Hi all,
I've been asked to discuss ghost-writing a book on a particular business
subject about which I have some surface knowledge, but I'm not the
topic-expert - the "real author", however, is very much an expert in this
particular industry. He has asked me what/how I would charge to ghost-write
a 100-150 page book. I've ghost-written speeches, articles, etc., but never
an entire book. Any advice on questions I should ask, how to set parameters
for charging, etc.?
Thx!
Paula
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3 comments:
I think $2,000 per 50 pages would be a fair fee, based on my VERY limited experience...
Paula,
To ghost write someone else's book could be a tall order. $2,000 might cover it, but I doubt it. Generally, one would write the 25-page proposal for twice that amount and more. So I'd be wary of quoting such a low fee.
Do you know if the guy has a working outline for you? If he does, that might make the $2,000 palatable. But only if the research is complete and organized as well (including interviews transcribed).
No matter if you're starting from scratch or not, you want to know how available the guy is going to be. If he's going to be difficult to reach (Has he been already?), that should be a deal breaker.
How did he come up with the page numbers for the book? I'd want to know that because if he's going short in order to save dollars, that's going to make your job more difficult in terms of condensing information. Ask about that.
Setting parameters is important, as you've guessed. You need to set those up front. Will you work on weekends? Will you take his calls after 5 p.m. on weekdays? That might need to be written in the contract.
Before you agree to such a job as this, you want to spell out everything. Does the job include rewrites? If so, how many? Will it be your job to hire the editor? You will want to hire an editor to go over the final document. That's a given.
Is he going to self-publish or market the book to publishers? If self-publish, is he handling that aspect? If he wants to submit the book to agents/publishers, does he have a list ready to go? Does he expect you to guarantee it'll be published? You can't agree to that. No one can, and your potential client needs to know that up front. If he wants to submit to a agents/publishers, is this non-fiction? If it's non-fiction, you don't write the book first, you write the proposal.
Personally, I wouldn't go lower than $5,000--and that's pretty low, in my opinion, as you won't have access to future earnings from this project. You won't get the byline, unless you include that in the contract (You can negotiate an As Told To byline).
There's so much to know before getting involved in a ghosting project that I'd spend time searching on the Internet for more information before I said yes to this.
Hope this helps.
Jackie
THANK YOU so much for your thoughts - I've already been doing some Internet-searching and compiling a list of questions for the guy, because, as you noted, I can totally see how easy it would be to get screwed time-wise on something so amorphous...ergo, the devil is in the details...
I'll let you know if/how it works out - not sure how serious he is on really doing this or if he's just fishing for info, as I am :) Thx again - Paula
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