The Author-izer

Archive for the ‘Ghostwriting’ Category

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.

When you hire a ghostwriter to help you with a project, it’s your name and reputation on the line. If you’ve never worked with a ghost before, you might think the most important thing is to find a good writer.

But most people who stay in business as professional writers can write competently, grammatically—even brilliantly. Just as not all great performers make great teachers, it takes more than good English or publishing credits to create a successful ghost/author relationship. You may find yourself having to choose between several candidates with impeccable credentials and solid references. Here are some criteria to help you choose the right ghost for you.

1. Compatibility

It may seem strange to put “compatibility” at the top of this list, but the relationship a ghostwriter has with a client—particularly when writing memoirs and autobiography—is an intimate one. Your ghost has to be able to get inside your head. That means spending a lot of time together. If you wouldn’t want to invite this person to dinner with your family, how do you think you’re going to make it through months of close collaboration?

It’s a good idea to meet with prospective ghostwriters in person before you make any hiring decisions. You can schedule the interview either after you look at writing samples and check references, or before. If you can’t meet in person, try to arrange a video chat. Services like Skype (www.skype.com) and Oovoo (www.oovoo.com) let you do this for free, as long as you have a webcam and a microphone.

Today is the last day to get a free copy of Marketing Sherpa’s 80-page report (regular price US$127) How to Get Your Business Book Published. If it’s still November 27, 2007 as you read this, go download your copy of the report right now and don’t wait to finish reading this post. If it’s too late and you want to know whether to pony up the $127, read on.

The report starts with an examination of what writing a business book is good for your career and covers everything from agents, publishers, contracts, and marketing to—yes—working with a ghostwriter. It concludes with four sample book proposals from successfully published books.

Examples like this are always worth having, because every author, even those who self-publish, should have a proposal. These are recent examples, so they give you a good idea of what you need to know and do to make your book succeed in today’s saturated publishing world. The report also provides contact information for business book agents (rarer and harder to find than agents for fiction) and publishers.

Marketing Sherpa’s recommendations and warnings are consistent with those in RainToday’s 2006 Business Book Publishing Reports (well worth reading, if you haven’t seen them yet). There’s plenty of fresh, original material here, though, and it’s presented in a very accessible way. Two of my favorite sections are those on agent turn-offs and myths about publishing.

And what does Marketing Sherpa think about hiring a ghostwriter? The best way to sum it up is probably “When it is good, it is very very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid.” And naturally I’m in full accord with their conclusion:

As in most things, you get what you pay for when it comes to hiring ghost writers. Professional, experienced writers charge more than, say, a graduate student majoring in writing—spend the money to go with the professional. You’ll save time and money in the long run—the better the work, the less rewriting and editing you’ll do. Expect to spend at least $5,000 (it could be much more) for a 250-page book.

While it may seem that the ghost does all the work while you get all the credit, that’s not the case. You’ll need to work closely with the ghost writer from the beginning to be certain that everything you want to say will be included. You will probably want to at least provide the writer with an outline, and will certainly want to spend some time giving the writer background on the subject. Then, once the copy is written, you need to make sure everything is exactly the way you want. You must copyedit, fact-check, and revise—or have the ghost revise—until the book is perfect. Remember, it’s your name on the book.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Yes! And no.

Since I offer visitors to my website the prospect of a book in 3-6 months, I thought I should address the questions of when, whether, and how it’s possible to produce a full-length book so quickly.

At the recent BACN Publishing Panel, Dr. Bette Daoust said that it takes her 32 hours to write a book. You could hear the gasps of astonishment from the audience. She quickly qualified the statement by pointing out three things:

1. That time is only for writing, not for research or editing. The research (gathering of relevant articles) may take months, not counting the years of experience that create the author’s expertise.
2. It takes 32 hours to write the first draft. Few writers actually want their first drafts published.
3. As the author of 150 books, Dr. Daoust is a practiced writer; first-time authors can expect to spend three times that on their first draft, even if they have all their ducks in a row.

When I was a young, energetic graduate student, I researched and wrote a 300,000 word quasi-historical fantasy adventure novel during our four-month summer break. That’s several times as long as any business book. (In fact, 300,000 words is really too long to be one novel; I decided a few years later, when I got nowhere with publishers, to divide it into two books and add a couple of chapters to the shorter section, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.)

Even though I’m not young and energetic anymore, generating reams of text is not a problem—as long as I know in advance what I want to say.

Start by Proposing

That’s where the research comes in. Whether you’re writing your own book or someone else’s, you have to gather a lot of source material before starting to write. You also have to go through the proposal process, to find out who the book’s intended market is, what the author’s goal for the book is, which books are comparable, etc and so on. I advise even authors who know from the beginning that they’re going to self-publish to write book proposals, because by the time you’ve done all that preparation, actually writing the book is almost an afterthought.

