The Author-izer

Archive for the ‘Ghostwriting’ Category

Claudia Suzanne is that contradiction in terms, a famous ghostwriter. After ghostwriting more than 100 titles, both fiction and non-fiction, she knows her stuff. If you want to know it, too, you can sign up for one of her semester-long Ghostwriter Certification courses. She teaches them in-person down in San Diego, and over the phone for everyone else. The cost is $930 plus an $89 materials fee; there’s a payment plan option.

Here’s a list of topics covered:

• How to do an A&R
• How to find the “gold” in any manuscript
• How to determine BISAC selection
• How to advise the three types of authors on publishing options
• The scope of responsibility for the various ESPs
• The variances between the author’s writing process and the ghostwriting process
• How to chart nonfiction
• How to apply a content template (not MS Word formatting)
• How to maintain the author’s voice
• How to do multiple “spins” (while maintaining the author’s voice)
• The variances between passive, static, and active voice; when and how to convert; and when to not
• The variances between and basic principles of line and copy editing
• How to build a nonfiction proposal and query letter and research a submission list
• The variances between plot and character driven novels
• PMA+A
• The elements of fiction writing
• The parameters of fiction A&Rs
• How to map a plot w/characters
• Meet-in-the-Middle
• How to ghostwrite supplemental scenes while maintaining the author’s voice
• How to ghostwrite full novels while maintaining the author’s story, characters, vision, premise, theme, intent and “tells”
• The variances between “show” and “tell”; when and how to convert; and when to not
• How to create a compelling submission synopsis and query letter and research a submission list
• How to create a personal resume and credit list while maintaining client confidentiality
• How to find clients and how to get clients to find you
• How to set reasonable fees, bid projects, and write equitable contracts
• How to assess clients and control the initial contact to land the gig
• How to establish and maintain authority and avoid or handle problems as they arise

I would love to take this course, but haven’t had a chance yet. I do know the classes fill up quickly, so if you’re an aspiring ghostwriter, you should head to Claudia’s website to register. (And don’t mind the painful collision of font colors—she’s a writer, not a web designer.)

If you read many white papers—and you certainly should be if you’re thinking about writing them—you’ll notice that some of them give the name of the author and some only the name of the sponsoring company, or possibly the research firm used to gather the data. So you might be wondering what determines whether a white paper author gets a byline. Is it a standard part of the contract negotiation, the way it is for books? Is there such a thing as an “As told to” white paper?

Not exactly.

If a company hires you to write a white paper, chances are your name won’t appear anywhere on that document, and neither will anyone else’s—except possibly that of the sales manager the reader is supposed to contact. Michael Stelzner, author of Writing White Papers, says on his blog that he’s written more than 100 white papers and never once been given a byline. That’s probably why he never mentions the issue in his book.

And it’s not just Stelzner’s book, either. You can find plenty of guides on how to write and design a good white paper, but I have yet to see one that mentions anything about author bylines, even though the standard white paper format ends with a “company information” section.

White paper writing isn’t usually ghostwriting in the sense that you’re writing in the voice of a specific individual, but it’s almost always writing where you don’t get attribution. There are only two instances I can think of where you’ll get a byline for a white paper you write.

You’re the Client

That’s right: if you’re a consultant or a business owner and you write a white paper to market your own company, you should put your name on it. If I were to write a white paper about ghostwriting (for this business) or podcasting (for the Podcast Asylum), I would certainly put my name on it. If you find yourself helping a sole proprietor with a white paper, his or her name will go on it, and you really will be ghostwriting, even though a traditional white paper has much less of a personal “voice” to it than a book does.

You’re An Industry Expert

So why would a client hire you to write a white paper for their company and then put your name alongside theirs? Because you’ve written so much about the field that your name adds credibility to the white paper’s conclusions. Unfortunately for the professional white paper writer, it’s journalists who are most likely to fall into this category. Even though you may be an expert after writing a few dozen white papers, that won’t help your client’s marketing if their prospective buyers have never heard of you.

On the other hand, there are many industry experts who are not writers, so you might get hired to improve the readability of what they produce. But in that case the byline will be theirs, even if you get part of the fee.

If you do want that byline, don’t be shy about demonstrating your expertise. But remember that it takes time to develop a relationship as a thought leader, and it doesn’t necessarily pay very well. If you can make as good a living from white papers as Michael Stelzner does, why worry about attribution?

