RL Stine

Franklin W. Dixon

James Patterson

Besides being people whom I’ve followed to their homes late at night for an unsolicited interview, these are authors well known for implementing ghostwriters. They, like many others, hire people to write for them and release their work without attribution. In fact, Franklin W. Dixon is a completely fabricated person entirely, which explains why the Franklin W. Dixon I followed shot at my car tires when I wouldn’t stop honking in his driveway. Ghost writing can be a great source of work for an aspiring author, and from singers who dropped out of middle school to businesses that, as a guiding principle, dehumanize all their employees, there’s a high demand for a competent ghost writer. We’ll look at the pros and cons of ghost writing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Before we get started, I should point out that if you are reading this article in the year 2027 or later, you can adjust your stillsuit that climate change has forced you to wear and move on to the next video, because it’s almost certain that AI has rendered all this information completely useless. This article is solely for those in the narrow window between 2024 and 2027, who still have some time to earn a little extra cash before the billionaire class unleashes their sentries to exterminate anyone making less than 50k a year.

All right, so this article will be broken into three parts: reasons to be a ghostwriter, career paths for a ghostwriter and some general advice in how to find work as a ghost writer.

Reasons to Be a Ghostwriter

The first thing you might be thinking is: John, I became a writer to become famous, so people would respect me, so everyone in high school would finally have to apologize for selling me a crushed-up bag of poison ivy and telling me it’s weed. Why the hell would I want to write a book without my name on it?

Well, for starters, fame can be a double-edged sword. For every kind, adoring fan, there will be another who pours maple syrup all over your windshield because you won’t grant him an interview for his book blog. Let’s look at some other reasons.

Reason 1: You’ll Probably Make More Than You Would On Your Own

If you’re watching this video, you’ve probably haven’t even made enough money writing this year to buy the rope to make the noose to hang yourself for your constant failure. Youth, inexperience, an overcrowded self-publishing market and ugliness are all big obstacles to overcome. But people will consume anything released by a celebrity. They’ll listen to any corporate speaker who they think will make them richer.

A successful ghost writer can easily earn 50K for a book-length project. I didn’t earn that much from my own books until two decades into my career, when I coincidentally came up with a book title identical to another popular work at the time.

Reason 2: You’ll Learn the Business

Most writers think that writing is done in alone, in a cozy bedroom, with a nice cup of tea or coffee on the desk, a loaded pistol at your side just in case. But the majority of a writer’s work is done in office buildings, it’s in done in conference rooms and it’s done with the piles of human excrement that are literary agents and publishers. As an unknown, these people wouldn’t even take the time to spit on you, but as a ghostwriter you can make connections and learn to manipulate them in the hopes that someday, you might publish something under your own name.

Reason 3: You Can Learn Other Voices Besides Your Own

This one’s tricky because to start as a ghost writer, you have to already be able to do this to some extent. Experience has taught me that, for example, corporate blogs about risk management in finance don’t like jokes about sucking dick for meth. (The Wolf of Wall Street lied to me). But, in any case, your skills as a writer will grow and develop as you’ll need to adopt a different voice for each client.

Career Paths for a Ghostwriter

When most people think of ghostwriters, they think of celebrity autobiographies. There’re a lot of reasons a celebrity or politician might use a ghostwriter: some are lazy, some are downright illiterate, some have busy schedules and can’t take time away from tweeting about how immigrants are poisoning our blood. Or they might just need someone who actually knows and can convincingly describe what consensual sex with a woman feels like.

You have other options, though.

For example, Alan Dean Foster got his start ghostwriting the novelization of Star Wars under George Lucas’s name, before piggbacking off this success and becoming the patron saint of 70s, 80s and 90s science fiction novelizations under his own name. I tried a similar thing recently, but it turned out Dune already was a book.

You can also write: blog posts for tech companies, speeches for firearms manufacturers after a mass shooting occurs, online course materials for educational institutions that want people to know not all slaveowners were bad and film scripts for North Korean cinema.

How to Succeed As A Ghostwriter

Step 1: Build your portfolio

While it’s not as much of a struggle as proving to a Big Six publisher that your book will sell, you still need to prove to the client that you can write. Starting a blog or website is a good start. It could be on any topic, really: gardening, investment strategies, a guide to age of consent laws around the world.

Guest blogging is the next step. You’ll need to build some ties in the community. Though I wasn’t a ghostwriter, I did a lot of guest blogging in the early days of blogs just to hone my skills and do a little self-promotion. I mainly wrote about how to have a successful marriage and I had a lot of fun doing it until I had to stop once my first wife went missing.

Step 2: Read all legal documents carefully

If you do land a client, it’s important to have your lawyer pore over all the contracts. Many celebrities and organizations will make you sign NDAs or follow specific guidelines in the project. Maybe, for example, you aren’t allowed to mention that Willem Dafoe is descended from swamp people.

Step 3: Publish long-form content

Finally, if you want to make the big bucks, you’ll need to ghostwrite a full-length book, but you’ll need to prove you can do that in the first place. Self-publishing a novel shows you have the focus and commitment to devote to a several-month project.

The aforementioned James Patterson hires ghostwriters to write full-length novels. In fact, because I had so much experience writing thrillers and crime fiction, I almost considered working for him. This was after my second divorce, when I needed some spare cash for booze money. But I chickened out at the last second because I was worried James would eventually find out I was the one who kept putting print-outs of his office floorplan in his mailbox.