Find a Ghostwriter

For your book, screenplay, music or lyrics project

By Karen S. Cole of Ghost Writer, Inc.

How do you find a ghostwriter? The Internet is an excellent place to look, especially nowadays. Trade journals like Writers Digest and other such writing magazines are places you can peruse, but having the Internet at your disposal makes things much easier. Generally, you can find a ghostwriter, a ghostwriting agency or several ghostwriters under various keyword search terms. I suggest looking under less generic phrases, avoiding “ghost writer” and “ghostwriter” as it is harder to actually find an available writer there. Try searching under “book ghost writer,” “book ghostwriter,” “find a ghostwriter” and more detailed, long-tail keywords. You will then find several listings for the type of writer that you need.

Once you have found a few such listings, investigate them thoroughly. Contact the ghostwriters, using information box forms and the contact emails listed. Ask pertinent questions such as about name recognition of the writer, pricing, time factors involved, copyrights assignation, and if the ghostwriter or ghostwriting agency provides publishing assistance services. Deeply research your prospective ghostwriters, as the best way to find a ghostwriter is to go over their related credentials. Read through their resumes, look through their portfolios, and review their samples. Try hard to get as many decent samples as possible from each ghostwriter, asking them if they are examples from bestselling works. If you’re looking for a book ghostwriter, ask them about sales of their books, and ask them if they can also assist you in landing a literary agent and a commercial book publisher.

When you need to find a ghostwriter, it can be as simple as cruising the right keyword search terms and simply exploring the websites you come up with, or it could involve several weeks of interviewing prospective ghostwriters, going through many samples, references and recommendations. Sometimes word of mouth works, so if you have a friend or colleague who has used the services of a professional writer, this is a great way to find a ghostwriter you can probably trust. Sometimes, you can join a writer’s forum, posting questions there about ghostwriting and looking for a ghostwriter there, too. There are many such outlets on the Internet that you can explore.

The best book ghostwriters can cost quite a lot of money, so be prepared with a steep enough budget to hire a really great book ghostwriter. When you seek to find a ghostwriter, in any case money will be involved. Unless you are a well-known celebrity or have a very salable idea, one that’s likely to market extremely well, you will need to lay out significant funding. Very few book ghostwriters nowadays take only a percentage of book sales as the price for their hard work, so you must consider the depth of your budget when you are looking to find a ghostwriter.