23 Sep Why Hiring a Ghost Writer Is An Investment in Your Business

If you’re like most of my clients, the thought of hiring a ghost writer either hasn’t occurred to you, or makes you wonder where to even start looking for a ghostwriter for hire you can trust — even though you’ve been telling yourself for years, “I should write a book.” With that goal in mind, maybe you’ve even opened a document, written a few chapters, created an outline, or filled a folder with notes and ideas. But between running your business, serving clients, managing your team, marketing, networking, and fulfilling your personal obligations, self-publishing a book fell to the bottom of your priority list. 

As a busy entrepreneur, mother, and “Glamma”, I get it.

In my experience, most of my clients come to me with one of the following challenges: they have too many ideas or not enough ideas for their books. They have the subject matter expertise, the compelling personal story, and an understanding of a book’s power to increase their online presence, create new opportunities, and expand their business, yet their book never comes to fruition. 

That’s where hiring a ghost writer becomes a strategic investment. For an entrepreneur, attorney, physician, functional medicine practitioner, consultant, coach, speaker, or other established professional, a well-written and produced book becomes a magnetic brand asset that increases credibility, attracts ideal clients, generates speaking and media opportunities, and positions you as the go-to authority in your field.

I’ve developed my Bestselling Author Program on the premise of creating the right book to attract your ideal clients and achieve your higher goals. Since 2013, my team and I have helped more than 500 experts become #1 bestselling authors.  And if the only obstacle standing between you and becoming a bestselling author is writing that book yourself, a premium ghost writer offers the perfect solution. 

At a Glance

Why hiring a ghost writer is a strategic business investment:

• You can turn years or decades of expertise into a professionally written book without spending hundreds of hours writing it yourself.
• A book establishes credibility and differentiates you from your competitors.
• Your book introduces prospective clients to your ideas and expertise before they ever speak with you.
• A strategically written book leads readers toward your services, programs, consulting, speaking, or other offers.
• You retain your ideas, stories, expertise, perspective, and voice while the ghostwriter translates them into a compelling manuscript.
• An experienced ghostwriter supports your ideas with structure, storytelling, organization, and an objective perspective.
• The Bestselling Author Program’s Platinum Package combines professional ghostwriting with the publishing and bestseller-launch services you need to take your book from concept to market.

Hiring a Ghost Writer & The Value of Your Time 

When considering whether to hire a ghost writer, many successful entrepreneurs wrongly perceive it as an unnecessary expense. Instead of asking how much it will cost to hire a ghost writer to write your book, I encourage you to ask how much it will cost you to spend the next year, or two, or three postponing its publication  — and its countless benefits. 

And what about the value of your time? 

Suppose you’re a business owner whose time is worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour. Does it make financial sense to spend several hundred hours learning how to structure, write, revise, edit, publish, and launch a professional book? I’m going to assume it does not.

Think about the other professionals you hire for their knowledge and competency: an accountant because you don’t want to spend your time doing your own taxes, an attorney because you don’t want to become an expert in contract law, and a marketing agency because you’re too busy working in your business to work on your business.

As an evergreen brand asset and a strategic marketing tool, your book can: 

• Attract  your ideal clients
• Position you as the wise guide your potential clients need to solve their problems
• Differentiate you from your competitors 
• Form the foundation of a content ecosystem that feeds your blogs, social media posts, and videos  
• Help you secure speaking engagements, podcast appearances, and media exposure 

Hiring an experienced, professional ghost writer allows you to remain focused on the work that only you can do while still getting your book out into the world.

Why Hire a Ghost Writer? A Business Book Is A Gateway to Greater Success

If you limit your goal for your book solely to earning royalties from individual book sales, you’ll have difficulty justifying a five-figure ghostwriting investment and making the numbers work. However, as I mentioned above, I encourage my clients to think of their books as authority-building assets and an extension of their marketing efforts. When a potential new client lands on your website, they’re not going to spend an hour or two reading every page and blog. They’ll stick around long enough to read you bio and learn about your services.

