If you want to be a ghostwriter, be prepared to work for a clientele of expensive, high-end services. Today, it takes something in the neighborhood of the ballpark of figures in the range of five to ten to fifty thousand dollars to hire a great book ghostwriter. You can hire a book editor, book doctor, or book coach for much less than that. Publishing prices and helping yourself to write your book cost much less.

I myself have worked directly on over 50 book manuscripts for a wide variety of client authors. I don’t do scripts; I have edited them and do an adequate job but you really need to know the movie industry to create the best screenplays and screenplays. So I leave that kind of project to experts, optional writers and television produced writers, who are on our team. My specialty is books.

I can get a great book reviewed and edited for an author client without having to worry about whether or not it’s poorly written, has grammar or syntax problems, or is colorful enough to catch the attention of a literary agent. Well, that’s one way of saying it. To be honest, I work my ass off to produce the best manuscript I can give to each of my author clients, and that can mean working like a dog at times. It depends. Some clients give me easy background notes, book outlines, chapter-by-chapter outlines, I’m the one who requests them from each client, and some clients don’t. They need to write a full manuscript and have me edit it for them, or advise them to write it, or modify an existing manuscript by doing content editing and/or development for them.

So when you’re a book ghostwriting service, you can handle both ends. When it comes to scripts and screenplays, I have other people working on them. I think the right thing to do is to specialize for a while, and then when you’re bored, it’s time to move on to a different specialty. I know a ghostwriter who got tired of writing screenplays, so he switched to writing prose and editing book manuscripts. It does not hurt to leave one field and enter another. I started out editing people’s book manuscripts for free, also at low cost, and then got into the field of book ghostwriting services in the early 2000s. It’s been a lot of fun for me and a real roller coaster.

My dream is to continue getting authors’ clients to the right book agents and commercial book publishers. It’s more than a dream, I’m capable of it. I have people on our team who take care of that and have the right connections. But I’d like to eventually switch to doing that myself one day. It is more lucrative. A book ghostwriter on our team got a $75,000 advance for a book for which she only wrote the proposal and inquiry letter. The book was published and sold quite well. She used the down payment to make a down payment on her new house.

She is very kind and always willing to adapt to the needs and desires of her clients. But she won’t accept the “wrong types” of non-marketable book projects. Only the ones that she sees as potential winners, who have a great chance of being properly marketed. So I need to get into that field myself some day in the future. Right now, I’m taking it more easy, mostly working with writers, editors, marketers, and others on our team, and trying to get my own three books published, the ones I wrote myself. I smuggled one of my author client’s books into the Library of Congress, early in my career, and we have placed several more there over the years.

I have listed my books on Google Books, Smashwords, Amazon, bookstores, and many of my author clients have been published on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, other media outlets, physical stores, online sites, and the Public Library System, as well as Worldwide. Our books and some of mine have landed in France, Great Britain, Rwanda, China, Canada, Germany, Spain, South America… it’s more of the glamorous side, the life of a book ghostwriter who runs the services of her ghostwriting. But there are also many pitfalls and drawbacks. The main one is to get enough advertising to attract customers. The second most important aspect is finding ways to get our author clients to sign a firm contract and then stick with the project. Soon I will write another article on those two topics, I promise!