The secret to becoming a high earning ghostwriter? Specialism

Any business thrives on specialists. So does ghostwriting.

Ghostwriting can be one of the most reliable ways to make a living as a writer, with a steady demand and the chance to work on fascinating projects. Best of all, it’s a career that pays you to do what you love - write - while helping others bring their stories, expertise, or ideas to life. If you really want to command higher fees and secure the most lucrative projects, it pays to have a specialism. Clients will pay a premium for a ghost who knows their field inside out, whether that’s business, health, politics, or lifestyle, because you can not only shape their words but also bring insight, credibility, and authority to the page. My own specialism is business and I thought it might be helpful to share my story to how that happened.

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer, except I only ever imagined myself becoming a journalist. Certainly, never a ghostwriter and definitely not one that specialised in bestselling business books. Perhaps though, and I can’t be sure it was intentional, I was ever-so-slightly indoctrinated as a child. From the time when I could first write, my father would present me with an empty notebook each September and inform me he’d like it filled with stories by Christmas. This was the only gift he wanted from me, he’d say. He’s a scriptwriter on soaps such as Emmerdale and Eastenders, so I do feel he was trying to shape my career choice a little so that I followed in his footsteps. All the same, I did enjoy the annual writing fest.

Journalism is a good training round for a specialism

Fast forward twenty years and I found myself running a PR and marketing agency. It was successful, turning over six figures with a dozen or so employees, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Somehow, I had lost sight of my dream. I backtracked, sold my half of the agency and finally fulfilled that dream by becoming a trainee reporter on the Southampton Echo. I loved it. Once qualified, I moved onto national newspapers. Ironically, my ticket into the top level was the knowledge I’d gained from running my own company: I understood how businesses work. What’s more, despite not wanting to run a business, I loved all the inner machinations of the corporate world. I started as a reporter at the now defunct Sunday Business and ended up spending a number of years at the Mail on Sunday as a financial reporter, writing news and features about some of the biggest hitters in the corporate world. I genuinely didn’t ever see myself doing anything else.

One day, I found myself sitting in Selfridges with Allan Leighton, then the deputy chairman of the luxury department store and CEO of supermarket giant Asda. As a business journalist these informal chats happen a lot. It’s a great way of staying in touch with contacts. Out of nowhere, as casually as if he were offering me another cup of tea, he asked me; ‘Have you ever thought about writing a book?’

I don’t quite remember my reaction, but I think it was a rather weak joke about me being the only journalist in the world without a book in me. Allan wasn’t joking though. Penguin Random House had commissioned him to write a book about leadership, and had suggested he pick a journalist he liked to help him. That journalist, it turned out, was me.

I said yes, thinking it would be an interesting challenge and would be a great way of developing my writing skills and contact list. What a challenge it was. I found myself on planes, chasing some of the biggest names in business around the world, collecting tens of thousands of words of interviews with their thoughts about what it takes to be an outstanding leader. I also did a fair few telephone interviews with industry giants while sitting in my car in the road outside my house in Ealing. My children were very young and couldn’t be trusted to keep the noise down, so my husband looked after them inside, while I did my interviews doing my best to ignore the noise of lorries trundling past. When finished the exhausting round of interviews, my challenge was to turn this chaos into an 80,000-word book that was coherent, compelling and publishable. The deep-seated panic I felt staring at that first blank page stayed with me for a while.

The terror of a lot of words and a blank page

Somehow, I did it. Allan’s book On Leadership became a bestseller and I was hooked on ghostwriting. What I thought might be a one-off experiment turned into a whole new career. Dragons Den’s Deborah Meaden asked me to help with writing Common Sense Rules. Then came Anne Boden’s Banking on It, which became one of The Times’ Business Books of the Year. Since then, I’ve ghosted more than eighty books, many of them bestsellers, some award-winners, and all of them fascinating.

The work has changed my life in many ways. I now earn double what I was taking home when I left the Mail on Sunday. I have the freedom to set my own pace, to choose my projects and to work from anywhere. That said, it’s not all leisurely mornings and drinking tea while I think about what to write. Ghostwriting still means long days at the keyboard and the relentless discipline of daily word counts.

Something that I have found that’s very much in my favour in bringing in well-paid jobs is that I specialise in business books. While there are more business ghostwriters now than when I first started out nearly two decades ago, there are not hundreds of us. This means that business ghostwriters can and do command a premium because we have specialist knowledge and the named authors don’t have to spend hours explaining to us how a takeover works, or what EBITDA means (If you are curious, Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation is a measure of a company’s performance that excludes financing costs, tax, and non-cash accounting charges). If I were to give advice to any aspiring ghostwriter, it would be to find a niche, something they know more about than the average ghost. Obviously, this specialism shouldn’t be too obscure, because there needs to be a market for their work, but it will help them stand out from other ghosts and therefore command larger fees.

Stand out from the crowd

I would encourage anyone with a background in writing to consider a career in ghostwriting. In the current uncertain environment, with so many jobs being lost in journalism and publishing, ghostwriting does feel like a little bit of an oasis. It is a place where you can still be paid well for writing. It is an amazing job too. Every project is a window into a new world. For six months at a time, I get to step inside someone else’s head, ask them every question under the sun, and then shape their story into something lasting. By the time the book is finished, I’ve learned enough to sound like an expert, although I should add that I usually forget it all as I move on to the next project. It’s intense and at time demanding, but it’s also the most rewarding career I could have stumbled into.

What started with notebooks filled with childish imaginings and moved towards a casual question over tea has grown into something much bigger for me. I never set out to be a ghost, but I became one anyway. In the process, I’ve built a life and an industry niche that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

If you’d like to learn more about ghostwriting and how to get started in this amazing industry, try our ghostwriting course. Here, The Ghostwriters Agency’s co-founder Shannon Kyle and I, together with other leading ghostwriters, have shared our invaluable tips on everything you need to know about ghostwriting. Click on the button below to find out about the ghostwriting masterclass.