It can take longer to create a good proposal, with its marketing plan, hook, handle, outline, and sample chapters, than it does to write the rest of the book. Again, it depends on how well-prepared you are. Patricia Fry, author of How to Write a Successful Book Proposal in 8 Days or Less, explains the value of book proposals on WBJB Radio and Authors Access.

Source Material

Part of preparing to write—and thus being able to write quickly—is getting your source material together. You might collect relevant magazine articles and web pages over the course of a few months. Make sure you have them where you can get to them, and that you go over them to decide where you want to include them. You should also collect any short articles you’ve published that you want to include or expand on. And if you have illustrations or figures of any kind already picked out, you’ll need to get those together, as well.

If you have recordings of yourself giving presentations and leading workshops, get them transcribed. If you don’t have them, start making them. They’ll save you from reinventing the wheel. You can get a digital recorder for less than $100; for a little more, you can get one that comes bundled with voice-to-text software. (This technology is much better than it used to be, but you’ll still need a human to go over and correct it.) If you want, you can produce your entire first draft by talking rather than writing.

If you’re working with a ghostwriter, s/he will probably record interviews with you, as well as making use of any recordings or transcriptions you already have. It can be useful to hear the original audio as well as having the text to work with, but you’ll almost certainly lose time and money if you ask your ghostwriter to do the transcription. There are specialized services that will do it faster and cheaper if you don’t want to go the software route.

If, instead of planning for a few years to write before you sit down at your keyboard, you get struck by a mental lightning bolt one day and conclude that you need a book now, you can condense your research and preparation period. It may mean some long days at the library and on the Internet, not to mention in front of the microphone, either presenting to an audience or getting interviewed by a writer, but you should be able to manage the research inside a month if you can take time off from your regular business to do so.

Time Off

One reason many authors decide they really don’t need a book in 3 months, or even 6, is the fact that they have businesses to run, or day jobs, which mean they can’t devote long hours to writing. Of course, that’s also one reason to hire a ghostwriter, but as long as you want it to be your book, you have to put time in on it. So you might take a couple of weeks off to fill in the gaps in your research and to do interviews, then hand your source material to the writer.

After that, you can concentrate on your work for the next month while s/he writes the first draft. Then you’ll need at least another week or two off in order to make revisions, unless you don?t require sleep. And so on through as many revisions as the book requires (at least one more).

So that’s at least two months. Once you think of the book as “finished,” you’ll need to give the manuscript, preferably in hard copy, to someone who’s never seen it before. This can be a professional proofreader, or just a friend with an eagle eye and a handy red pen. You’ll be amazed at how many typos and other small errors you, your writer, and the spelling checker missed.

Once you fix those last problems (and the ghostwriter, or even your assistant, can on that part for you), you can turn the book over to the publisher, designer,or book packager. If you’re self-publishing, either via Print on Demand or through a more traditional printer, you need to have someone do the layout and typesetting. It’s best to hire someone who is experienced with book design—both the principles and the software—rather than an all-purpose graphic designer. If you’re working with a traditional publisher, they’ll take care of this part for you. (I can recommend a book designer, if you’re looking for one.)

A Real-Life Example

It took me 60 hours to do the first draft of a client’s book, using her blog posts as raw material; that would be just about exactly a month for me if I were working on it “full time.” But I wasn�t working on it full time, and neither was she. She actually started writing the blog in August of 2005 and concluding in October of 2006. Writing the blog posts took her roughly 1-2 hours apiece.

I started collecting and organizing the blog posts at the end of 2005 and finished the first draft in June of 2007. A lot of what both of us did during that process was eliminate duplication. She’d made several points in more than one blog post, and we needed to consolidate all that material. If she’d written all of them at once, it would have been easier for her to remember what she’d already covered—but impossible for her to do any work for her clients.

She then put in 6 hours a day reviewing and revising that first draft, and sent it back to me on July 8th, 2007. It took only until July 15th (less than 12 hours of actual billed time) for me to read over the second draft, make corrections, and send back the third draft.

Now the publisher, who is also acting as proofreader, is asking for a number of changes in the details, so it may be a few more weeks before the book goes to press. (When it does, I’ll be sure to announce it here so that you can buy it.)

The Bottom Line

My total time on this project, including some research, was 78 hours. My client’s time was probably double that, or more. (Since she wasn’t billing it out, she didn’t track it.) Spread over the course of 18 months, it was a manageable task and a manageable expense. The book, at 110,000 words, is on the longer side; you can get away with half that for a business book, if you can say what you need to say.