Contrast that with a potential new client who comes across your professionally produced book online. Immediately, you’ll gain credibility with that person, who now sees you as an expert who took the time to organize their knowledge. After they purchase your book, they’ll spend their time reading it, getting to know you on a deeper level, and gaining a fuller understanding of how you can help them solve their problem. A book transforms a cold prospect into a warm lead. As they turn the pages, your prospects learn from you, understand your philosophy, hear your stories, and become familiar with your approach to working with clients who once had the same challenges they’re now dealing with. And when that book becomes a bestseller, it adds another magnetic credibility marker to your name.

The conversations I have with prospective authors focus on this exact business case: a bestselling book attracts high-quality clients, increases an expert’s authority, creates greater impact, and puts a relevant and timely message in front of more people. That’s why I always start with the end in mind in each client meeting before we ever discuss the book itself. I want to know what they do, why they do what they do (what is their pain-to-purpose story?), who their ideal clients are, what their ideal clients’ pain points are, and how they solve these pain points. 

After You Hire a Ghost Writer: Measuring the Real ROI of Your Book

Instead of looking at the ROI of a book solely in terms of the number of copies sold, we measure success by answering more meaningful questions, such as:

• How many clients did the book attract?
• What opportunities did it create?
• Did it help you secure a lucrative speaking engagement?
• Did it lead to appearances on podcasts or in the media?
• Did it give a prospect the confidence to choose you instead of a competitor?
• Did it help you sell a $5,000, $10,000, $25,000, or $50,000 service?

The answers to these questions reveal the true ROI of a business book. 

Hiring a Ghost Writer Doesn’t Mean Giving Away Your Voice

Understandably, a common concern for my clients considering the Platinum Package — which includes ghost writing — is that the book will not sound like them. If that’s a concern for you too, know that a skilled ghost writer’s job is to extract your stories, experiences, expertise, opinions, methodology, personality, and language into a well-structured, cohesive book. Think of the ghost writer as the person who helps you identify and organize the concepts in your head in a process that involves in-depth interviews. Instead of sitting alone staring at a blank screen and a blinking cursor, you’re having conversations about subjects you already know inside and out.

Your ghost writer asks questions, listens for the stories behind the expertise, identifies themes, organizes the material, and turns those conversations into a logical outline. Once you approve the outline, you’ll provide the content for the chapters on each of your calls. In between, your ghost writer develops the chapters you discussed and sends them to you for review. You provide feedback, the ghost writer makes any needed edits, and the process unfolds seamlessly. 

You and your ghost writer make adjustments as you go, resulting in a finished book that sounds authentically like you. So much so, that when you share it with the people in your life, they would never guess you chose to hire a ghost writer (unless you told them). 

The Right Ghostwriter Offers More Than Writing Skills

Although it’s a common search term and an understandable impulse, I recommend looking beyond a Google search for “ghost writer near me.” Why? In today’s digital environment, location is not the most important qualification. You want someone who understands nonfiction books, knows how to interview subject-matter experts, recognizes what belongs in the book and what doesn’t, can organize complex ideas for the reader, and understands the larger business strategy behind the project.

A business ghost writer also understands that the book is a marketing asset that supports your business. Of course, it must engage the reader first; nobody wants to read a 150-page sales pitch. However, a savvy ghost writer understands that a strategically developed nonfiction book creates a natural bridge between the reader’s problem and the additional ways you can help solve it. Depending on your line of work, it could mean consulting, coaching, professional services, speaking, courses, workshops, masterminds, assessments, or another high-value offer. That’s why the right ghost writing partnership always considers the big picture. 

