How to become a ghostwriter with a six-figure income

In the Wall Street Journal, Jacqui Shine just published a piece called “Want to Earn Six Figures as a Writer? Try Ghostwriting.” Before you writers all start rushing into the ghostwriting field with your hands out, I thought it might be instructive to describe what it actually takes to become a well-compensated ghostwriter.

First, a few facts from recent surveys:

• Our recent survey of business book authors reached 25 authors who used ghostwriters. The median price paid per book was $25,000, and the 75th percentile was $50,000.
• Gotham Ghostwriters published the results of a survey of ghostwriters conducted at an event called the Gathering of the Ghosts earlier this year. The survey found that one in three ghostwriters made more than $100,000 annually and 25% of ghostwriters charge more than $100,000 for their last nonfiction manuscript. (At that event, panelists on stage opined that “a writer who charges less than $50,000 for a book of 50,000 words or more is going to starve.”)

Keep in mind that most attendees at the Gathering of the Ghosts are at the high end of the ghostwriting world, which is why the two surveys tell different stories. For every well-compensated ghost at that event, there are probably a dozen people supplementing their income with ghostwriting but failing to generate anywhere near six figures.

How do well-compensated writers make money?

There are basically two ways to generate a lot of income ghostwriting.

1. Do a bunch of books for $20K or $30K each every year. This is a very hard way to make a living. First of all, you have to scramble to market yourself and gin up a bunch of new clients every year. Secondly, if even one or two of those books blow up and becomes a disaster, it can eat up a whole lot of your time and interfere with your other projects. Finally, you’ll constantly be juggling projects, and task-switching is hard on the brain. Despite all of this, that’s how many ghostwriters start out.
2. Do a few books at a high price. These are the $100K projects that the Gotham survey found. Of course, there aren’t a lot of potential clients ringing bells and shouting, “Hey, can I find anybody out there that I can pay $100,000 to ghostwrite a book?” To get those jobs, you need credentials. First, you need a network full of rich folks who like to write books and their friends. Second, you need a track record of writing or ghostwriting successful books. Third, it helps if you are highly specialized, for example, writing athlete memoirs, business strategy books, medical books, or political books. It also helps if you work with an agency like Gotham Ghostwriters who can generate leads for you. These sorts of high-end clients are quite demanding, so ghostwriters like this are rarely working intensely on more than one or two books at a time. In my experience, these sorts of projects can often take a year or more to complete, with occasional delays and hiatuses, so your income stream can be a bit uneven.

But here’s the real secret: most ghostwriters don’t just ghostwrite books. They supplement their income with other writing-related projects. These include:

• Writing your own books.
• Editing other people’s books (the clients who pay $100,000 for someone to write their book are the same kind of clients that pay $25,000 for you to edit books they wrote).
• Coaching authors.
• Ghostwriting book proposals. Since book proposal are intended to generate book contracts from traditional publishers, including advances, high-end authors are often willing to pay $20,000 or more for a well-written proposal.
• Helping authors develop ideas.
• Ghostwriting articles, speeches, slide decks, corporate emails, and other forms of writing at the very elite end of what’s traditionally called “copywriting.”

If you talk to a ghostwriter below the very top tier of those getting $150,000 or more for a manuscript, you’re likely to find writers doing many of these other activities to earn a good living.

How to break into ghostwriting

If you aspire to be one of these six-figure ghosts, here’s my advice to you:

1. Write your own book first. Until you have experience writing your own content, people are unlikely to trust you as a ghostwriter. Coauthoring your book with a more experienced writer is a way to get your feet wet (but only if you and that other writer and already have a shared vision of the book).
2. Get a job where you rub shoulders with high-end potential author clients. Such jobs would include technology analysts, financial analysts, management consultants, journalists, literary agents, editors at publishing houses, book publicists, sports agencies, entertainment management agencies, and aides to government officials.
3. Start with ghostwriting articles or editing. These pay less, but they’re easier to get started with. PR agencies often need people with these talents.
4. Treat any clients that you do get like kings. Every ghostwriting client I’ve worked with will tell you I’m not just talented, but really helpful and easy to work with. The same is true of people for whom I’ve done editing or proposals. Since so much of this kind of business comes from referrals, you need every one of those clients to be a total cheerleader for you.

I hear stories all the time from ghostwriters who sort of “backed in” to the job. They were doing something else — something related to books or thought leadership or celebrities — and they connected with someone willing to take a chance on them to ghostwrite that first book.

So if you covet a career as a ghostwriter, you may not be starting out as one. But whatever you are doing, see if you can turn it into an opportunity to work on great ideas with powerful people who can pay for quality work.