A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written material. In music, ghostwriters are used in film score composition, as well as in pop music such as Top 40, country, and hip-hop. The ghostwriter is sometimes acknowledged by the author or publisher for his or her writing services.
The division of work between the ghostwriter and the credited author varies a great deal. In some cases, the ghostwriter is hired to publish and edit a rough draft or a mostly completed manuscript. In this case, the outline, ideas and much of the language in the finished book or article are those of the credited author. In other cases, a ghostwriter does most of the writing, using concepts and stories provided by the credited author. In this case, a ghostwriter will do extensive research on the credited author or their subject area of expertise. It is rare for a ghostwriter to prepare a book or article with no input from the credited author; at a minimum, the credited author usually jots down a basic framework of ideas at the outset or provides comments on the ghostwriter’s final draft.
Remuneration and credit:
Ghostwriters will often spend from several months to a full year researching, writing, and editing nonfiction works for a client, and they are paid either per page, with a flat fee, or a percentage of the royalties of the sales, or some combination thereof. Having an article ghostwritten can cost “$4 per word and more depending on the complexity” of the article.[1] Literary agent Madeleine Morel states that the average ghostwriter’s advance for work for major publishers is “between $30,000 and $100,000″[2] In 2001, the New York Times stated that the fee that the ghostwriter for Hillary Clinton’s memoirs will receive is probably about $500,000″ of her book’s $8 million advance, which “is near the top of flat fees paid to collaborators.
According to Ghostwriters Ink, a professional ghostwriting service, this flat fee is usually closer to an average of $12,000 to $28,000 per book. By hiring the ghostwriter for this negotiated price, the clients ultimately keep all advances and post-publishing royalties and profits for themselves.
In Canada, The Writers’ Union has established a minimum fee schedule for ghostwriting. The total minimum fee for a 200-300 page book is $25,000, paid at various stages of the drafting of the book. Research fees are an extra charge on top of this minimum fee.
In Germany the average fee for a confidential ghostwriting service is about $100.00 per page.
There is a recent[when?] trend of outsourcing ghostwriting jobs to offshore locations like India, to save up to 80%. Outsourced ghostwriters whose qualities are at par with US, UK or Canadian ghostwriters, based in countries like India, complete 200-page books for fees ranging between $3000 and $5000, or $12–$18 per page. This sharp price cut in ghostwriters’ fees is encouraging more outsourcing.
Fiction:
Ghostwriters are employed by fiction publishers for several reasons. In some cases, publishers use ghostwriters to increase the number of books that can be published each year by a well-known, highly marketable author. Ghostwriters are mostly used to pen fiction works for well-known, “name” authors in genres such as detective fiction, mysteries, and teen fiction.
Additionally, publishers use ghostwriters to write new books for established series where the ‘author’ is a pseudonym. For example, the purported author of the Nancy Drew mystery series, “Carolyn Keene”, is actually a pseudonym for a series of ghostwriters who write books in the same style using a template of basic information about the book’s characters and their fictional universe (names, dates, speech patterns), and about the tone and style that are expected in the book. (For more information, see the articles on pseudonyms or pen names.) In addition, ghostwriters are often given copies of several of the previous books in the series to help them match the style.
The estate of romance novelist V. C. Andrews hired a ghostwriter to continue writing novels after her death, under her name and in a similar style to her original works. Many of action writer Tom Clancy’s books from the 2000s bear the names of two people on their covers, with Clancy’s name in larger print and the other author’s name in smaller print. Various books bearing Clancy’s name were written by different authors under the same pseudonym. The first two books in the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell franchise were written by Raymond Benson under the pseudonym David Michaels.
