3 More Great Reasons to Hire Ghostwriters

Why else might someone hire a ghostwriter?

“There’s a book here somewhere. I just need someone to help me find it.”

“I have specific goals for my book. I need to reach the right audience to meet those goals.”

“I know a professional can do a better job than me.”

These are three other reasons my clients have given me when I ask why they want to use a ghostwriter. This is the continuation of last week’s column. Read it here.

As I said previously, clients don’t want just writing services. They want a ghostwriter’s expertise in digging deep and making sense of their lives, finding the right strategy through words to get them money, and producing something of a higher quality than they ever could.

Here are three more reasons people hire ghostwriters.

1. “I need you to discover the story.” In many cases, a person who wants to have a memoir written has numerous life stories that they have told their friends, family, and co-workers over and over, and the response they’ve received repeatedly is, “You’ve got to write a book!”

So, they hire a ghostwriter without having any idea of what the book’s focus should be. They only know that these nuggets have to be included, so they hire someone to come in and give an outsider’s perspective. 

Maybe they’re too close to the material. Maybe they want a trusted sounding board. I had two clients who came to me with manuscript drafts and asked me to read them and tell them if what they had was interesting and compelling, what worked and what didn’t, and what to do to improve it. 

They needed me to find the actual story within their material.

Another possibility is the client wants someone to tell them why they’re story is so unique and compelling.

That happened to me. I had a client who wanted to work with me, then balked because of unrelated matters, then came back to me and said, “Tell me why I should do this.” 

So I did, helping him to rediscover what I already knew. We’re still working together.

2. “I want to develop my audience and position myself better.” Many executives who write business books find themselves having some idea of their audience but want to grow it. Along with that, they want to turn their ideas into opportunities, they want to build credibility and authority, or both.

I had a client who was a marketer with a plan he called a “marketing machine” that he had written about in a previous book. When COVID-19 hit, he saw that his marketing machine worked just as well during during the pandemic and figured it would continue to work when the world ramped up again. He wanted to leverage the situation and write a book about how to effectively market coming out of COVID.

He needed my help adapting his marketing machine to COVID, so we structured the book thusly: We opened with how COVID shut down the world and how some people figured out how to market during a pandemic sing his marketing machine. Next, we analyzed what exactly worked for those people and made suggestions for how his marketing machine could be applied universally. Finally, we offered the promise of what would happen when the principles are applied.

The book became an international bestseller, thereby taking his credibility as a marketer and turrning him into an authority during a pandemic. It also expanded his audience to more types of marketers in more types of industries and created opportunities for additional revenue. 

 3. “I want your experience and knowledge.” Many clients hire ghostwriters because they know that they don’t know everything, and they know what they can’t do, so they want the quality, professionalism, and expertise that ghostwriters provide. This leads to the desired end result: a book that reflects high standards.

They know that if they write it themselves, the finished product will probably be lacking because, although they have interesting stories, they didn’t have a writing process that would have taken their experiences and turned them into a truly compelling book. So they hire a ghostwriter to guarantee higher quality and avoid costly mistakes.

My clients hire me for a variety of reasons. These include my ability to sound like them (capturing their voice), my interviewing and listening skills; my organization, researching, and storytelling skills, my making deadlines, my trustworthiness, and my network.

Clients increasingly want a professional partner who understands how books actually work. Every client I work with learns there are seven major parts in the book process: idea, format, writing, editing, designing, publishing, marketing. Clients want to hire somebody who can help them through all seven parts.

I am a ghostwriter. Writing is my area of expertise, but since clients want full service, I have aligned myself with a network of editing, designing, publishing, and marketing professionals that I refer clients to once we have finished the manuscript.

I currently have two projects in the editing phase. In each case, I introduced my clients to several people I thought would be a match; at least one always was.

Clients often inquire about publishing and which route they should take. I first ask what their goals are for the manuscript and point them in the appropriate direction.

Recently, a client didn’t want to state his goals until after I ran through the various ways to publish: Big Five, hybrid publishers, or self-publishing. I gave him an overview.

• The Big Five (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette) are primarily concerned with making money, and they almost never accept unsolicited manuscripts. Therefore, a person needs a literary agent, and the agent will have his or her own requirements to take on a client.
• The hybrid publishers are pay-to-play. They offer many of the same editing, designing, publishing, and marketing services as the Big Five, but you have to pay for them, either as a package or a la carte. There are hundreds of hybrid publishers, so research is needed to determine which would fit.
• Self-publishing is the least expensive way, but that means you have to do all the marketing, which is very time-consuming. Or you have to hire freelance editors, designers, and marketers. 

The client chose the hybrid route, but he wouldn’t have known without my knowledge and experience. That is what a ghostwriter can offer.

Feel free to read and check out my other posts related to ghostwriting. Go to https://leebarnathan.com/blog/