How to Hire a Business Book Ghostwriter

Pick a Ghost, Any Ghost. (Not.)

Anyone can hire a ghostwriter for their business book. These days, we’re a dime a dozen. Apparently.

How do you hire the right ghostwriter?

Now, that’s the question.

Step 1: What’s Your Endgame?

At the start of a meeting, I often ask the other person, “Before we get too deep into this, let me ask you: What do you hope to be walking away from this meeting with?”

I encourage you to ask yourself a similar question.

After engaging your ghostwriter, what do you hope to take away?

Some business authors simply want a book with their name on it. A glorified business card, if you will. If it doesn’t matter what’s in your book, then it doesn’t really matter which ghostwriter you choose. Go with the cheapest one you can find.

Heck, use AI. You can have ChatGPT write the chapters, generate a cover, and show you step-by-step how to get it printed.

If you want a New York Times bestseller, there’s a fairly short list of ghostwriters who’ve proven they can reliably achieve that. Authoring a bestseller takes a lot more than having a great product, but ghostwriters who’ve been down that road before can steer you in the right direction.

If you have a structured outline and want someone to turn your thoughts into prose, plenty of ghostwriters and ghostwriting agencies are set up perfectly to help you do just that at a pretty reasonable cost.

So, Step 1 is simply: What do you really want?

Step 2: What’s It Worth to You?

I have an uncle in my extended family who buys old shrimping boats (yes, he’s a Cajun from down here in Louisiana), rebuilds them, and then sells them up and down the East Coast and the Gulf Coast.

A shrimping boat will never be worth $30,000 to me. Never.

But for Uncle Steve, that might be a great find.

It’s not that a $30,000 shrimping boat isn’t worth it. It’s that it will never be worth $30,000 to me.

For some business authors, a ghostwriter will never be worth $150,000. For others, they can’t justify hiring one for $15,000. It’s simply never going to be worth it. To them.

You can find a ghostwriter on Fiverr for $500. You can find plenty of others for five figures. I can name several ghostwriters charging six figures.

What is your book worth to you?

Step 3: How Much Work Are You Willing to Do?

I see some ghostwriters marketing themselves for “busy executives” who “don’t have the time.”

If you’re one of those executives, you need to know that.

My clients and I spend a lot of time working together. I tell them from the start they don’t have to write a single word, if that’s how they want to work together. Most of the time, they write tens of thousands of words over the course of our collaboration.

Some ghostwriting agencies have their processes tuned like a Swiss clock. You know from the outset exactly how much time and effort you’ll need to invest.

My collaborations happen with authors who like to get their hands dirty, as I say. We’re in their manuscript together, slogging through like two adventurers hacking our way through the bush.

That idea scares plenty of others.

You need to think about what kind of relationship you’d like to have with your ghost. Buddy-buddy, arm’s length, or somewhere in between?

Step 4: One-Off, Freelance, Professional, or Agency?

Some of the best ghostwritten books came after a journalist interviewed someone for their newspaper or magazine. Seeing as how the journalist wrote for a living, the subject asked if they could help them write a book.

English teachers, bookstore owners, and other people in literature-related fields often get approached by people in their social circles.

You’ll find definite advantages in these one-off arrangements. Price, for one, is often cheaper. Willingness to help is another. Of course, you’ll find some drawbacks, too. Writing is one skill set. Ghostwriting is another. While there’s overlap, there are distinctions as well.

Then there are freelance writers. Speechwriters, copywriters, editors, and other writing professionals are often willing to take on a book ghostwriting gig. Again, considerable overlap between their professions and ghostwriters’. But it’s not one-to-one.

When I was a freelance copywriter, I had no idea ghostwriting was even a thing. Seventeen years later and I’m an honest-to-god professional ghostwriter. It’s not only my business but my vocation. We’re more expensive, but we know what we’re doing. We’re the difference between working with a homebuilder and an architect.

But there are drawbacks to us, too. Working with a professional one-on-one, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If I step in front of a bus, my authors are up a creek without a paddle.

Then, too, how do people tell the difference between someone who markets ghostwriting services and a legitimate professional? We’ll tackle that in a minute.

Lastly, there are ghostwriting agencies. I was mentored into ghostwriting by Claudia Suzanne at Wambtac (who literally wrote the book on ghostwriting and created the world’s first college-based ghostwriting program). I know the great team at Gotham Ghostwriters. I’ve heard nothing but positive outcomes with authors who’ve worked with Kevin Anderson & Associates. MemoirGhostwriting.com is another great agency run by someone I trust.

As with any organization, you’ll be paying for not only the person doing the work but the overhead it takes to run the business. However, you also get vetted ghostwriters, contingency plans, financial guarantees, and some of the other benefits that come from working with an actual business instead of an individual like me.

You have to weigh the pros and cons of each to figure out which fits you and your book best.

Step 5: Do Your Homework.

I often wrap up my sales calls by saying, “It’s at this point I need to remind you I am a stranger you met off the internet.”

As a field, book ghostwriting drifted onto the radar of the world’s scammers about a decade ago. As recently as 2020, my client and friend John Willis got in touch with a purported ghostwriting agency that listed Where the Crawdads Sing in their portfolio.

Y’all…that book was not ghostwritten.

John was too worldly to fall for it, but too many people aren’t.

Do your due diligence.

Track down books they’ve worked on. Reach out to authors they say they’ve worked with. Vet your ghostwriter—be they an agency or an individual—the way you would vet a babysitter.

Ask for their references. Ask if they’re credited in a book’s acknowledgments. Ask for their past clients’ phone numbers and email addresses. Track down those authors’ LinkedIn profiles or Facebook accounts.

To misquote Ronald Reagan, “Don’t trust but verify.”