Ghostwriting is something that pretty much every freelancer is going to do at some point in their career.

And make no mistake – there’s major money to be made doing so if you play your cards right.

Since I’m all about helping you guys hit your freelance goals, this is the perfect topic for our next episode.

Today, we’re going to talk about ghostwriting: what it is, and what you should know before offering it as a service.

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Hey guys, welcome to Write Bites, a series of 10-minute episodes on writing, marketing, and freelancing. In this episode, I’m going to be answering the question: what is ghostwriting? And should you be doing ghostwriting as part of your freelance work?

So if you’ve never heard the term before, ghostwriting is essentially just writing that is done by someone other than the credited author.

For example, within my own work, I’ll often have pieces that are very data-heavy or require a bunch of examples that I don’t really want to spend the time to go and do.

In this scenario, I will hire a ghost writer to send me an initial first draft where they go through and find these examples and write up some initial ideas and insights.

In this context – and this is how ghostwriting should be done – they are fully aware that they are being hired for a ghostwriting project that they will not be credited on. And in my case, I will often end up rewriting almost all of the content – or at minimum about half of it.

Now some people will just hire people to come in and do fully ghostwritten pieces that they barely touch. And this is very common in the industry as well. Even when we talk about full-length books, most of the business books that you see are not written by the credited author.

And in any case where the subject matter expert is not a writer, but they want to create a thought leadership piece – which books tend to work very well as – they will hire a ghost writer to come in and take either their core ideas or come up with ideas of their own to create this book.

So it’s very common, all throughout writing. I would say probably 50% of the writing that you have read to this point in your life has been ghostwritten.

It’s a common part of writing.

It’s a very large segment of the freelancing world, so I just want to dive into it and talk about it.

It’s one of those things that when a lot of new writers first discover it, it throws them for a loop.

They’re not really sure how to engage with it because on the one hand you want to get credited. You want to put your name out there. But on the other hand, a lot of the paid work out there is looking for ghostwriters, not credited authors.

So how do you approach this?

You’re Probably Going To Do Both

First of all, I want you to understand that if you have a successful writing career, you will very likely do both.

You’ll do credited work. And you’ll do ghostwritten work. In fact, a lot of probably your biggest paychecks might even come from the ghostwritten work.

Just understand right up front that this is – and should be – a part of your portfolio.

Now where we can get into some, some weird areas are, a lot of times, people won’t really be up front about it. They’ll hire you for pieces and won’t say clearly “Hey, this is going to be ghostwritten. You will not be credited for this.”

That’s really where you run into issues: when either you or the client isn’t being upfront about expectations.

And so it’s important that, from the get go, you’re being clear with this.

Set Separate Rates For Credited & Uncredited Work