If we hadn’t taken breaks in between working on the book, we might have spent fewer total hours on it due to the momentum of staying immersed in the material.

Nevertheless, 78 hours is a fairly quick job. My client saved herself money by investing so much time on the project herself. A typical ghostwriting project, which involves quite a lot of interviewing and research time as well as the writing and revising, can easily take 200 hours. Any collection of source material is going to need consolidating. Writing someone else’s book can be more time-consuming than writing your own, and sometimes revising a client’s first draft also takes longer than just writing it yourself.

But if I do the math on 200 hours, that’s still only 4 months, beginning to end, if I work on that book to the exclusion of everything else. And my client might need one week off each of those months to devote to the book, and another couple of weeks after my job is done to handle issues of publishing and printing.

Marketing time, of course, is something else entirely. But as the person whose name is on the book, you’re the one who has to do most of the marketing.

There’s been a veritable storm of discussion in the blogosphere lately on the topic of ghost blogging. Despite the number of people weighing in on the subject, very little new is being said. The great bulk of commentators—many of whom are PR professionals who’ve made up quotes and attributed them to their clients without batting an eyelash—strongly oppose ghost blogging. A few others say that hiring someone else to write your blog is fine, as long as you disclose that fact clearly. After all, transparency is one of the key principles of the blogosphere.

The Story So Far

So, speaking of disclosure, I’ll repeat what I’ve said several times in other articles and in comments on blog posts. For the last two years (almost), I’ve been retained by a client who must remain nameless to ghostwrite blog posts.

The blog in question isn’t a “personal voice” blog. It’s not meant to be the CEO’s personal insights or reflections on the business. It’s what I think of as an “article blog,” one with posts about material relevant to what my client does. I’m not writing in any particular “voice” when I write these blog posts. Given the nature of the job, I don’t really have time to. Given the nature of the blogosphere, I’m not sure I’d want to.

If I remember correctly, the initial posting about the job was asking for bloggers, and didn’t mention anything about the attribution of the posts. It was clear enough by the time I got hired, however, that what I wrote would go out under someone else’s name and that I was not to disclose my relationship to the company. It’s kind of a pity, because it means I can’t point people to the blog, because I don’t feel I can endorse the company or its blog without disclosing my relationship.

I’ve suggested to them that it would be in their own interest to include a statement somewhere on the website that they get professional help writing their blog, but so far they haven’t chosen to do that. My concern is not publicity for myself: I wouldn’t benefit professionally by becoming known as an expert on my client’s subject matter, and I don’t want to be pigeonholed as “the X company blogger.” I just don’t want my client’s use of ghost bloggers (there are several of us, though I don’t know any of the others) to backfire on them if they get found out.

The Practical Problem

A couple of weeks ago, Tony Kontzner called to interview me for his Investors Business Daily article about ghost blogging. (The article has the rather provocative title “Writing blogs can be hard, so get help,” and does not quote me.) I told him what I tell everybody: that writing in someone else’s voice takes time and close collaboration, and it would be less work for CEOs to write their own blog posts and have someone else edit them for spelling and punctuation than to have a writer interview them every day for the blog and then have to go over what was written and correct any inaccuracies or statements that don’t ring true.

It seems not everyone shares my attitude to this. Kontzner’s article features a couple of web developers who hire teams of writers to produce posts for their clients, in response to an increasing demand. (It would appear that this demand is coming to PR agencies and web developers more than it is to writers themselves. Most people who contact me still want books written.)

But even they admit that if the blog is going to be convincing, the client has to participate and approve the posts. My ghost blogging client (and I only have the one) goes over every post I send and sometimes revises it a bit before publishing. They also answer their comments themselves.

Is There Really a Difference?

One question people like Mitch Joel are asking is whether there’s any practical or moral difference between hiring a speechwriter and hiring a ghost blogger. Or, for that matter, between ghost blogging and other forms of ghostwriting. After all, if there’s something innately reprehensible about hiring a ghost blogger, why should it be acceptable to hire a speechwriter? If authenticity is important, why are PR professionals still making up quotes from CEOs to put into their press releases? Why are celebrities paid millions for “autobiographies” they didn’t write a word of? Why should blogs get singled out?

As I said above, there’s a practical difference between writing blog posts and writing other things. Blogs, in general, are short, topical, and timely. That means less opportunity for the writer to convey the author’s real ideas or voice. It’s actually a much tougher job than ghostwriting a book.

But is there an ethical difference? Not that I can see. In all these cases, there’s a client who lacks either skill with language or time to write, and a professional who has both, and an exchange of value for money which is not noticeably different from paying someone else to clean your house rather than doing it yourself. Except for one thing, which is that most people don’t take credit for their housekeeper’s work.

