You do. Whether you choose to hire me to ghostwrite the book or you write and I coach you, you are listed as author. As ghostwriter Kevin Anderson has said, “A client who hires a ghostwriter is still the author of their book. . . . A ghostwriter is an interpreter and a translator, not an author, which is why our clients deserve full credit for authoring their books.”

(See what I did there? I credited him, instead of just writing his idea and pretending I thought of it. Because I don’t do that.)

The contract we sign. You could sue me if I stole your idea and I would lose. 🤷

One big difference comes down to control. When a publishing house signs a contract with you, they gain some control over the way your book will reach the market.

In exchange, they pay, usually they pay you in advance, which is schweet. No one is paying you anything to self-publish, and you have to spend money for things like editing, cover design, and typesetting.

But in exchange, you retain full control over all rights to your book. You decide how to distribute it. You decide how many copies to give away. This becomes very important if you’re thinking of using your book as a “lead magnet,” a freebie that you give away in exchange for someone joining your list. 

Nope! Traditional publishing is a gatekeeping mechanism. The publishers hire gatekeepers who have many, many unacknowledged biases. 

These can range from snobbery about where you’ve been previously published to where (or if) you went to college to unacknowledged racism, sexism, or ableism. 

That doesn’t mean you won’t get a contract if you’re not a white/cis/hetero/able-bodied man. But it does mean that sometimes agents or publishers will tell you they’re saying NO because your idea is not strong enough, when they’re actually saying NO because they don’t understand the market for your book. 

So if you hear NO from the traditional publishing world, I encourage you not to think of self-publishing as second fiddle. Self-publishing is a way to bypass the gatekeepers and reach your market directly (and keep more of the money from book sales for yourself). 

It’s the equivalent of creating a wildly successful YouTube channel instead of getting booked on a TV show. It offers a road to the success and recognition you deserve, without the battle with naysayers.

Great! You need to write a book proposal and find an agent. I do consult on book proposals, and the first thing we would do is meet to discuss your book idea and its positioning in the market. You can book a one-time strategy session for that here.

I engage you in interviews. I have 10 years of journalism experience and a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, where I spent a large portion of my time learning how get the story.

What that means for our partnership is a series of recorded interviews where we will talk about your angle of focus on your topic. Is it personal experience? Professional expertise? Do you have a framework that you’re using but you’ve never written down before?

The interviews allow you to unpack all that’s in your brain so we can start finding and organizing the information that will go into the book, and unpacking and leaving behind nuggets of wisdom or personal stories that are fascinating, but don’t make the cut for this book.

The interviews are the first step toward organizing all your ideas.

If you write your own book, plan to spend 10-15 hours a week on it for about four months. If you hire me to ghostwrite, the time commitment is about 4 hours per week in the first month, as I interview to gather information, and then 1 to 2 hours a week in subsequent months until we’re done.

Each contract includes a 21-day grace period for each of the 5 book-writing stages. If the book is delayed beyond that 21 days as a result of you not finishing research or writing, our contract is paused until the stage is finished. There is a $500 contract unpause fee.

I include this fee because a deadline is the most important motivation a writer has to finish her work. Without an enforced deadline, your book risks falling to the bottom of your to-do list and never getting done.

Payments occur on a fixed schedule and are not tied to completing phases of the book. This is another encouragement for you to stick to the deadlines we agree to at the beginning of the project so you can get the book finished.