The six essential skills every ghostwriter must have — and no client will pay for

All ghostwriters are good writers. That’s what clients imagine they are paying for. The challenge, of course, is that good writers — even great writers — are as common as robins in the spring.

What gets ghostwriters work, of course, is referrals. And what gets referrals are the skills they have other than writing.

These are the six essential skills that make ghostwriting clients happy and generate referrals. None of them will appear on the invoices, but they’re all essential.

1 Listening

All great ghostwriters are great listeners.

This doesn’t mean sitting quietly and politely while the client rambles aimlessly. It’s listening with a goal in mind. It means asking questions that direct the conversation towards useful knowledge for the book project. Questions like these:

• What was most important to you?
• Why did you do it that way and not another way?
• What made you believe that?
• What persuaded you to take that risk?
• How did you feel?

Writers express themselves. That can make it difficult for them to mostly sit, listen, and take notes. But all that listening is essential to the project.

Clients don’t want to pay the ghostwriter to sit and listen, they want to pay them to write. But you can’t write without listening.

2 Research

There are always massive gaps between what the client tells the writer and what the writer needs to write. These are the unspoken questions that come up when the ghostwriter tries to write. Questions like these:

• What else was happening in the world at the time we’re describing?
• How much money did that event actually generate?
• You remember it this way, but do the published accounts actually corroborate your recollection?
• What’s the best way to explain this concept that you believe is so obvious you don’t even talk about it?
• Who else should I interview to write a rich account of this, and how can I get them to talk to me?
• In this massive lump of thousands of pages of stuff you gave me, where is the part that’s relevant?

These are research skills. Research is a lot easier now with AI tools, but it still takes human judgment to figure out what to look for and whether to believe sources (and no, ChatGPT is not a source).

Great ghostwriters are also great researchers. Clients don’t want to pay ghostwriting rates for research — they often consider it less valuable — but without effective research, the writer can’t fill in the blank spaces that the client has left open.

3 Responsiveness to criticism

The ghostwriter is going to get it wrong. The chances that the writer’s first draft of a chapter or passage is just what it ought to be are, effectively, zero.

So what matters is how the writer responds to the client’s criticism. That criticism is often maddeningly vague.

• “This is boring.”
• “It feels like this misses the point.”
• “You are focused on the wrong things.”
• “That’s not what I said.”
• “I don’t talk like that.”

What happens after that is a conversation. In that conversation, a skilled ghostwriter gets to the actual issue. And equally important, they take the raw material of the first draft and completely revise it to address the issue. Great writing is actually great rewriting in response to criticism.

Unless the writer embraces and creatively responds to criticism, the text is going nowhere.

Clients don’t like to pay ghostwriters to get it wrong and then fix it, but that’s what every great writer does.

4 Psychology

There’s what the client tells the writer. And then there’s what they actually want. Ghostwriters must understand the difference.

Even clients who purport to be completely transparent don’t fully realize what they want.

A successful ghostwriter gets inside the question of who the client thinks they are. They also become skilled at getting beyond the immediate moods of annoyance, frustration, elation, or distraction to figure out how to please that client. And that means understanding not only what they seem to want now, but what they’re going to want after the book is published.

That takes a knowledge of people that’s uncommon. All great ghostwriters have the skill of understanding human psychology.

No client will pay a writer for their understanding; that’s what they expect from their therapist. But without that understanding, the project is unlikely to succeed.

5 Publishing knowledge

The world of books is pretty odd. The people who’ve worked in it understand it. Ghostwriting clients rarely do.

That means a ghostwriter is going to have to answer questions that have nothing to do with the content of the book. Questions like these:

• Why do we have to write this elaborate book proposal to get a publisher?
• Why does it take so long to get a book out?
• How do advances and royalties work?
• What complex set of processes have to happen after the manuscript is done?
• What should the cover look like?
• When and how will the publisher meddle in our process, and how should we treat them?
• Why is this publisher ignoring me?
• How do I get copies of the book to everyone I’d like to see it?
• Do I really have to do all that book promotion after the thing is finally published?

Clients turn to ghostwriters to answer these questions because of the ghostwriter’s experience. But that experience isn’t what they imagine they’re paying for. They think they’re paying for a writer, not a publishing expert. But unless the writer understands and can explain publishing, the client will remain very confused.

6 Project management

Writing is simple, right? The client tells the writer about what they want, and the writer writes it.

If only.

Projects tend to be more complex than this, sometimes far more complex. There are agents, editors, publishers, and researchers to manage. The client may want to bring in various folks to review the work. They may want to market-test parts of it. Everyone from the client’s spouse to the CEO of their company may need weigh in.

Unless somebody manages this process, it can spiral out of control. The result is wasted work and a schizophrenic manuscript with everybody’s fingerprints all over it.

Only one person can truly manage all of this. It’s the ghostwriter. And it’s a matter of self-preservation. Unless the writer manages the process, they risk becoming a victim of it.

Clients want to pay for writing, not project management. But if writing is a project, it needs to be managed. That’s part of the job.

What this means for ghostwriting projects

Ghostwriting sounds simple. Find the client. Interview the client. Write the book. Cash the check.

It’s not simple at all. That’s why ghostwriters need listening, research, revision, psychology, publishing, and project management skills. It’s impossible to succeed without them.

Smart writers build all of that knowledge and activity into their cost estimates — and then add a cushion for what’s coming down the pike that they can’t anticipate. That’s how they don’t end up doing a highly skilled job for minimum wage.

Smart clients recognize that those skills are essential and why they have to pay for them. They look for writers who are skilled at more than just writing.

When everybody understands this, the project can go well. So don’t ignore the hidden skills. Because they’re going to affect the project, whether you plan for it or not.