Most ghostwriting clients don’t really take credit for the writing, either. The “ghost” gets credit somewhere, either on the front cover in an “as told to” byline, or in the acknowledgements using a euphemism like “I’d like to thank X for assistance with writing.” People who are experienced with the publishing industry know to look for these things.

The blogosphere is a fairly new arena of operations for businesses. It has different codes, standards, and conventions from the ordinary business world. It doesn’t have any established conventions for giving credit to ghostwriters, for instance. Dan York argues that this is likely to change: as more businesses enter the blogosphere, the definition of acceptable behavior will change, just as it did when businesses started putting up websites. He concludes by saying:

Those blogs will even “sound” human… just as good speechwriters today can create speeches in the style of the speaker, so too will ghost bloggers take on the style of the blog “author”. Blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc. will just be part of the communication plan… and in many cases will sadly spew out the same bland corporate drivel that caused so many of us to celebrate the changes brought so far by social media. I hold onto the perhaps vain hope that those blogs, podcasts and other vehicles that do speak with “authentic” human voices will rise to the top.

What Is Authenticity?

I happen to agree with those who advocate disclosure and even those who say that it’s best for the company if the CEO (or some other employee, if the CEO isn’t the best choice) writes the blog rather than hiring someone else to create the content. I’m definitely in favor of direct contact between the customers and the people who run the corporation.

But the fact is, a lot of CEOs do speak “bland corporate drivel.” That’s the way they’ve been trained to speak, and they never let down their guard. And there are plenty of “honest” blogs which are only of interest to the writer and perhaps a handful of friends. (And let’s not even mention the barely-literate blogs and the spewing-invective blogs and the “I just needed something to put next to the AdSense so I’ll steal random bits of other people’s writing” blogs.)

It isn’t the identity of the writer that makes the difference. It’s the writer’s ability to communicate. Above all, it’s the writer’s ability to listen. No one can ghostwrite competently without doing a lot of listening and asking questions in order to unpack meaning when something is unclear. The ghost’s job is to become a channel for the client’s thoughts—and sometimes a lens that focuses them. That means getting your own personality and your own writing style out of the way. It means studying your client the way an actor would study a part for a film or a play, and then interpreting your client for readers the way that actor interprets Shakespeare for an audience.

Putting the Audience First

Back in my former life as an academic, I used to translate Greek and Roman drama for the stage. We used to argue about what constituted an “authentic” performance of a Greek tragedy. Was it more authentic to attempt to reproduce the theater, masks, and costumes, and to use the original language, or to translate the play and adapt it to modern performance conventions?

I always came down on the side of trying to achieve the same impact as the original performance. Sophocles, after all, was writing in a language his audience understood, about subjects his audience knew well, using stagecraft that they took for granted. When he produced his plays, he used those conventions to make a connection. A modern performance which tried to duplicate the original exactly wouldn’t make the same connection, because a modern director can’t duplicate the ancient audience.

Ghostwriting is a lot like translating for the stage. The writer needs to make a connection between the client and the audience/readers/customers, and to do it while being true to both parties. The resulting document, whether it’s a speech, a book, or a blog post, has to present the client’s real thoughts and ideas—in a way that the audience can understand them.

Not many brilliant scientists are brilliant at speaking to the general public. Specialists (including ancient theater professors) are accustomed to talking primarily to their peers, and use a lot of jargon. They also tend to assume that people already know things, because those things seem so obvious to them.

Business is not always too different: the engineers who build the product may not be the best people to explain why the customers should buy it. But if the customers can’t understand what the product can do for them, the engineers have no reason to build it. If they don’t know how to put the benefits into words, they need to find someone who does.

So How Does This Relate to Blogging?

Even though I work as one, I don’t think hiring a ghost blogger is the best strategy for a company that wants a blog. There are too many viable alternatives. An articulate employee who isn’t the CEO can write the blog and become the voice of the company. (That’s what Robert Scoble did, after all.) The company can hire a freelancer to write the blog in her own name. (Stonyfield Farms did.) A CEO who hates to write or is dyslexic might choose to podcast instead.

After all, there’s no law requiring companies to blog. As for the love affair search engines have with blogs, a company will get just as much Google juice out of publishing unattributed articles using blog software as it will by having the CEO blog. You don’t need to hire a ghostwriter just because you want content; you can go to any of the article banks on the Web and get it for free.

If you really want a blog, at least try writing it for yourself. But don’t assume that hiring a ghostwriter automatically precludes authenticity. If you don’t look at what I wrote and say “That’s exactly what I meant, but I didn’t know how to say it,” I haven’t done my job. Ghostwriting at its best preserves the author’s authentic voice while it translates it into a new medium. And that should be true whatever form the writing takes: books, speeches, and yes, even blogs.