Common Questions / Answers About Hiring A Ghostwriter To Write Your Book
Below are a few common questions and answers related to ghostwriting.
What is a Ghostwriter?
A ghostwriter is a professional writer who partners with you to create your book. The activity of ghostwriting spans the entire process of creating a manuscript that is ready for publication (or submission to agents and publishers). A skilled ghostwriter can develop your book from a rough draft, if you have created one, or—if you have no draft—can interview you to develop your manuscript from scratch. The prefix “ghost” refers to the behind-the-scenes work the ghostwriter does while you remain the visible author of the book. Everything is confidential (signing a Nondisclosure Agreement is standard), and you receive full credit for the work. Take a look at the New York Times Bestseller list; many (most) of the non-fiction titles there were written with the help of a ghostwriter.
What are the typical costs for ghostwriting services?
The price may vary depending on the topic and length of your book. It also varies by ghostwriter quality. Ghostwriters hired through traditional New York agents and publishing houses can run in the neighborhood of $7,000 – $10,000 and up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you search online job posting sites like Elance, Guru, and others, you can find many so called “writers” who are happy to write your book for very little money. The caveat is that many of those writers speak English as a second language and are from non-American countries, so the writing—if your book is supposed to be in English—will likely be substandard and filled with twisted verb use, garbled adjectives, and quirky attempts at humor. Roughly about 2 out of every 50 writers bidding on these sites is a true professional native-English writer, and many of the companies bidding on these online project sites have American addresses that are fronts for non-American companies and workers.
How does the ghostwriting process work?
If you provide us with a rough manuscript, the ghostwriter will edit the manuscript and recommend any major additions, deletions, and modifications, which—upon your approval—either you or the ghostwriter will complete. If you do not have a draft manuscript to start with, we will work with your to determine the best method of generating the manuscript. You may choose to write the initial draft, in which case the ghostwriter will coach you through the process. Before the work begins, you will convey the reasons you are writing your book and what you wish to accomplish. Once the process begins, your rough draft—or your thoughts and experiences—will be crafted into a well-organized, entertaining, and professional manuscript.
What categories of books are normally ghostwritten?
Memoir, Self-Help, Business, Inspirational, Adventure, Christian Living, Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, Family, Political, Educational, Historical Non-Fiction, and most other non-fiction categories. Far more books are ghostwritten on non-fiction topics than fiction.
Will I be able to speak to the ghostwriter as my book progresses?
Ghostwriting a book is usually a dynamic process, and depending on the nature of your project, you may be involved throughout the entire process. It all depends on how complete your manuscript is, and on how much input from you is required to meet your goals and objectives. You should always know the status of your project, and if you have any questions at all as the project progresses, your ghostwriter should be only an email or a phone call away. You should approve every aspect of your book before it ever becomes available to the public, and this should be outlined in the Service Agreement.
What legal agreements should be in place?
You should require that the project start with written Service Agreement that contains (1) a complete description of deliverables, (2) a well-defined timeline, and (3) a detailed payment schedule. You may also request a Nondisclosure Agreement.
How long does the process take?
The entire process can take anywhere from 1 to 12 months. If the ghostwriter is developing your manuscript from scratch, the interview and writing process can take up to 10 months to produce a polished manuscript. If you provide the initial manuscript, the process can proceed more rapidly.
About Juggernaut Press
Juggernaut Press has award-winning, published writers on staff, including accomplished ghostwriters, book coaches, and Internet marketers. They have ghostwritten hundreds of books, some that have appeared on the NY Times bestseller lists. Their clients include novelists, screenwriters, public figures, television producers, CEOs, advertising and marketing executives, physicians, psychologists, marketing/life coaches, public speakers, military personnel, missionaries, and other talented individuals and high-profile organizations.
To discuss a ghostwriting project, you can contact them at:
Leveraging Cost-Effective Lettering Effects In A Quality Book Cover Design
First and foremost, a quality book cover should engage the potential buyer.
If you take the time to observe the book covers for those books on the New York Times Bestseller List, you will discover that nearly all of those cover designs employ some type of custom lettering. Custom lettering takes time, and design time costs money–usually lots of money.
Although it is usually not cost effective to spend thousands of dollars to hire a custom graphic designer for your book cover until you know you will sell a few copies, you can however get some fairly high-quality effects with just a few hours of design time.
Here is a recent JuggernautPress.com cover design in which this concept is put to practice:
Can you see how the lettering has been manipulated to emphasize the concept of the book?
First of all, the main title letters are overlapping in a way that gives the impression that each letter is ATTRACTING those letters beside it.
