Unlocking the Secrets of Ghostwriting for Busy Professionals

00:11 - Lynn (Host)

Hi, future authors, Lynn Liquidy-Smart is back again for another week of Write, edit and Publish, a podcast that is for thought leaders, speakers and executives who want to write a book, but you don't have a lot of time to write it and you need to know the information on how to write it. So I am a professional ghostwriter with unicorn publishing company. We also offer publishing services as well, but I love to bring these educational episodes to you so you know more about the world of publishing and how to self-publish your own book in a professional way. All right, so let's jump into. Today's topic is when to hire a ghostwriter. All right, so there are so many people. I've had several clients just this year hire me for ghostwriting and I've got two more spaces left and I'd love to fill them for 25.

00:56

I write all non-fiction and one of the things I love about ghostwriting is helping my clients get their work done faster. So I'm a lot of my clients. I cut their time in half or less to write a book, so I can write a book in three months to a year in or a year and a half, depending on how fast my client gets back to me with their content they need for the book. So it's really exciting and it's really rewarding to be a ghostwriter because I get to help people, you know, achieve a bucket list item, which is really cool. Not that many people can say they do that for a living, which I absolutely love, and timing is really important in the ghostwriting process, right? So like you don't want to hire a ghostwriter if you just came up with an idea and you're not sure what to do with it, you do want to hire a ghostwriter if you have an idea and you're like I definitely want to turn this into a book, especially what you want to hire a ghostwriter If you are coming up on a conference or an exhibit where you're going to have exhibitor at an exhibitor hall and you have a table and a booth and you want to sell your book, right. So that's like a really hard deadline that you want to get a book done for. That's what I'm doing with one of my clients right now. So he has all these events he wants to to promote and sell his book. So we're making sure that his book is getting published. By the time you watch this, his book will be published and I'll talk more about that and later and you'll see it in the email as well.

02:12

All right, so you have the ideas, but not the time. This is a great reason to hire a ghostwriter. So you might be like, oh, I want to write this book to make uh, to as like a lead magnet for my business, or I want to write this book as a calling card for myself, or I want to write this book to separate myself from all the other speakers that are out there that don't have a book. So, as a speaker, you don't have to have a book. But let me tell you, it's really great if you do, because when you do your speaking gigs, then you can sell your book at your speaking gigs, which is a really great place to sell it, because people are really pumped after meeting you about getting your book right. So that's, that's a really cool way to do that, all right.

02:49

So, um signs you're too busy to write. The calendar is consistently full with all your business activities. Great way to have your calendar full, but you definitely don't have any time to write your own book. Your writing projects keep getting pushed back because you have other priorities that take place over your book. You've been about to start. For months, or even years. I've had somebody who had several years they wanted to do this and they finally pulled the trigger last year and they're very happy about it. Your evening or weekend writing plans never materialize, so you're not in a good writing habit.

03:24

So a good writing habit is basically like you schedule a time to sit down and write and you do that if it's like early in the morning before your kids get up, late at night, after your kids go to bed, maybe it's during their nap time, maybe you write on the weekends while your partner takes the kids out to do something fun, whatever it is, you're not getting that consistently done because you're just too busy. All right, so a ghostwriter can fill your time gap, because we basically what we do as ghostwriters is we help busy executives complete their book on time. And that's really important because if you're a busy executive, and especially if you have that hard drop-down deadline, like some of my other clients do, you don't have time to really consider all the other options or whatever you don't have time to. You know really, you know, consider all the other options or whatever. Right, you don't have time to just be willy-nilly about it. You want to get it done, you want to get it done right and you want it to look professional. So, just like I said in the last video I just watched, a professional keynote speaker clearly did not hire a editor for her book and, oh my gosh, it was terrible like it was so hard to read that book. So make sure you hire even if you write your own book, hire somebody for editing. I do a la carte things with my publishing, so if someone just needs a book editor, they can hire me as a book editor. Someone needs a formatter. They can hire me as a formatter and have very competitive prices for book formatting. So keep that in mind as you are thinking about your book that you want to write next, all right.

