1 Unexpected Ghostwriting Secret: No Power Partners

Last week at a networking meeting, it was time for introductions. The leader decided to put a twist on things and announced, “When you introduce yourself, make sure you list your power partners.”

My eyes turned upward. I remembered how my career coach blew me away a couple of months earlier when he declared that referral partners aren’t the way to go because people aren’t spending their day trying to find you business. They’re trying to find their own business.

I said to him, “You mean to tell me that SEO is better?”

“For you, yes,” he responded emphatically.

The reason I was shocked was because he had done a complete 180-degree turn since I had started working with him in 2020. Back then, he was all about referral partners and taught me the difference between upstream and downstream referrals. I learned the importance of being downstream because business, like water, flows that way, and it’s really difficult to refer upstream. It isn’t impossible, but it is inequitable. Networkers who suggest, “Let’s refer each other!” likely don’t understand that the number of referrals between them will be unequal.

I was a copywriter when I started with my coach and hadn’t yet transitioned to ghostwriting. Once I did, my coach and I tried to find new power partners. 

We tried adjunct professors because they could use a book to demonstrate their expertise, thereby increasing the likelihood they would be hired (and the students could be forced to buy the book, thereby increasing sales). 

We tried defense attorneys because they have clients who have compelling stories to tell. We tried literary agents and publishers because we thought that if somebody pitched a great idea to them, they would need a ghostwriter to flesh out that idea into a book.

We tried going through speaker bureaus because a speaker with a book is more of an expert and can command higher speaking fees.

None of these panned out. No adjunct professor or attorney responded. I found out literary agents and publishers don’t deal in ideas, they deal in completed manuscripts.

I only heard from two speakers of the dozens I queried. One said she would never work with a ghostwriter, and one happily admitted it was nice to be so busy that she didn’t have time to write a book.

Meanwhile, my investment in search engine optimization (SEO) through seolocale.com started to pay off. I got better and higher quality leads that resulted in two book jobs, several speechwriting gigs, and a rewrite of an 18-page letter.

I thought I would do cold outreach while I waited for SEO to work, but since SEO was working so well, I considered telling my coach that I wanted to ditch cold outreach, that it wasn’t working for me. Before I could, he dropped his bombshell. 

So, here I was at this networking group. How was I going to tell people that ghostwriters really don’t have power partners? 

I did my introduction: “When you have to tell your story, I provide the focus, the organization, and the words to get the story out of your head and onto the page. I’m Lee Barnathan, and I’m a ghostwriter.”

Then I defaulted into my copywriter days. “For smaller jobs, my power partners are website designers, graphic designers, printers, and social media experts.”

Then I got creative. I looked around the room.

“For the bigger book-writing jobs, hotel owners could be power partners because I need a place to conduct the interviews. Senior resources people are great because their clients know their time is running short and they want to get their life story down on paper for the family, to leave a legacy.

“But the reality is more like this,” and I quoted my coach: Show me a person with a lot of referral partners, and I’ll show you somebody without a lot of clients.

I sat down. I didn’t see any stunned looks. I didn’t see any reaction at all.

I wondered if I should quit this networking group.

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