The next design element employed here is in the subtitle. When a viewer first encounters the design, their eyes are naturally drawn to the main title, and this is where the letters are attracted to one another. Note that a 3D effect has been implemented to make the main title appear slightly in the distance. The viewer’s eyes acknowledge this and then move immediately to the subtitle: “The Secret Is In Your Mind.” Notice how the subtitle words are perceptively much closer to the viewer than the main title. When the eyes travel from the title to the subtitle, the effect is that of the subtitle coming closer, because it is positioned closer to the viewer–as though the subtitle is ATTRACTED to the viewer. This second effect also engages the reader subconsciously, and it does so in a way that is relevant to the topic of the book.
We offer book cover design services at very affordable prices. For example, approximately 6-8 hours of design time went into the subject cover. You can find our book cover design pricing here: www.BetterCovers.com
For quality book design services, and other publishing and editorial services, contact us at: www.JuggernautPress.com
When Constructing A Quality EBook, Make Sure To Propogate The Branding
To construct a quality eBook, first understand there is an organic relationship between graphics and text–and you must respect this relationship. Most electronic books weigh too heavily on the side of text, primarily because the creator does not spend enough time fine-tuning the presentation. To keep the reader’s attention, there needs to be an appealing balance between the text on the page and the graphics.
Consider the following design, and the basic branding elements it contains (from a recent Juggernaut Press project, client website still under construction, we will update link when available).
The basic elements of this cover design should also be present in the interior of the eBook. Now consider a few pages from the eBook interior:
(click picture to enlarge)
The font and design colors, and the basic design elements, are present in the interior of the eBook. They are not overpowering and only present enough to convey the same look and feel.
Many eBook designers spend little or no time on the design, and the result is a flat, boring presentation. I suspect they are only interested in getting the money from the client and moving on. Remember, your client may be relying on your product, and the success of the product may determine the success of the client. If you want repeat business, you need to go the extra mile and create a high quality product. If you fail to do so, your client may not be there for the next project.
We have completed hundreds of projects, and we know that spending the extra time and effort will pay off in the log run. So spend however many hours you need to ensure that your eBook product is of utmost quality, and the interior reflects the same branding as the exterior.
A Good Graphic Design Conveys a Story
To create a top quality graphic design, you should incorporate the basic elements of STORY. Consider the following book cover design from a recent Juggernaut Press project:
What story does it tell you?
To understand the overall story it projects, consider the visual messages or symbols included in the design. First of all, we have a female figure in a seductive pose. Next we have an open doorway. We also have a heart, and a rainbow.
The female is also a shadow rather than a real figure, which is hidden. This projects the idea of the title word “hidden.” The doorway is a symbol of new beginnings and passage to a new world of information and opportunity. The heart is the everlasting symbol of love (and sex).
The rainbow symbolizes something benefited–a pot of gold found at the end of the rainbow. Rainbows are also elusive as anyone knows who has ever tried to follow one. They move with the angle of light, and this is sort of like a pick-up artist chasing a woman. In this case, the rainbow is FIXED on the cover of the book, implying that all the potential reader needs to do is purchase the book and they get the gold at the end of this rainbow.
Visit us at www.juggernautpress.com
The Importance of STORY
During my career as a writer, I’ve ghostwritten several hundred books (all non-fiction) and I’ve read many more than that. From all of this, one thing resonates as the most important component of any book (or anything at all put down in writing actually):
STORY
What do I mean by STORY?
Let me illustrate. My first career job was as a project manager in one of the biggest and “best” (in terms of culture) multi-national corporations. I made lots of money, enjoyed good benefits, and I had a promising future.
But sometimes I felt like just another cog in a giant impersonal wheel—like my creative spirit was being stifled. During my ten years there, certain things happened that helped me understand that I did not belong there. Like the day my manager was giving me feedback on a training manual I had just completed. As managers go, he was a guy I did not care for much. I think this was primarily because he was not very open and I always wondered what he was thinking. In his quietness, I always felt like I had to talk to break the silence, and then I felt sort of awkward revealing myself since he didn’t often reveal his own feelings or thoughts.
“I really don’t know where you learned how to write,” he said, “but this is really good. I’ve read it twice and I have to say that I really like the writing.”
He was turning the pages of the manual as he spoke. “Something about it makes it a pleasure to read.” And he laughed like he was surprised that a training manual could affect him like that.
It was one of the only times I had ever seen him show emotion. He was truly excited and I could sense it in his words and body language. Looking back now, I see this as one of several defining moments in my own personal story. It helped me open my eyes to the fact that I had to leave that corporation. I had to leave all that security behind and strike out on my own…
It was part of my STORY.
So what do I mean by STORY?
In short, I mean a narrative that is grounded in emotion.
If you don’t infuse ALL of your writing with STORY, then you will likely lose your audience…and fast. Unless of course you are creating a training manual. But even that can be done using the power of STORY—and it should be if it anything more complicated than an assembly guide.