04:44

Point number two is your expertise exceeds your writing ability. Now, this is very common and don't feel bad if you can't write. A lot of people who are very good at what they do aren't good at writing. Luckily, I am good at writing and that is what I do. So that gives me an advantage for my business, because I get to write lots of content for my business pretty easily, because I can write up to 8,000, 10,000 words a day day, and that's pretty common for me, depending on what I'm doing right, like on a day where I'm doing a lot of marketing content, I will write six, seven, eight thousand words a day, because I like to batch out my things and that's what I do for my clients. I batch out their work. So I made sit on someone's book and write it for three hours at a time, or four hours at a time, or one or two hours at a time, right, and that's time that executive is getting back because I'm doing that work for you. Some common scenarios of other examples of your expertise exceed your writing ability would be technical experts who struggle with general audience writing, and this is very, very common, right? So if you are someone who's listening to this, and you are technical and you are really great that technical information is fabulous, but no one's gonna read it if it's too dry, so, so a ghostwriter can help you. And you are technical and you are really great that technical information is fabulous, but no one's gonna read it if it's too dry. So a ghostwriter can help you take that technical information and make it a little more easier to read, with a lot of style and flow and possibly some humor and some personality in it If you're a non-native English speaker, you might not know how to tap into valuable insights in the American market, and that's another reason to hire a ghostwriter is because there's the cultural differences.

06:10

You know with outside of America or outside of English-speaking countries is going to be different than you know the other if you don't speak. You don't speak English, or you're not in a modern European country or modern American country. In modern America, professionals whose strengths lie in speaking rather than writing. So just because your speaker does not mean that translates well into writing, right? So like I write all day and that doesn't mean it translates into speaking. So speaking is a complete is a different skill sets. Of course there are some skills that cross over between speaking, your writing, but it doesn't necessarily mean if you're one you're going to be good at doing the other. So if you're an amazing speaker, you want your book to look amazing. So just like that example I gave earlier where that person was an amazing speaker but that book was absolutely horrible, right, that's a huge disconnect. So you want to make sure that if you are a powerful speaker or a powerful executive or a professional thought leader, that your book looks professional as well.

07:09

All right, a subject matter expert who needs help with structure and flow. So a lot of times, if you're a subject matter expert, you have all these ideas but you're not sure how to put them together. If that's you, a ghostwriter is a good person for you to hire. All right, because ghostwriters can bridge the expertise writing gap and so, like, a technical manual can be transformed into writing content, right. Like a story that you have can be transferred into writing content, because stories are different when you verbalize them than when you write them down. So if any of these things sound like oh yeah, that's definitely me, then definitely jump on the discovery call to talk to me about it to see how I can help you with any of these issues where your expertise exceeds your writing ability. All right, let's go on to the next one.

07:57

Number three you need to scale your content, but you don't have the time to do it right, because content demands that you have multiple platforms that require consistent content. Book writing while maintaining regular content is really hard. So even if you are maintaining that regular content, you might not have time to put it into a book. That's what happened with one of my clients who hired me last year. She had all the social media content, but she didn't have time to put it in a book.

08:21

However, one of the things I will tell you is that social media content is not great to transfer into a book. It's too choppy and too short. You need original content and then you can actually take your book content right and break it up into social media blurbs. That's actually really easy to do on AI. So if you are a published author and you want to make social media content, take a chapter of your book, put it in AI and ask it to write hey, can you write 10 social posts for Instagram with this? Can you write 10 social posts for threads? Can you make this a super thread? Right, can you take this and make it into a story that's good for me to post on like Medium or post on Substack. So once you have your book, you can break it down into other things, but I definitely would not recommend taking social posts and try to translate that into a book format. It does not work very well at all. It ends up being more work than it is repurposed with ease.

09:14

Another thing is launch of new programs or services. So if you're launching a new program or service which I'm doing this year. One of the new things I'm offering is group ghostwriting and coaching and book coaching. So to help people that you don't want to spend a couple thousand dollars on a ghostwriting package per month but you want to get that expertise, I have that available in a group, but again, I am building that up, so my team is helping me with that. Another thing you want to know about is growing your audience expectations, right. So if you want to grow your audience expectations and you need to scale your content that way, that's another great reason to hire a ghostwriter, because ghostwriters can help with content scaling.

09:52

So one of the things I love to do with my clients I've done this with a couple of clients in the past is they have this overarching idea. I'm like okay, let's reverse engineer this. Let's take your video, make it a transcript, take that transcript, make it into a blog, an article, social media post, so you can repurpose that information. And you're not constantly writing original information, because that's way time consuming and you won't get as much use out of your information. So you wanna repurpose, repurpose, repurpose and a ghostwriter is great with that. So even if you have content and you're like, ah, I don't know how I'm gonna repurpose this.

10:23

Hire a ghostwriter to repurpose the content that you already have. I always have lots of great ideas for repurposing content for my clients. All right, my friends, we're going to take a short break here. When we come back, we're going to talk about being at a critical business juncture and why that's a good time to hire a ghostwriter. You, hey, future author, we're back with the second half of episode five when is a good time to hire a ghostwriter, right? So we talked about in the first half. We talked about you have ideas, but not the time. Your expertise exceeds your writing ability and you need to scale your content creation. All of those things are great jobs for a really good, reliable ghostwriter, all right.