My first ghostwriting client was a dead man.

It was a pro-bono job.

I realize this is not the way most ghostwriters start their careers.

I was in graduate school at the time, working on a PhD in Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. Before I could start working on my dissertation, I had to complete three preliminary exams or papers. For my Special Author in Latin, I chose Plautus. The specific project was reconstructing Cistellaria, a play dated to about 200 BCE and missing about a third of its text due to damaged manuscripts. (You can see the Latin text here and the 1912 translation on the Perseus Project website.)

I didn’t think of reconstructing Cistellaria as a problem in ghostwriting. It was a problem in script analysis, the process by which a director works backward through the action of a play to find out what in each scene could not have happened without the scene before. The missing parts of Cistellaria are scattered through the middle of the text, so examining the later scenes made it clear what had to have happened in the missing lines. (We know how many lines are missing because of the way manuscript pages are constructed.)

Without finding a lost papyrus containing the missing parts of the script, there’s no way to figure out what Plautus actually did say in the missing lines. But there’s more than enough left of Cistellaria to know how the different characters behave and speak, and to know Plautus’ style. (There are also several complete plays to go by.)

This close study of the client’s previous writing is very similar to the way I work with clients today, though I have an advantage now in that I can get their confirmation that I have succeeded in capturing their “voice.”

1994 production of Easy Virtue in Ann Arbor, Michigan
Photo by Peter Smith

In 1994, I had to convince an audience made up substantially of my classmates and instructors that Easy Virtue, as I called my reconstruction, not only worked as a comedy in performance, but sounded convincingly like Plautus. I had a slight advantage, because I wasn’t writing in Latin. Therefore I didn’t have to match Plautus’ style exactly. (And while Plautus’ Latin is difficult at first because it’s more archaic than, say, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the kind of comedy he writes is easy to adapt for a modern audience.)

The key scene in Cistellaria revolves around a box, or cistella, whose contents prove that the heroine is really the daughter of the Rich Couple Next Door. It’s a scene involving a lot of physical comedy (for which director Kate Mendeloff created some wonderful stage business), as the character who dropped the box searches frantically all over the stage, not knowing that the people she meant to give it to have already found it and picked it up.

After the production, one of my classmates asked whether that scene was the one I’d written, so I figured I must have done something right.

And though I didn’t know it at the time, that was the beginning of my ghostwriting career. While I’ve learned a lot since then, one thing hasn’t changed: my goal is still to create a final document where no one can tell which parts my client wrote and which parts I wrote.

You can read the script for Easy Virtue here.

Asked by Adam Fields on LinkedIn, August 9, 2009.

Real ghostwriting, as opposed to what self-publishing guru Dan Poynter calls “contract writing,” involves writing in another person’s “voice.”

To explain the distinction, contract writing is “Go write me an article/blog post/white paper on topic X, and give it to me when you’re finished.”

Ghostwriting means I sit down with the client and get to know him or her, the way s/he speaks and thinks, what really matters to him or her, why s/he wants to write a book, etc. Then I use materials such as recordings of the client’s speaking engagements, interviews, notes and other written materials the client has (from e-mail messages and blog posts to short articles), to help me build up the book.

Then we pass the manuscript back and forth to make corrections for accuracy of style, tone, fact, and grammar, and finally we have a book that’s a joint effort. The client’s name absolutely belongs on this book: it’s his or her ideas and expertise that the book contains.

My name could go on the book, or not. I certainly appreciate having an acknowledgment. But I get paid for the work I’ve done, and the author and publisher might not if the book doesn’t earn out its initial investment. The obscurity is worth it.

Randy Kemp posed that question on LinkedIn, or rather, he asked what advice to give someone who wanted to hire a ghostwriter. He included my public answer in his April 26th blog post, but I thought I should post it here, as well, and add some of my further contributions from our follow-up discussion.

There are a number of factors to take into consideration when hiring a ghostwriter. Budget is an important one, because if this is a major project, it’s going to involve considerable time and effort on the writer’s part. To know how much you can afford to spend, you need to know what the book (or other project) is worth to you in terms of expanded business opportunities, increased pay scale, etc. (Sad to say, it probably won’t earn you that much in royalties.)