Why infuse a training manual with STORY?
Because it makes the reading experience more pleasurable, so why not?
How Best to Sell and Distribute Your Electronic Products
As with physical products, there are many ways to sell and distribute electronic products. You can simply list them on your website and have buyers send you an email when they want to buy. But really, why would you ever do something so simple when there are so many less expensive–and less cumbersome–ways to sell and distribute electronic products?
The answer might be because you may not know of any other ways. If so, I am going to show you one of the many ways you can do it.
Set Up a PayPal Buy Button
You can set up an account on PayPal in only a few minutes (if you don’t already have one). After you have a PayPal account, you can generate a Buy Button with the correct price of your product, and you can place this button on your website next to your product. PayPal even offers a shopping cart feature you can use for multiple products.
The advantage of this method is this: you can do it very simply and quickly. If you have ever researched shopping carts, then you know how complex they are and how many hoops–electronic, physical, and monetary–you need to jump through to get it done.
Online shopping carts require term agreements and all sorts of other messy things. It can get to be a really real quagmire when you try to compare all the different shopping carts given all the different features. You will also encounter a more complicated issue with interfacing the shopping cart to your site. You need a more complex (and costly) relationship with a web programmer for one.
It goes on and on, but when the rubber hits the road, it all comes down to this:
Most, if not all, new Internet Entrepreneurs have little or no understanding of how their product is going to perform online, so why spend a gazillion dollars setting up a monolithic shopping cart system just to find out?
The disadvantage of PayPalling it is that you are making “pals” (in the financial sense) with PayPal, and maybe you don’t want to do this. Because they are not regulated like normal financial institutions are, PayPal can cause serious problems for your business and you may have no recourse other than to close your (online) doors. PayPal dodged all of that regulation stuff (for the most part) because Internet Commerce evolved so quickly that the regulators could not put the normal regulatory “stranglehold” on them (sort of like Microsoft in the computer business). PayPal got huge before anyone in the regulatory world realized it. Now they are literally the “King Kong” in the online transaction world.
Since PayPal has no regulatory oversight, they can shut your business down in a mouse-click. Suppose a terrorist in Klackistan buys a product from you and PayPal decides to investigate you for money laundering; during the investigation, you have to declare bankruptcy because PayPal has frozen your account and you have no cash flow. If you believe the many accounts posted on the Internet, such things have happened.
If King Kong has a fit, rightfully or wrongfully, you can get smashed.
No questions asked (actually, you might ask them, but–unlike with a bank–no one has to answer).
Anyways, back to your PayPal buy button. If you don’t mind being pals with a big money monkey, you can set up a quick and easy PayPal button, and you are in business. I know of about 5-10 other ways to sell and distribute products online, all with advantages and disadvantages depending upon the nature of your product/business.
For now, a PayPal buy button is the quickest and easiest.
The “Ultimate Bible” of story structure, Robert McKee’s book, STORY
If you want to understand story structure, you might consider reading what I would consider “the ultimate bible of story structure,” Robert McKee’s, Story. Although many books aspire to adequately address the subject of story, many fall short.
To be successful, fiction and nonfiction should be infused with the basic elements of story.
Here is a good book review of Story:
STORY by Robert McKee
New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1997
Spinning a good tale requires a bit of magic, so rather than present a recipe or stock method for story construction, Robert McKee outlines the key components shared by all good stories. While this book is primarily aimed at screenwriters, the points it makes apply equally well to novelists. A former Fulbright Scholar, McKee has been teaching classes on this subject to packed halls around the world, his students producing such works as The Color Purple, You’ve Got Mail, The Deer Hunter and Forrest Gump.
McKee outlines the different story forms, but points out that if you want to write for a living you should avoid the avant-garde and follow the classical design structure emphasized in this book; it more closely mirrors the human mind, and other story forms just don’t sell as well. He believes that most of what Hollywood produces is mediocre or worse, and he challenges the seemingly insurmountable odds of getting a screenplay produced. People intrinsically recognize a good story and if you build one you will beat the Hollywood odds; it’s a seller’s market when the product is a well-structured story.
According to McKee, there is only one true story, the quest, and all stories take this form:
‘For better or worse, an event throws a character’s life out of balance, arousing in him the conscious or unconscious desire for that which he feels will restore balance, launching him on a quest for his object of desire against forces of antagonism.’
Five key elements are required in a well-constructed story: the Inciting Incident, or the event that launches the protagonist on his quest; the Progressive Complications encountered on the quest; the Crisis Scene, or final choice that completes the quest; the Climax Scene, or last action beyond which the reader cannot image another; and the Resolution, or tying up of lose ends.
