If it’s your ambition to ghostwrite books, what do you need to know, and what do you need to do? To start, here’s an inventory of the skills you need for nonfiction ghostwriting (with some notes about fiction at the end of this post): Whew! That’s a lot to know. But you also need a…
Newsletter week 28: why ghostwriters are having a moment, Wimbledon umpires must know how to swear in a dozen languages, and Texas can’t make publishers, authors, libraries and booksellers into thought police. Plus, three people to follow and three books to read. Ghostwriters ascendant I just shared a whole day in New York with more…
I know if you’re going to be a good client in 15 minutes. I’m not prejudiced. I’m experienced. How I know Before our discovery meeting, I check out your LinkedIn profile and posts, as well as your web site if you have one. I can tell if you have something useful to say, or if…
Writers may at any time get called on to write anything from social media posts to instructions to research reports. The more versatile you are, the more valuable you are. I’ll illustrate this with examples from my own career. While it included a lot more than writing, you could easily describe many of my jobs…
As a ghostwriter, you appear to work for your author client. Even so, generally speaking, you should manage the book project. Here’s why and how. Why ghostwriters should manage book projects Consider your own skills and abilities. You’ve most likely completed book projects before, so you know what’s involved. You know how to plan and…
It’s not just the things you should avoid in writing that are a problem. It’s the constant overload of those things. Too much passive voice, too much jargon, too many puns, too many exclamation points. If the reader is saying “Enough!”, the writer has made a mistake. I’ve written in this space before about the…
Newsletter 27: Making people say “huh?”, Fairly trained AIs, radical publishers, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and a head start on your next book. What the heck IS that? The names or titles of some things just make you sit up and marvel. They create insane curiosity. What did you think…
Writers and editors should have a sweet spot: the topics on which they know the most. They should also have a range of topics they are comfortable with. They also need a clear idea of what they don’t do. The T-shaped editorial skills profile A common way to describe the skill profile of any expert…
Multiple people on my timeline recently shared the photo of Donald Trump and famous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein on a plane, shown below, which is a fake: How do I know it’s fake? As soon as I saw this, I was suspicious. Why? Because while I’ve seen other photos of Trump and Epstein together — as…