To become a ghostwriter, you need prose that can take on another person's voice, the interviewing skill to draw that voice out of them, and a few samples that prove both. Most ghostwriters start with short pieces for people they already know (op-eds, speeches, LinkedIn posts, book proposals) and move up to books through referrals, agents, agencies and marketplaces. On rates, the Editorial Freelancers Association's 2026 chart puts book-length ghostwriting at roughly 25 cents to $1 a word, and the agency Gotham Ghostwriters quotes $30,000 to more than $300,000 for a full nonfiction book.
What a ghostwriter actually does
A ghostwriter writes something that another person publishes under their own name: a memoir, a business book, a keynote, a newsletter, a year of LinkedIn posts. The client supplies the substance (the stories, the expertise, the opinions) and approves every page. The ghostwriter supplies the structure and the sentences, and makes the result sound like the client on a good day.
It is an ordinary arrangement, including at the top of the bestseller list. J. R. Moehringer ghostwrote Phil Knight's Shoe Dog (2016) and Prince Harry's Spare (2023). Executives, doctors, coaches and politicians hire ghostwriters for the same reason they hire accountants: they have the knowledge, not the hours or the craft.
| Role | Who writes the words | Usual credit |
|---|---|---|
| RoleGhostwriter | Who writes the wordsThe writer, from the client's material | Usual creditNone, or the acknowledgments |
| RoleCollaborator | Who writes the wordsThe writer, often openly | Usual credit"With" or "and" on the cover |
| RoleDevelopmental editor | Who writes the wordsThe author; the editor shapes | Usual creditAcknowledgments |
| RoleBook coach | Who writes the wordsThe author, with guidance | Usual creditUsually none |
The line between ghostwriting and developmental editing is who drafts the sentences. If the client drafts and you restructure, you are editing. If you draft from their interviews, you are ghostwriting, and the fee should reflect it.
On a book, the work runs in a fairly fixed order: a discovery call, a plan or proposal, a run of recorded interviews, an outline the client signs off, chapter drafts, two or three rounds of revision, and a final manuscript. Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency that matches writers with clients, puts most nonfiction books at six to twelve months from start to finish.
The skills clients pay for
Clean prose gets you considered. What clients pay for is the rest:
- Interviewing. Most of a ghostwritten book comes out of recorded conversations. You need questions that get past the client's polished anecdotes to the actual scene: the date, the room, what was said. "Tell me about the day you quit" gets a better answer than "What's your leadership philosophy?"
- Hearing a voice. Every client has a tone of voice: sentence length, pet phrases, how formal they are, whether they joke. You catch it from transcripts, emails and recorded talks, write it down, and hold it for 60,000 words.
- Structure. Clients arrive with material, not a book. You decide what the book argues or what story it tells, what goes in which chapter, and what to leave out, which is usually most of it.
- Reliability. Clients hire a ghostwriter because they are busy. Hitting dates is much of why they recommend you.
- Discretion. You will hear about money, marriages and company trouble. Some of it can't go in the book, and none of it can go anywhere else.
Write the voice down in a one-page sheet, and keep a style sheet beside it for names, dates and spellings. Here is what a voice sheet looks like after the first three interviews:
Dana Ruiz, owner of a 40-person heating and cooling company, writing for owners of small trade businesses.
- Short sentences, rarely past 20 words. Often opens with "Look," or "Here's the thing."
- Numbers, not adjectives: "We lost $38,000 that winter," never "we struggled."
- Calls her technicians "my guys" and customers "folks." Never "clients."
- Jokes at her own expense, never at a customer's.
- Avoid: business-school words ("synergy," "stakeholders") and anything that sounds like a keynote.
And here is the job itself, from transcript to page:
Transcript: "So the first winter, um, we basically, I mean we took every call, every single call, and the guys were out till midnight, and then in March the accountant says, you know, we lost thirty-eight grand. Doing all that work."
On the page: The first winter, we took every call. Every single one. My guys were out until midnight, and in March our accountant told me we'd lost $38,000. All that work, and we'd paid for the privilege.