My Decade-Long Collaboration With Ghost Writer Daria Anne DiGiovanni

One of the reasons I can offer professional ghost writing as part of my programs is my long-standing collaboration with my lead ghostwriter, Daria Anne DiGiovanni, founder of TrueVoice Writing Services. Daria and I have been collaborating for more than a decade, and together we’ve worked on multiple books that have gone on to become Amazon bestsellers.

She has more than 15 years of experience in content creation and SEO and has written and edited books and marketing content across industries including law, functional medicine, leadership, and personal development. Her specialty is taking an expert’s ideas, experiences, and intellectual property and transforming them into engaging books that still sound like the person whose name belongs on the cover.

Most recently, we’ve collaborated on a soon-to-be-released book for a functional medicine nurse practitioner — another example of how our process works particularly well for highly knowledgeable professionals who have enormous amounts of expertise but don’t necessarily have the time or desire to turn that knowledge into a manuscript themselves. Our collaborations have also included books for a business attorney, a Navy SEAL, a Major General in the U.S. Army, an orthopedic surgeon, an automotive executive, and a C-Suite consultant, to mention a few. 

Different sectors, audiences, and voices. Same strategic approach. 

Daria often says that the two most important qualities a ghost writer must have is a genuine interest in other people and the ability to write in someone else’s voice. The success of these books validates her philosophy because the purpose of ghost writing is to help each author sound like the clearest, strongest version of themselves and organize their ideas and expertise into an engaging narrative. 

What Does It Cost to Hire a Ghost Writer?

Professional ghost writing is a significant investment because you’re not purchasing a commodity. You’re hiring someone to spend weeks or months extracting your intellectual property, interviewing you, researching where necessary, developing the structure of your book, writing tens of thousands of words, revising those words, and helping transform your knowledge into an asset you can use for years.

We have various packages and price points that include professional ghostwriting as part of a much broader done-for-you bestseller program. I designed it for the busy expert who doesn’t simply want someone to hand them a Word document and wish them luck. This package includes professional ghostwriting and editing along with writing/structure support, cover design, professional book description, print and eBook formatting, Amazon KDP publishing, category and keyword setup, coaching with me, and our bestseller launch strategy.

When comparing prices, it’s a critical distinction. It’s not simply a matter of how much it costs for a ghost writer to deliver the final version of your book in a Word document. That only gets you partially to your goal. The real question is how much do you need to invest in turning your expertise into a professionally written, formatted, designed, published, and strategically launched book that supports your business goals. You hired a ghost writer to save you time – you don’t want to defeat that purpose by having to search for professional editors, formatters, book cover designers, and book publicists. And you certainly don’t want to become a project manager forced to coordinate all of these efforts and manage deadlines.

With our ghostwriting package, you receive everything you need from concept to book launch while our team of experts works together to deliver the final product within 90 days. Of course, we understand that the unexpected happens, so we build in a 30-day buffer. Still, from sign-up to launch, the longest you’ll wait to see your book online is 120 days. It’s another important factor to consider when considering independent publishers. 

When Hiring a Ghost Writer, Consider the Lifetime ROI of Your Book

After launch week, a great business book continues to work on your behalf. You can feature it on your website, send it to prospective clients, give copies of it to people after speaking engagements, send it to podcast hosts, and use it to introduce your framework. Drawing from your book’s intellectual property, you can create presentations, courses, workshops, lead magnets, email campaigns, and consulting programs. And while you sleep, travel, consult with clients, or spend time with your family, it can continue introducing people to you. I’ve seen what happens when entrepreneurs treat their books as valuable assets in their  business ecosystem. Your book may be the lowest-priced thing you sell, but it can become the doorway to your most valuable products and services. I built my own program around creating the “right book” to attract ideal clients, with the book serving as a tool that can turn readers into warm leads. 

That’s why hiring a ghost writer can deliver a high ROI that you cannot measure by book sales alone. 

Should You Hire a Ghost Writer?