Expect a good ghostwriter to cost you a substantial chunk of money. The least I’ve ever charged anyone for a full-length non-fiction book is about $7,000, and she did a great deal of the writing herself. We are talking about as much as 200 hours of work, after all. (That project, by contrast, came to about 70 hours.)

To get a sense of the range of rates for ghostwriting, you can look at the Editorial Freelancers Association’s listing for Developmental Editing (which is not the same thing, but sometimes comes close) and the “What to Pay” guidelines at Writers.ca. They give a range from $10,000 to $50,000 (Canadian, one presumes) for a book, or your entire advance plus 50% of the royalties. Rainbow Writing, by contrast, offers “highly affordable” ghostwriting at a standard rate of $5,000 for a 200-page manuscript (where a “page” is defined in the old-fashioned double-spaced typed fashion, or about 250 words). Five thousand is pretty much rock bottom. You might find someone cheaper than that on Elance, but I don’t think you’d want to hire them.

Now that I’ve gotten the sticker shock out of the way, let’s get to the important part. Of course a ghostwriter needs to be able to write well. Some people insist on hiring writers who have published their own books, or writers who are journalists. You should certainly be able to see samples of the ghost’s writing. But that much is true of any writer you hire.

If you want a ghostwriter—someone who can take the knowledge in your brain and the passion in your heart and distill it into words in your voice—then you need someone who has more than just writing skills.

You need someone you can develop an intimate personal relationship with, because the ghost is going to be getting inside your head. Rapport is critical.

You need someone who listens to you. Don’t be surprised if your ghost spends more time asking questions, recording, and taking notes than actually writing.

You need someone with a gift for mimicry, someone who writes in multiple styles and genres. Established authors with too strong a “voice” of their own are not always good at this.

You need someone who understands enough about publishing to be able to keep the purpose and audience of your book in mind, and help you refine and develop your ideas to achieve that goal.

So far as I know, ghostwriters don’t have a union or a professional association. We are, by our nature, anonymous. You can find us lurking in the acknowledgements pages of books when we don’t have “as told to” bylines, which we often don’t. (I’ve never asked for one, but then, I mainly write business books, not celebrity biographies.)

The best way to find a good one is probably to ask for a referral from another author. You can, of course, search LinkedIn and read recommendations here. Check out the books they’ve worked on. Read their blogs. Meet them (or have a video interview) and see if you click. Find out how they work and whether your subject is interesting to them. (The more interested they are, the better their writing will be.)

Then go on and enjoy a wonderful collaborative experience building something neither of you could have created alone.

I haven’t written much about ghost blogging lately, though plenty of others have, and I’ve bookmarked their posts here. I didn’t think I had anything new to contribute to the topic.

Anyway, I seem to be doing less blogging and more writing of other kinds for my longstanding ghost-blogging client, so my authority as a confessed ghost blogger might not be as great as it was. I’m not particularly hip to the industry trends, as it were, though I’m well aware of the ongoing controversy.

I had heard that there were people outsourcing the writing of their blogs to workers in India and Malaysia who charged $4/hr. This seems a bit counter to the idea of ghost-anything: no one is likely to think you’re the one writing the posts if the blogger is manifestly sub-literate in English.

Of course, you only care about things like that if the purpose of your blog is to establish your credibility in your field. For most consultants and coaches, it is. But there are other uses for blogs. One is to provide “spider food” for search engines and attract visitors to your website where they will then take usefully income-producing actions.

If the purpose of your blog is to get people to come click on ads, then it hardly matters if the posts are scarcely-coherent clusters of keywords. That’s why “splogging” is so pervasive. It works.

But if you hire some poor slob from Elance to keyword-stuff your own custom splog in order to get money from Google and Amazon, I’d think the last thing you’d want to do is show the thing off to your colleagues, because there’s no possible way it can enhance your credibility.

Yet someone I will not name did just that not an hour ago, posting a link to one such article to a professional group on LinkedIn. Now, there is some actual useful content in that article and the others on the blog. It’s just that very nearly any other possible source of that same information would be more readable and more credible.

In fact, I hope for his sake that no one else on LinkedIn actually reads his article, or if they do, they resist the urge to comment in the group’s discussion section.

