Ninth in an occasional series about stories and ideas that are worth a ghostwriter’s time. Ghostwriting about clearing one’s name and placing the blame on the correct person are two types of stories that interest large numbers of people, including ghostwriters. In movies, there’s Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Wrong Man” from 1956, in which Henry Fonda…
Recently, I took on a new ghostwriting client. A Pennsylvania-based personal injury lawyer hired me to ghostwrite some chapters into an already existing book about depositions. In our early conversations, I asked him if the writing will be technical and legal, since the target audience is attorneys. “No,” he said, “it needs to be written…
Eighth in an occasional series about stories and ideas worth telling. “It takes a complete recipe to make the best cakes,” Guy Powell wrote in the preface to his book The Post-COVID Marketing Machine: Prepare Your Team to Win. “If one ingredient fails, the cake will be a dud. Running a business is exactly like…
I’m always trying to stay informed about the ghostwriting industry, and one subject I know I need to study more is AI ghostwriting. Recently, I came across a website called hypotenuse.ai, which sells a variety of ghostwriting services using the Bespoke tool. Naturally, the site describes all the great things AI, or artificial intelligence, can…
As a ghostwriter, I recently received this email: I arrived in Los Angeles on October 31st from Mississippi to attend the LA Film School. I didn’t have the means to get an apt, so I lived in my car id travel at night to various places all over Los Angeles way up in the mountains…
I once had a pair of ghostwriting clients who in our first meeting confessed, “We really don’t know what we’re doing. We need you to tell us what to do.” In other words, while they hired me to ghostwrite their book, the reality was they needed a coach as much as a ghostwriter. That’s not…
Before ghostwriting, I was a sportswriter, and one lesson I quickly learned was hurry up and wait. When I covered any college or professional game, there was a mandatory cooling-off period afterwards when the press had to wait before gaining access to the teams. This often extended to before the game, too. I remember covering…
Ghostwriters don’t automatically deal with a lot of death, but I’ve been lately. Three friends lost their mothers in a matter of weeks. My wife and I have been attending memorials and making condolence calls. Also, a friend died at just 67, sending shockwaves through our social circle. And now, a ghostwriting relationship is at…
As I’ve previously written, the outline is the most important part of the ghostwriting process. It provides a plan, a blueprint, a direction, a pathway—call it what you want—to help you write the book. There is no way to ghostwrite a tightly focused book without first having an outline to determine what’s going in, where…
Fifth of an occasional series about stories and ideas worth telling. A heart defect is not inherently compelling. As a ghostwriter, if someone pitched me to ghostwrite a story about a guy who overcame a heart defect, I’d first ask, “What else is there to the story?” and if there was nothing, I’d turn it…