The decision to hire a ghost writer depends on the individual. If writing your book has always been part of the dream and you genuinely love the writing process, then you may want to write it yourself and hire professionals for editing, publishing, and launch support. That’s where my standard package comes in. Instead of a ghost writer, it includes content editing with a professional editor, original book cover design, interior formatting, keyword-optimized title, subtitle, and book description, and a two-day bestseller book launch. 

However, if you’ve been talking about writing a book for three, five, or ten years and still haven’t done it, it’s worth asking yourself why. If the answer is lack of time, uncertainty about structure, difficulty translating your expertise to the page, or simply knowing that writing isn’t the best use of your time, hiring a ghost writer may be the smartest way forward. You already have the knowledge, stories, and expertise.  You don’t have to become a professional writer to become a professionally published author.

Frequently Asked Questions About Hiring a Ghost Writer

What does a ghostwriter actually do?

A ghostwriter takes your ideas, expertise, stories, experiences, and perspective and develops them into a manuscript on your behalf. For nonfiction business books, this effort involves interviews, outlining, research when necessary, drafting, and revisions based on the author’s feedback. Only the author’s name appears on the finished book.

Will my book still sound like me if I hire a ghost writer?

If you work with a premium ghost writer, yes. A professional ghost writer spends significant time learning how you communicate, the phrases you use, your stories, opinions, and personality. The goal is to capture your voice and establish you as the wise guide your readers need to solve their problems.

How much does it cost to hire a ghost writer?

Pricing varies considerably based on the ghost writer’s experience, manuscript length, research requirements, subject complexity, and services included. My Platinum Package begins at $20,000 for a 20,000-word manuscript and goes beyond ghost writing to provide a comprehensive path from book development through publishing and bestseller launch.

Should I search for a “ghost writer near me”?

You can, but don’t make geography your primary criterion. Most professional ghost writing projects can be handled remotely through Zoom interviews, shared documents, email, and project-management tools. Experience, writing ability, interviewing skills, communication, subject-matter fit, and the ability to capture your voice matter far more than whether the writer lives in your city.

How involved will I need to be if someone else is writing my book?

You won’t be responsible for sitting down and writing thousands of words, but your participation is still required because your ghost writer needs access to your knowledge and stories, usually through interviews and any existing materials you can provide. You’ll also review drafts and provide feedback. It’s still your book; you’re simply working with a professional to execute it.

Is hiring a ghost writer worth the investment for a business owner?

When you work with strategic book marketing and book launch professionals, yes. Evaluate the book as a long-term business asset rather than relying solely on book royalties to recover your investment. A well-organized and written book can support client acquisition, authority positioning, speaking, media exposure, consulting, coaching, and other revenue opportunities. The Bestselling Author Program has worked with more than 500 authors. Its graduates include authors who have leveraged their books into speaking, consulting, coaching, and larger businesses. 

How long does it take to ghost write and publish a book?

It depends on the complexity of the subject, manuscript length, research involved, and how quickly the author can participate in interviews and revisions. My current process helps experts move from their disorganized concepts toward a completed book in a done-for-you ghost writing process takes approximately 90 days, with a 30-day buffer. That means the longest amount of time it’ll take for your completed book and your book launch is 120 days. 

Don’t Keep Your Book on Your “Someday” List – Contact Me Today 

If you’ve been thinking about writing a book, you need a plan. Maybe you already know what you want to write. Maybe you’ve started a manuscript and got stuck. Or maybe you know you have decades of valuable experience but have absolutely no idea how to turn it into a book. That’s okay because my experienced team and I know what to do and how to help you. 

Together, we’ll envision the right book for your expertise, audience, and business — and if ghost writing is the best option for you, we can handle the writing, publishing, and launch process. There is zero pressure to sign up for anything. Let’s have a conversation about your book, your business, and what you want the book to accomplish. Then we can determine whether my Platinum Package or another option is the right fit. Your expertise could become one of the most valuable marketing assets your business owns. It’s time to get it out of your head and into the hands of the people who need it.

Click here to book a call with me.