I just completed a ghostwriting project. Last year a fellow writer contacted me with an idea, wanting to know if I would ‘ghostwrite’ a book for him. He gave me a length and a price. I judged the length and the price would net me about $10 per hour, and found that palatable. When I told some other writers the price they thought I was selling my work cheap. Indeed, the writer contracting me thought it was a low offer. But, he was going to be self-publishing this, would be incurring numerous other expenses, and would have zero guarantee of a return on his investment. I had my own rationale for working at this rate. As it turned out, I made $15 per an hour, paid on delivery. This came out to about trade magazine rate.

I had self-published in the 1980s and lost money even though the item sold 1,700 copies.

I recently tried to self-publish a print book through a subsidiary of Penguin, iUniverse, who took my money and ran. $500 [my entire life savings] and I don’t have a single page in print to show for it. I seem to be woefully short on Hebrews in suits to send after these people.

The Fighting Edge earned me 25 cents per an hour in royalties. But I was a learning writer, struggling with the keyboard.

The Logic of Steel I cranked out in a fraction of the time and have since received $14.17 dollars per hour in royalties.

The Broken Dance cost me about 10,000 hours of my life in reading, research and writing, for a net loss thus far of $740.

The website is a break-even proposition, barely paying for itself.

So, $10-15 per hour, I’m in brother.

1. I had written a lot of mini-autobiographies for people as part of the Harm City project. That process is heavily dependent on the interview. I could not imagine writing an autobiography without extensive interviews. This, however, was a concept book. I immediately looked to the strengths of this fact; the greatest being that this author had the ability to write this, he just did not have the time. For a magazine writer like this his first book can seem like an un-scalable mountain. I was once a successful magazine writer, indeed now crank out two articles a day on my own site. But, a book, that is an order of magnitude change which brings up all of a writer’s deepest fears and frustrations. This author looked at my output, noticed that I do numerous books a year, and decided to tap into that. My first order of business was to tap into his knowledge base; mine him as my research. I had him e-mail me everything he had written as a starting point.

2. You need to have a voice conversation with the person you are ghosting for, so that you can get their emotion for the project. It is also a chance to take their concept, bundle up little ideas you have for the execution, and shoot it back to them in a format where you can get their tone, not just their considered opinion.

3. After your voice conference e-mail him and request an outline—not a synopsis. What we are taught in school, that you give a three sentence description of the book and then a three sentence description of every chapter, is bullshit. It is exhausting for most people, takes up valuable writing effort, and is really a road block. I gave him the following instructions: “I need a title, a subtitle, and a table of contents. That is it. Don’t sweat it. If you can’t come up with a chapter, it is not needed. No pressure. I’ll take the heat. That is what you are paying me for.”

Through the course of the above process you need to compare his written material with his spoken words and his e-mails, which will carry three different tones. The e-mail is probably the most spontaneous in terms of ideas. The spoken words are the most authentic to his character. The writing represents his unsuccessful attempt to transfer his spoken persona and ideas to the page. It is your job to take his actual voice, his ideas, and his feelings, and work it into written from, while retaining the structured concepts that he managed to put down in the title, subtitle, and table of contents.

If his writing thus far had rung true to his ear, he would not have hired you. I was fortunate in that my subject sent me extensive articles and journals, as well as recordings of him speaking on the subject of the book.

The first step in achieving his voice for him is to find out where you and he come together in tone. For instance, I am a smartass in writing, but generally pretty solemn in my personal life. This fellow used no humor in his writing. I decided, right off the bat, to drop my humor—and edit it out later where it became intrusive—and tap into how we were alike in our tone and vision.

The next step was the clutch one, and it earned me a bonus. We had agreed that I would submit a first chapter, free of charge, and be paid for each chapter thereafter. The first chapter was conceptual, which permitted me to tap into his passion. He e-mailed me back that ‘he was blown away’ and sent a bonus payment. A key aspect to accomplishing this was to look for his beliefs as expressed in his writing, and then amplify them, either by condensing the passage, or developing it, as required.

From here on out, any time I would feel like I was losing his voice, like I was writing as me again, I went back and read that chapter, in which I had successfully captured a word picture of his passion for his book, and related it in a voice that he felt was more ‘his’ voice than what he had managed to put on paper.

The difficult aspect about this project was projecting completion dates for the various chapters. It is more time consuming to write as another person, than it is to write as yourself. I feel that my fiction writing helped me immensely in accomplishing this. Even so, it was difficult to switch gears from my voice to my version of his voice. Keep this in mind when agreeing to a deadline. Give yourself twice the time you would for your own creation. This takes the energy level of writing a historical character in fiction. Writing historical characters is tougher than writing the ones you create. Ghostwriting might have aspects of fiction writing, but it is tougher.

The one thing that really helps the deadline is that this is not your creation. If you can’t decide on a direction within a section, e-mail him for a clarification. You two are sharing the heat, sharing the responsibility, making this possible for each other. Do not forget that this is a team effort.

The most functional part about this aspect, that it amounts to you helping him realize his vision, is that you will not be tempted to expand it—unless you are an asshole. You must avoid all temptations to expand on his concept, which is much easier than resisting the impulse to expand your own work, emotionally involved in it as you are. If he hired you to write a short history of drinking stout in Boston, avoid all temptations to expand the book to include New York or lager. One of the biggest saps on a novice writer’s energy is the struggle to expand or not expand on their seed idea. This is commonly called ‘writer’s block’.

You must be the professional, the person who agrees to write a short story about the author’s obsession with drinking stout in Boston, knowing that you will, at all costs, keep that story under 7,501 words, unless he says, ‘I would like to pay you more to turn this into a novelette.’

I am thrilled and honored to have been hired and paid to write a book for another author. I have come to identify myself first and foremost as a writer, before I even identify myself as a human, or a man. Indeed, writing ultimately means not caring if you are dead or alive when the work is read. It is an odd pursuit that was once the province of the shaman, the sorcerer, the priest.

Writing in anonymity permitted me to leave myself behind and focus on this craft, this thing called writing. The opportunity to live as a ghost before my end, untimely or not, was most welcome, even sublime.

I was shocked to find this article on the most read list on the backend of the site. I write so much that I often forget what I have written, which does incidentally help me edit it more effectively down the road. When a piece rises up into the top 2.5% of the site content I reread it in an attempt to make sure I purge any typos before the reads begin to rise higher. Although I did not find a typo, I do have something to add. The author that contracted me to ghostwrite his book contacted me a couple weeks ago and e-mailed, "James, I have been rereading the book and it is just so much better than I had thought it would be. I'm totally going to devote myself to making sure it is the best it can be. I'm so proud of this."

I reminded him that I would stand by my promise to proof it for free when he is done editing it. It is important that I not edit this work. He needs time to massage it and infuse as much of his enthusiasm for the subject as he can. As much as I resented the imposition on my own creations when I devoted a day out of my writing week to this mercenary project, I am now glad that I rented my time to help another writer achieve his vision, and learn a bit more about myself in the process.

James' book on writing, Saving the World Sucks, is available at the link below.