How I Became 1 Terrific Ghostwriter

I have yet to meet the person who says, “My lifelong dream is to be a ghostwriter.” That wasn’t me, either. But like an early love lesson I learned as a child: You don’t look for it, it finds you.

My new career path began with COVID.

At the time, I was a freelance writer doing all sorts of writing, including having ghostwritten one 37,341-word manuscript for $7,500, then the highest-paying fee I had ever received for a single project. My highest-paying client was a weekly newspaper ($225/week), which I had written one or two articles a week for the past four a half years. I had a journalism degree and had previously spent twelve years as a sportswriter.

Then came the pandemic, and the paper’s ad revenue dried up. By the first week of July 2020, the last issue had printed and I was struggling. I had been networking and freelancing for fifteen years to that point, and I was discovering the law of diminishing returns. The same people came to my networking meetings and they weren’t referring to people outside the rooms, so the potential client pool was limited and not increasing. It didn’t matter if I joined one-per-category networking groups or groups that welcomed a lot of different writers. I wasn’t meeting enough new prospects.

A fellow networker discovered online networking and suggested I join him. So, I attended online meetings based out of Toronto, New York, Ireland, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia.

Of these, only the Philadelphia-based one, then called Centricity, seemed promising. The first meeting I attended, I got a job writing website copy for a New York-based client who offered to pay me my rate even though he wanted less copy per page. I also met a career coach based in Florida who I still keep in touch with to this day. 

Centricity allowed two free meetings, and then you had to join to continue. The cost to join was steep for me at the time, two hundred and fifty dollars a month. I had never spent that much on a group and I was scared to make the investment, but I felt that I had to or I would never grow. Plus I had a good feeling from the two meetings I attended, so I felt scared and joined anyway.

In the coming months, I met the founders, Jay Kingley and Taz Sadhukhan, who at the time were combining networking and career coaching. A group of what started as six (three from the Bay Area and one each from Portland, Utah, and me in L.A.) met every week and learned how to market ourselves to a specific audience, which we also got help in determining. Every meeting had breakout sessions where we discussed and helped each other figure things out.

Also each week were wider networking meetings in which we could practice and pitch what we had been working on.

There was a lot of vulnerability as we flew blind trying to figure out who we were, pain points we solved for what audience, how we could reach that audience, and what words would we use to convey our value to the audience. We came up with sixty-, thirty-, and ten-second introductions, and we practiced on each other, giving feedback as best we could (because we were still flying blind).

Over time, the original six in our group swelled to almost twenty. Meanwhile, I got more copywriting jobs, mostly writing websites from Centricity members and the occasional editing and speech writing job outside. Also over time, Centricity changed its name to Maven and its focus from networking to business advice, so I no longer saw the entire membership. Then the focus settled on individual meetings with either of the founders. Now, I wasn’t seeing anyone other than the handful of clients who came on a call the last Tuesday of the month.

In 2022, I was still a general copywriter with a website that highlighted my abilities as a website writer, editor, blogger. and speechwriter. I got some jobs, but I was somewhat stuck again.

I had been working with Kingley because he and I had similar senses of humor, and I responded positively to how he suggested and criticized. One day, he asked me, “If you could do anything, what would you do?”

I remembered my sportswriting days and how much emotional satisfaction I got from writing those in-depth, human interest stories about athletes overcoming some adversity to star in their chosen sport. I remembered the emotional and financial satisfaction of that first ghostwriting job in which a Philadelphia-area high school teacher named Marc Lieberson (now retired) had a mysterious heart ailment that sent him into a sixteen-day coma right before final exams, only for him to awaken and recover fast enough to be ready for school when it started again in September.

“Ghostwriting,” I said, “because nothing has been more emotionally and financially gratifying for me than telling someone’s in-depth story.”

“OK,” he said, “so do that.”

That required us to start all over again, finding the target audience (which took some trial and error) and crafting proper messaging to reach it. It also required me to invest more money in a new website and better search engine optimization. Fortunately, I had the money because I had closed on another big ghostwriting project (I also ponied up more a month with Maven).

It wasn’t easy. We tried targeting speaker bureaus, adjunct professors, and authors who needed either a second book or a second edition of a previous book. None of that worked. What did was SEO and the messaging on the website (incidentally, the website designer and SEO specialist were Maven members).

In the end, the investments—in scripting, messaging, website, and SEO—returned more than I ever imagined. Last year, I made 83% more than I ever had. The gross difference between 2023 and 2024 was more than I made in thirteen of the twenty years I was self-employed. 

Today, ask me what I do and I proudly say “ghostwriter.”  It just didn’t start that way.

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