McKee believes that the phrase “character-driven story” is redundant as all stories are essentially character-driven. True character is concealed behind a façade of traits and revealed only when real pressure—brought on by increasingly difficult plot choices—peels away that façade. Plot and character mirror one another and when you change character, you must change plot accordingly.
A well-constructed story leads us into expectation, makes us think we understand, then cracks open reality, creating surprise and curiosity and insight, sending us back repeatedly. On each trip, we gain a deeper understanding of the characters and their world.
In McKee’s words, “The protagonist can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make him.” Fully realized and satisfying antagonism only occurs when the primary value at stake in the story progresses through the limits of human experience. For example, in a story about injustice, the protagonist should not simply be the victim of a crime; he should also undergo tyranny. The antagonism should be powerful enough to make a legal action illegal, prosecute and punish the protagonist for it, and then declare the action legal again. This would be injustice masquerading as justice. McKee terms this extreme “negation of the negation” (a phrase borrowed from dialectics). If, on the other hand, love is the value at stake in the story, the negation of the negation would be “hatred masquerading as love,” a far more interesting antagonistic force than simple hatred (as exemplified by the mother character, played by Mary Tyler Moore, in the movie Ordinary People).
To date, Story has sold more than 100,000 copies, underscoring its popularity; and it would be a valuable addition to the library of any serious novelist, screenwriter, or nonfiction writer.
(Book review copyright, 2010, Juggernaut staff writers)
staff@juggernautpress.com
The Quality of a Book Cover Design is Relative to the Target Audience
When it comes to designing commercial book covers, quality is a relative term. For example, if you ask an Internet marketer what makes a quality book cover design and you also ask a New York publishing executive the same question, you will likely get very different answers.
This is simply because the target audiences are usually different. Based on our results (with the conversion rates on more than a hundred book projects), the Internet prospect usually responds better to graphics that are more colorful and have more flashy design effects—graphics techniques like embossing and gradients and strokes. When designing for the Internet prospect, you should create a design that comes alive and explodes out of the screen. You want to infuse it with elements that “shimmer” or move (think optical illusions). You want the book cover design to grab attention.
Since you are using a display screen to present your product, you can embellish with colors and lots of shimmer to grab attention.
Conversely, when designing a book cover for a more conservative prospect, possibly a C-level business executive, you need to give the overall cover a more conservative look and feel. Usually, these more conservative prospects are put off by flashy colors and infomercial-like presentations. They are more impressed by a book cover that looks more like a textbook. Avoid flashy graphics and limit your colors to three or maybe four at the most. You should use big conservative text and spaces filled with flat color.
If you follow these basic cover design guidelines, your conversion rate will be higher; we know this from experience.
This is simply because the target audiences are usually different. Based on our results (with the conversion rates on more than a hundred book projects), the Internet prospect usually responds better to graphics that are more colorful and have more flashy design effects—graphics techniques like embossing and gradients and strokes. When designing for the Internet prospect, you should create a design that comes alive and explodes out of the screen. You want to infuse it with elements that “shimmer” or move (think optical illusions). You want the book cover design to grab attention.
English Language—Duck, Bob, and Weave
Most of us go through life thinking the language we speak read and write is a static sort of thing, when actually it is constantly changing.
Consider the sentence: “Some may require followup a month after the sale, while others will require a followup immediately.”
HERE, followup is used as a noun. Since the dictionary does not define the word “followup,” I would hyphenate it. But actually a new word is evolving and being formed in our language. Remember, the English language—and any language for that matter—is a moving target, as are the grammar rules of the language.
If you doubt this, take a moment to read some Shakespeare, which is only several hundred years old. Note that many of the words he uses are outdated now and to understand his stories, you must do quite a bit of work deciphering all the subtle nuances in the words.
Language is moving, and at a pretty fast pace. Listen to the slang words of any teenager and watch them grow in popularity. At first, the words sound odd and out of place; but before long, the mainstream media has taken them up and we have included them in our own vocabulary. When a new word emerges, a sort of democratic process takes place with usage being equivalent to a vote. If the word gets enough “votes,” ultimately it is formally accepted into the language by being included in the dictionary.
Teenagers are not the only word generators in society; technology is the provenance of many. As technology evolves and new processes and objects (verbs like google and nouns like computer) emerge, words to describe them are added to the lexicon.
Think of “followup” or “follow-up” as a noun or adjective, and “follow up” as a verb construction.
- “She is going to follow up.”–verbish.
- “He is going to get some follow-up.”–nounish
- “He is going to a follow-up meeting.”–adjective.
Back to Shakespeare for a moment. Consider the following line from Twelfth Night, Act1, Scene II:
“Perchance he is not drown’d: what think you, sailors?”
Consider the word, perchance. Is it possible that this word started as two words “per chance.” Is this sort of like “follow up” and “followup”?
I think so.