What do writers really think of artificial intelligence? It depends on how much you use it. The more you do, the more likely you view it positively. That’s one of the results that came out of a recent study by Gotham Ghostwriters and Josh Bernoff, a Portland, Maine-based advisor, coach, editor, and ghostwriter. Entitled “A.I.…
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There is a famous song from “The Sound of Music” in which the first line says, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” That might be true, but as a ghostwriter I can tell you how wrong it is to start a book there. I once had a client who…
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In his seminal work The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, entrepreneur Michael E. Gerber quoted the U.S. Department of Commerce: Forty percent of all businesses fail in the first year. eighty percent fail within the first five years, and eighty percent of those that last the…
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Every book, whether ghostwritten or not, becomes part of the author’s brand, so every time a ghostwriter helps an author write a book, the ghostwriter must be aware of the author’s brand. In trying to understand a brand, think about a favorite author, perhaps Stephen King, John Grisham, Robert Ludlum, Ian Fleming, Toni Morrison, Sue…
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I’ve written several times that when it comes to ghostwriting, humans trump artificial intelligence, or AI, every single time. I recently read an article in the Los Angeles Times that wasn’t even about AI but nonetheless further reinforced my notions. The article’s author, Hossam Elsherbiny, is director of language instruction for the Department of Transnational…
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As I wrote last week, everything is ghostwriting—or at least, so many types of writing without attribution are forms of ghostwriting. Here are eight more you might not realize. 1. Professional apologies or public statements. It might be easier to list a famous person who hasn’t had to make a public apology than list those…
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When people think of ghostwriting, they often think of celebrity autobiographies or political memoirs. It’s true that’s a large part of the industry. After all, Prince Harry, Richard Branson, Andre Agassi, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Demi Moore, Laura Bush, Michael Jackson, Millie Bobby Brown, Donald Trump, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan wrote books with the…
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When people contact me to ghostwrite their book, they sometimes tell me, “We don’t know how to do it. We need you to show us how.” Fair enough. One of the first things I tell them once they become a client is that the process is like a relationship, and in this relationship, there are…
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If a high school student came up to me today and said they were considering majoring in journalism in college and wanted my opinion on whether they should, I would say, “Don’t.” If I met a hypothetical journalist who proceeded to complain about the state of his/her/their industry, I would say, “I understand. Woe is…
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I recently had a prospect send me several hundred pages of a manuscript in which she sought my opinion about its publishing potential. I read only about a third of it before I realized something extremely important was missing. There was no story. I wrote the following email: Thank you for letting me be of…
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