But I really, really want to tell this guy to stop being so cheap and hire a blogger who can write. Only not me. I can tell this one is a job I wouldn’t want, even if weren’t already obvious that the blog’s owner wouldn’t pay my rates.

I guess it doesn’t take that many clicks to support paying $4/hr. But what’s it really doing for your business?

SpeakerNet News (part of the National Speakers’ Association) is hosting a teleseminar with Matt Holt from Wiley Publishing on December 16th, 2008.

From the SNN Website:

The Details:

Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Time: 7:00 pm Eastern (6 pm Central, 5 pm Mountain, 4 pm Pacific)
Length: ≈ 60 minutes
Cost: $25

The Program:

Matt Holt is one of the top five players in the business publishing world. He knows what sells. He knows what authors need to do to partner with publishers. He knows what annoys him. He will share the straight scoop that will save you lots of time and money from pitching the wrong book to the wrong people.

Many would-be authors think that once their book is in print, the publisher will push it to bestsellerhood. You are smart enough to know that isn’t true. Matt will discuss what you will be expected to do to market your book.

If you’ve considered proposing a business book to a major publisher, this is a must-hear session. Matt will cover what gets his attention and what gets tossed.

You will learn how to:

• Capture a top publisher’s attention
• Avoid common mistakes would-be authors make
• Submit a pithy proposal including key elements
• Help your book sell big
• Know when you will be expected to pay for editing, illustrations and promotion
• Market your book pre-publication

This is the kind of thing that gives ghostwriters a bad name: Merck wrote the studies for Vioxx and persuaded (or bribed) prominent doctors to sign them.

Perhaps if someone outside Merck had actually conducted and written the studies, the drug wouldn’t have been released unless it was safe, and Merck would have been spared its eventual recall.

There are times when it really does matter whether the person whose name is on a document is the one who wrote it. And there are times when the identity of the ghostwriter matters more than the identity of the author. If obscure doctors had conducted the Vioxx study and more prominent doctors had signed it, this would not have been much different from the common scientific practice of having the graduate students do all the work and the professor get top billing on the publication. It’s the fact that it was Merck’s employees who wrote the studies that invalidates the results.

The third quality you should look for in a prospective ghostwriter is the ability to mimic your writing style. Well known authors—particularly novelists—have distinctive writing styles, sometimes to the point that you can recognize their work even without seeing the name on the spine of the book. A ghostwriter has to be able to master many different styles of writing, to subsume his or her own “voice” into yours. It’s a bit like developing a good accent when learning a foreign language. A ghostwriter is not a “star” with a recognizable face, but more like the character actor you’ve seen in a dozen movies, never realizing all those parts were played by the same person.

Unless your prospective ghost already knows you well or you’ve worked together before, he probably won’t be able to write in your “voice” without hearing you talk and reading your writing. An experienced ghostwriter should be able to show you samples of work done in a range of different styles.

Note that in some cases the writer may need permission from clients to share this work, because either the work itself or the relationship with the client might be confidential. In such cases, be sure to ask for references who can attest to this ability.

If you’re interested in hiring someone who hasn’t worked as a ghost before, try asking her to rewrite a paragraph or two in the style of a famous writer: Shakespeare, or Stephen King, or Barbara Cartland, or anyone whose work is readily available and who has a distinctive style.

Continuing our series on how to find the best ghostwriter for your project, we move on to our second criterion for success, Active Listening.

The ability to listen to you—and more, to understand you—is important in any consultant you hire. A ghostwriter’s job is to “channel” your ideas. That means paying attention, taking notes, making recordings, and accurately reflecting back what you say. A good listener will ask pertinent questions about your project during the interview process.

Make sure to ask prospective ghosts to write something that demonstrates this ability. If you already have a rough draft and want a rewrite, ask the writers you’ve interviewed to rewrite a short section (250-500 words of a long document). If you want a series of newsletters, ask for a sample introductory issue (or article)—again, short enough not to give the impression you’re trying to get the work done for free. And always ask them to sum up the project itself—what you want them to do, who your audience is, and what you want to accomplish—in a few paragraphs.

If you don’t think “That’s exactly what I meant, but more so,” when you read their responses, you may need to keep looking. Don’t worry too much yet about how well the writer captures your “voice,” though: that’s something it takes time to perfect.