11:31

The next part is that you're critical business junction, so you're launching a new business or service, you're rebranding or you're doing a speaking tour preparation, so you don't have the time to write your content. A ghostwriter is fabulous for any of those things. You might be developing a course or program, right. A ghostwriter can come in and help you write the content for your course. So I was a middle school teacher for over a decade. I wrote lots of course content online like tons and tons and tons like more than I will ever remember moving forward. So if you need somebody, like I don't put together the courses, but I can write the content for you and then you can go to someone. I have a really great person in my network I recommend for course creation and I can refer you to that person to actually create the course. But I can always help you with course outline and writing the content and what you need to put in that course, because I've done so many courses and so many lesson plans, hundreds and thousands of them Building thought leadership.

12:26

If you're trying to build thought leadership and you're stuck and you're not sure how to start that or where to build it or how to build it, a ghostwriter is a great option for building your thought leadership. Okay, so the next thing we're talking about is expanding into new markets. So maybe you're in on the East Coast and you want to expand to the West Coast. Great way hire a ghostwriter. Say hey, here's my content I have for the East Coast. Can we translate this into West Coast content? Perfect example of how to hire a ghostwriter. And really great reason to hire a ghostwriter.

12:56

Also legacy preservation. So I'm currently writing two books for one of my clients who wants to preserve his legacy because he just turned 80, and he knows his time is getting short and because, you know, isn't all of our time getting short? We all age. But he wants to preserve his legacy and he's feeling that time clock ticking. So I'm helping him preserve his legacy with his book so that all of his friends can have a copy of his book his kids, like you know people. His legacy will go on and on forever because he's going to have a published book and that's really exciting, all right.

13:27

So another reason you can hire a ghostwriter is you're ready for professional support. So are your readiness indicators? Are budget allocated for professional writing? So you definitely want the budget for it. Clear vision of desired outcomes. So what do you want your outcome to be? Do you just want more like? You want to get on more platforms, or you want to get more eyeballs on yourself, right, does it? Maybe you want to be more positioned as a thought leader, whatever it is, and a ghostwriter can also help you organize your source material to make it good for the project that you are creating, right? So you just don't want to pick things here and there. You want to have a clear outline and clear path on organizing your source material so you know what is being used and how you're going to use it.

14:09

What is the time available for collaboration? So how often can your ghostwriter get together with you to collaborate and or work on your project independently? You want to understand the ghostwriting process, like we talked about in episode 4. You want to make time to commit to your project, because I've had clients who didn't make the time to commit to their project. They spent thousands of dollars on a book and they never finished it. So make sure you have your time commitment. You really want to make sure that you're passionate about your book and that you really want the book out by a certain date.

14:38

Alright, your willingness to share information right. So sometimes if you need to have your ghostwriter sign a confidentiality agreement, that's perfectly fine, you can do that as well. I always keep my word with my clients that I won't share their information and until it's published, then I'll share their book. But I'm very, very careful with that because I like to make sure that that trust factor is there with my clients. So if you are interviewing somebody and you're like, ah, your gut says, oh, I don't know if I can trust this person, then definitely don't go with them, right? Like I always go with my instincts, I'd rather go with my instinct and be wrong than go against my instinct and be wrong, so keep that in mind for sure.

15:16

All right, so remember reasons to hire a ghostwriter, or when to hire a ghostwriter is you have the ideas, but not the time. Your expertise exceeds your writing ability. You might need to scale your content creation, or you might be at a critical business juncture, or you just might be ready for some professional support because you've been doing this all on your own and it's getting tiring and it's burning you out and you want somebody to help you along the way. These are all reasons to hire a ghostwriter. If you're interested in hiring me, definitely click on the bottom and get that discovery call in and we can talk about your book or your content, whatever it is you're looking to ghostwrite, and we can see if we're a good fit for each other.

15:54

I'd love to help you with your book, so make sure you are doing that getting that discovery call in right so I can. So those are your action steps, my friends. So make sure you click on that button, get that discovery call and then I can evaluate your readiness on whether you're ready to work together with a ghostwriter and we can start the process, and that would be super exciting. All right, so remember to hit the like and subscribe button on this video or, if you're watching listening to this on audio, follow the podcast so you get every week's episode dropped right to you so you can get all the information you need about self-publishing your book. I'm your future author. I hope you're having a great week and I will see you next week for another episode of um write, edit and publish.