How Are We Taking the Risk Out of Using Ghostwriters?
Most authors and publishers who hire ghostwriters don’t have a proven screening operation set up, or a database of redflags when communicating with applicants.
Nor do they have the time to manage the ongoing back and forth, deadlines, egos, personalities, or indeed, manuscript versions.
If you’re publishing, and potentially writing your own series as well, you haven’t got time to wade through hundreds of applications: even if you had the resources and know-how to generate that many.
Your mental efforts are better spent elsewhere — not on trying to manage ghostwriters who aren’t delivering what you want, missing deadlines, or turning in material that is under par. Our project managers are trained and experienced in having those difficult conversations whenever they occur. Thankfully, due to our rigorous hiring process, they are rare.
Here’s how most people’s foray into hiring ghostwriters goes:
Most folks hire one of the first few writers they’re in contact with, hand over an incomplete outline, and wait for a “first draft”.
After being messed about for a few months, they get something back that is terrible from the first few pages onwards. Accustomed to being able to figure things out, they might try someone else, only for a similar scenario to play out. They lose another few months, six weeks, and then another few months trying to find someone else from wherever they can. Most give up somewhere in this process and conclude that ghostwriting — for their novels — can’t be done. Some persist until they maybe have a sort of finished manuscript, maybe written by a few different people.
And then wonder why it doesn’t sell.
This is why you might be considering getting us involved. We’re specialists in just this one thing so you can do what you do best — coming up with stories and publishing. (Incidentally, we don’t write non-fiction books or biographies. We don’t do literary fiction or one-off novels. We’re a genre-series only company.)
When you first start working with us we find the right writer for your project. We ensure that the samples you review are from diligent, capable writers, and we don’t hire them unless their commissioned samples are close enough to what you want that you won’t spend hours each week correcting them. If you are spending that much time on the submissions, we just haven’t found the right ghost yet and we keep recruiting.
Once we find the writer who can get the style at least 80%-90% aligned with your writing, we get them to make a start on your series – but with smaller deliverables than they would at full speed. This is where the vital feedback process begins. With feedback from you, to the writer, you end up with another bestseller. Without this step, you end up like every other person who has tried working with ghostwriters and say it “doesn’t work”.
Since we’re managing everything else, your only tasks are to:
1. Deliver the book outlines in a timely way, and
2. Review each segment submitted and make sure it’s what you want.
If it’s close, we want to know how it’s falling short, so we can push it back to the ghosts to get it closer. By feeding back on the initial segments, and even sending back passages with tracked stylistic changes, your ghost learns your ways and delivers accordingly.
If on the rare occasion they can’t, we replace them with someone else of your choosing from the selection process and test them again with small segments to begin with until you’re delighted with their output.
You don’t have to deal with difficult conversations with them.
You don’t have to manage an artist’s ego.
You don’t have to worry about when they’re going to deliver the next segment.
The whole process is managed for you, hands free, with white gloves.
You just have to be involved at the delivery end to make sure you’re getting the output you require for your next hit.
Risk Reversal Statistics
Not every recruitment goes like this, but this is to illustrate the lengths we’ll go to to find the perfect writer for our client, this is instructive.
Sometimes our clients find their best match from someone we’ve already worked with, or already have in our database.
Sometimes, we have to go back to the drawing board and pull out all the stops to find the right fit – and this is how it goes:
Number of hours: 95 hours invested by project managers
Conservative cost: $1840
Number of applications reviewed: 392
Number scenes commissioned: 48
Cost of scenes $480
Number of commissioned, probationary starts on the client’s outline: 8
@ 3000 word, 6c per word, 8 x $180 = $1440
Total cost of written samples $1440 + $480
Cost of man hours $1920
Total cost of recruiting one writer $3760
This is why we’re selective about who we work with.
We’re also confident in what we do to facilitate the scaling your business, we cover the upfront investment, and assume we’ll have a long term relationship which is lucrative for everyone involved.
When we ask you to put down a token administration fee, this truly is just a token amount to show us you’re as serious as we are about finding the right person for your series.