How to find your first clients
Few clients hand a $50,000 book to a writer with no track record. They hire someone for a $1,500 op-ed, like the result, and come back. So the usual path is a ladder, and the first rungs are short.
- Pick a lane
Choose one kind of client and one kind of writing: memoirs for retirees, books for founders, speeches for nonprofit directors. A lane tells people who to send you, and lets every sample point the same way.
- Build samples under your own name
Your best ghostwriting will sit behind a confidentiality clause, so build a public portfolio first: essays, reported articles, or a sample chapter in the genre you want. These writing portfolio examples show how to present them.
- Take short paid jobs from people you know
A former manager's op-ed, a founder's newsletter, a keynote for a board member. Ask in writing whether you may name them as a client afterward, or quote a line of thanks. If an op-ed needs placing, the same skills apply as in pitching an article.
- Write a book proposal
Proposals are the bridge to books. Agents need one to sell most nonfiction, they are far shorter than a manuscript, and Gotham lists proposal fees of $15,000 to $25,000 for traditionally published books. Learn the form in how to write a book proposal.
- Get in front of the people who match writers
Literary agents represent people with a strong story and no time to write it, and they need writers to pair them with. Agencies do the same for a cut: Gotham's FAQ says it takes a 15 percent commission from the writer. Reedsy lists ghostwriters on its marketplace beside editors and designers, and the Association of Ghostwriters keeps a member directory.
- Ask every client for the next one
When a project ends well, ask who else has been meaning to write something. Founders know founders.
Ghostwriter rates: what to charge
There is no standard rate, and the spread is wide. Two published sources give a useful frame. The Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) surveys its members on what they actually charged. Its 2026 chart, based on 2025 rates from more than 1,100 respondents, gives these ranges for ghostwriting:
| Project | Per word | Per hour |
|---|---|---|
| ProjectMemoir | Per word50¢–$1.00 | Per hour$80–$100 |
| ProjectNonfiction book | Per word33¢–50¢ | Per hour$85–$100 |
| ProjectNovel | Per word25¢–50¢ | Per hour$80–$100 |
| ProjectBusiness and marketing | Per word50¢–$1.00 | Per hour$87.50–$125 |
| ProjectArticles and essays | Per word15¢–30¢ | Per hour$75–$100 |
| ProjectBlog posts | Per word25¢–40¢ | Per hour$75–$100 |
Agencies quote by the book. Gotham Ghostwriters publishes these tiers for a full nonfiction book:
| Tier | Book fee | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| TierEntry level | Book fee$30,000–$60,000 | What it buysA straightforward memoir or how-to book, often small press or self-published |
| TierMid-market | Book fee$75,000–$150,000 | What it buysA writer with major-publisher credits |
| TierElite | Book fee$180,000–$300,000+ | What it buysA writer with several bestsellers |
Read both tables as a range, not a promise. Where you start depends on your samples and references more than on what you want to earn.
Price a project, step by step
Estimate the hours, then check the total against a per-word rate. If the two land near each other, you have a defensible quote.
- Fifteen 90-minute interviews, with preparation and transcript review: 45 hours
- Outline and chapter plan: 20 hours
- Drafting, at about three hours per 1,000 finished words: 180 hours
- Two rounds of revision: 60 hours
- Calls, email and scheduling: 25 hours
Total: 330 hours. At $90 an hour, that is $29,700. At 50 cents a word, 60,000 words comes to $30,000. Quote $32,000, which leaves room for the extra interview every book needs, paid in four installments of $8,000: on signing, on approval of the outline, at the halfway draft, and on delivery of the final manuscript.
A few rules that hold up across projects:
- Quote per project, not per hour. Clients want a number they can budget, and an hourly rate punishes you for getting faster.
- Take a deposit before the first interview. Gotham says fees usually come in two to four installments with a meaningful share up front. The deposit reserves your schedule, which is what you are selling.
- Treat royalties as a bonus. A royalty share pays only if the book sells. Experienced ghostwriters generally take a guaranteed fee, with any royalty share on top of it rather than in place of it.
