will bring to their business. One new client can more than pay for the investment in their book.

But if you can't make the numbers work, that's okay. There are other ways to work with me, including manuscript consulting, author coaching, and standalone retreats.

I also highly recommend The Business Book Bible. I wrote it exactly for people like you—people who need my knowledge and expertise but can't justify the investment of time and/or money to work with me on a full manuscript.

Yes and no. For some of the books you see here, I was a heavily involved editor, such as The Eagle & the Dragon and The Five Technological Forces Disrupting Security. For others, like Golden Stripes and Everything I Need to Know About Business I Learned from Hip-Hop, I was a coach or consultant. There are books I have ghostwritten that I have to stay hush-hush about. But most of the books you see were really more collaborations than traditional ghostwriting.

A typical ghostwriting arrangement is where the author has all their information ready to go—sometimes even in a fully drafted manuscript—and needs a professional writer partner to turn it into a book. That’s fairly straightforward.

My authors, however, are more often looking for a collaborator than a ghostwriter. They have decades of experience and insights. They have well established domain expertise. They know they know enough to write a book. But they need a true collaborating partner to help them pull it all together into a business narrative that effectively communicates all of that while also serving as an intriguing or entertaining read.

That’s how it was with The Introvert’s Edge. Matthew Pollard had a well developed sales system that he’d taught thousands of people all over the world. But a great sales training doesn’t necessarily translate into a great business book. We worked together for a year to gather, create, and edit all the additional content, research, anecdotes, and stories to develop a fleshed out book.

The same for Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge. John Willis was already one of the foremost Deming authorities in the country when we began working on his book together, but there was so much more we found once we started digging. He wrote more than 90,000 words himself, and I generated about the same. Together, we wrote over 180,000 words to result in a book we edited down to only 80,000 words long.

Confidentiality is a ghostwriter's stock and trade. I treat my profession like a priest, lawyer, or therapist—anything you tell me stays with me.

I include confidentiality provisions in all my collaboration agreements, and I'm also happy to sign any NDA you feel you need. Your proprietary information, business strategies, personal stories, and intellectual property are completely protected.

Whether we're discussing sensitive business practices, confidential client work, or personal experiences you're not yet ready to share publicly, you can speak freely. Our conversations are a safe space for you to explore ideas, work through challenges, and discover what your book needs to say—without worrying about where that information might end up.

Your trust is essential to our collaboration. Without it, you can't be fully open, and without that openness, we can't create the authentic, powerful book your readers need. Protecting your confidence isn't just professional courtesy—it's the foundation of how I work.