Shopping around for a ghostwriter is exhausting. Where do you go to find a ghostwriter? What’s the standard rate? How do you evaluate someone who never publishes under their own name?
Ghostwriting has been an opaque market for a very long time. While new companies like Reedsy have finally made it easy to find a ghostwriter, there still isn’t a lot of great advice out there regarding how you should select and evaluate a ghostwriter for your project.
We’re going to fix that.
Below, we’ve broken down three crucial pieces of advice for evaluating a ghostwriter.
1. Understand The Skill-Level You Need—And The Price Tag
World-class ghostwriters are hard to find, and expensive as hell.
Go into your search knowing how skilled of a ghostwriter you need. For example, if your book is more of a “how to” book, and most of the content is going to come directly from interviews with you, then you don’t need a world-class ghostwriter. You just need someone who can turn what you say into a book.
However, if you’re writing fiction or if you’re writing a deeply nuanced piece of non-fiction, then you need someone who is a rock star. They need to be able to take whatever ideas you have, complete research to supplement them, sculpt it all into a compelling narrative, and then write it beautifully.
That isn’t cheap.
Nils Parker, for example, is a ghostwriter who has contributed to many NYT bestsellers and is considered one of the best in the industry. If you want a ghostwriter, there’s no one better. Working with him, however, will also run you in the six-figure realm.
As you begin looking for a ghostwriter, know how much you’re going to need to spend. If you have a ghostwriter who pitches you far above or far below the price you expect to pay, they’re probably not right for you.
2. Ask Your Ghostwriter To Explain Their Process
Everyone, in every field, works a little differently. In the ghostwriting profession, this is especially true.
While some ghostwriters will spend a few, intense weeks with you, conducting long interviews and doing chapter by chapter research only to disappear for months, other writers might prefer to spend small bursts of time with you and move on a chapter by chapter basis. If you want to invest a bunch of time upfront, then finding a writer who wants to get all the information they need first is probably for you.
Another thing that’s important to keep in mind while discussing a potential hire’s process is what their timetable looks like for the future. A lot of writers won’t be available right away, but if you’re planning to secure a writer in the next month, make sure that establish deadlines for yourself and for them. You don’t want to wait forever to write your book because you’re waiting for the right ghostwriter, but you don’t want to sacrifice good writing for the sake of expediency, either—this isn’t some DIY “make a book” project, you’re paying for a professionally written book.
3. Read Their Previous Books
Reading a book written by a ghostwriter you’re thinking about hiring, especially one that relates to your subject, is an extremely helpful way to see how a ghostwriter might tell your story.
You’ll get to see how they convey large quantities of information, what the technical aspects of their writing are, and really, what’s really important, is how engaging they are on the page.
You should be able to tell if they've written books similar to yours—meaning they've written in the same point of view, same style, same narrative structure, etc.
An additional way to evaluate your writer is to go look at reviews for the books they’ve written in the past. What are the reviewers saying about those books? Look for the specific positive and negative aspects of the reviews as they relate to the book in front of you and factor those into your overall evaluation of your potential ghostwriter.