What the contract should cover
A contract protects you from scope that keeps growing and a client who goes quiet. Start from a ghostwriting contract template and check that it covers each of these:
Work for hire or assignment
Many contracts call the book a "work made for hire," which makes the client its legal author from the start. Under US copyright law, a commissioned work only qualifies if it falls into one of nine categories (among them a contribution to a collective work, a translation and an instructional text) and both sides sign a written agreement saying so, according to the US Copyright Office's Circular 30. A memoir usually fits none of the nine, which is why many ghostwriting contracts also include a plain assignment of copyright. Ask your lawyer which yours needs.
Credit, confidentiality and ethics
Credit is negotiated, and the options run from nothing at all to a name on the cover: no mention; a thank-you in the acknowledgments; a "with" or "and" credit under the author's name; or the older "as told to." A cover credit helps if you want a public career, but some clients want the book to look like theirs alone.
Standard confidentiality covers the client's identity, story and business. Some clients want permanent, total silence; Gotham notes that writers who agree to it may charge a substantial premium. Settle in advance what your portfolio may say, even if it is only "a memoir for a retired surgeon."
The arrangement is honest as long as the substance belongs to the client. These are the lines worth holding:
- Only the client's facts. If a scene needs a detail the transcript doesn't have, ask for it. Don't invent it.
- No academic work. Writing a student's essay or dissertation is academic dishonesty, however the request is framed.
- Respect sole-authorship rules. Writing contests and some awards require the entrant's own work. A ghostwritten entry breaks them.
- Put AI use in writing. If you use AI tools, say so in the contract. Amazon KDP requires self-publishers to disclose AI-generated text, images or translations, but not work they wrote themselves and only refined with AI tools.
- Check the confidentiality clause before using any AI service. Pasting a client's chapter into one shares it with a third party, and some agreements forbid that.
Mistakes new ghostwriters make
- Starting without a deposit. A client who will not pay the first installment will not pay the last one either.
- Promising unlimited revisions. "Until you're happy" is not a scope. Name the rounds, and price extra ones.
- Writing in your own voice. Your best sentence may be wrong for the client. Read every chapter against the voice notes before it goes out.
- Disappearing until the full draft. Send chapters as you go. A surprise at the final draft costs months; a surprise at chapter two costs a phone call.
Where Strokes fits
Strokes is a desktop editor for macOS and Windows that keeps documents as files on your own machine, which suits work you have promised to keep private. Give each client a project: transcripts, voice notes, the outline, and each chapter as its own document. Version history saves drafts as you go, so you can see exactly what changed between the version the client read and the one you are about to send.
For the voice check, add the voice notes to an AI Assistant chat and ask it to flag lines in a chapter that don't sound like the client. It is a second reader; you decide what changes. The AI features run on models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, so the confidentiality point above applies to them too. When a chapter is ready, export it to Word or PDF, or share a link the client can read in a browser.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need a degree to become a ghostwriter?
No. Clients hire on samples, references and how the first call goes. Journalism, editing, marketing and speechwriting are common backgrounds because they teach interviewing, deadlines and writing in someone else's voice.
How much do ghostwriters make?
Too widely to give one figure. The Editorial Freelancers Association's 2026 chart puts most kinds of ghostwriting at roughly $75 to $125 an hour, and Gotham Ghostwriters quotes $30,000 to over $300,000 for a nonfiction book. Yearly income depends on how many projects you finish and how much shorter work fills the gaps.
How long does it take to ghostwrite a book?
Gotham Ghostwriters puts most nonfiction books at six to twelve months, longer for complex or high-profile projects. Interviews and the outline take the first month or two; drafting and revision take the rest.
Is ghostwriting ethical?
For books, speeches, articles and business writing it is common and accepted, as long as the ideas and experiences are the client's and the client approves every page. It is not acceptable for academic work, or anywhere the rules require the named person's own writing.
Can I put ghostwritten work in my portfolio?
Only if the contract allows it. Many clients will agree to a general description without their name, and some agree to be named once the book is out. Ask before you sign, not after.
