Hens Lay Eggs

food for thought

A great analogy for ghostwriting

Zack Williamson, Ph.D., posted a truly apropos analogy for ghostwriting that, with his permission, I am using:

Does it bother you not having your name on it?”

That’s the question I get most often when people find out I’m a ghostwriter.

And it doesn’t. Not even a little.

If they add your name to the cover or acknowledge it in the back, sure, it feels good.
But you never expect it—and you never need it.

The deal is: someone brings the vision. I bring the time, the structure, the language to make it real.
Sometimes they have the skill but not the time. Sometimes the time but not the skill.
Either way, it’s a better use of their money than their time.

It’s like hiring a tattoo artist.
You explain what you want.
They execute—sometimes exactly how you pictured, sometimes in a way that’s better than you imagined, but still undeniably yours.
And they don’t insist on stamping their name on your arm.

That’s what this work is. And it’s a beautiful thing

Years ago, my first writing mentor told me:
“Give away your best ideas, and trust that more will come.”
I’ve seen the truth of that line again and again.

You let go of the instinct to hoard. You give your best work to someone else’s vision. And more ideas show up. They always do.

And yeah—sometimes it feels personal, letting go of a line you’re proud of.
But when you care about the person you’re writing for, it starts to feel less like loss and more like a gift.

Some of the work I’m proudest of doesn’t have my name on it.

And I wouldn’t change a thing.

So, to answer the question often posed, no, ghostwriting isn’t cheating. It isn’t stealing. It’s using a professional to use your idea and develop it and, quite likely, improve upon it.

But it’s still your idea.

Do the math.

Once again, I came across what looked to be an appealing gig for a fiction ghostwriter: writing serialized romance (https://freelancewritinggigs.com/job/freelance-prose-writer-romance-fiction/#gsc.tab=0). This would make any ghostwriter with a penchant for the romance genre salivate. Of course, this particular ghostwriter has long since learned to do what doesn’t come naturally to many word nerds: calculate the numbers.

So, I’ll do it for you.

The average writing speed is 3:20 to draft, self-edit, revise, and polish. That’s the average. You may be faster or slower at producing good content.

Each chapter should be about 1,200 words, so that each chapter should take nearly 4 hours to complete. The requirement is to produce a minimum of 10 chapters a week which makes for 12,000 words of good content per week. At least you don’t have to develop the plot or characters: the company provides you with a plot outline. Regardless, you’ll be spending an estimated 39:40 for a week’s worth of work. That’s full-time employment without benefits.

With each completed and accepted chapter, the company will pay you $15-$20. Let’s be optimistic and say you get paid the full $20 per chapter. That full-time employment—miscategorized as freelance—will net you $200 a week. Your hourly wage: $5.07.

That gig doesn’t sound so appealing now, does it?

The Editorial Freelancers Association shows an average per-word fee of $0.09-$0.11 for fiction ghostwriting. At that rate, you’d earn a median fee of $10,800-$13,200 for a 120,000-word manuscript of 100 chapters (serials tend to run long) averaging 1,200 words each. But let’s be a little more reasonable as to manuscript length for the genre and figure 75,000 words: $6,750-$8,250 at the EFA average range.

If you do a bit of research into ghostwriting, you’ll soon learn that the EFA average is actually on the low side. High-powered, in-demand ghostwriters of fiction may earn $0.50-$1 per word. That makes this company’s paltry per-word rate of $0.016 even more insulting.

If you don’t hold your time and skill to a higher standard, then you undercut your colleagues and justify undervaluing yourself and your craft.

You’re not an elephant; don’t work for peanuts.

The Fox and the Lion

One of Aesop’s fables tells the tale of a fox who encounters a lion. The mightly lion terrifies the fox, but repeated encounters during which the lion does nothing aggressive turn the fox’s fear into familiarity. The fable is the source of the old saying that familiarity breeds contempt.

This relates to a recent book I downloaded. I thought it seemed familiar, but couldn’t quite remember having read it. So, I opened the book and began reading. Before I’d gone half-way through, I recalled enough of the story to realize that, yes, I had read it. And I wondered how I’d managed to slog through the story the first time.

I didn’t remember the TSTL heroine’s intellectual dishonesty, her propensity for lying to herself and the hero, her utter refusal to acknowledge the reality of her circumstances and deal with them accordingly. I didn’t recall the foreign hero’s unlikely familiarity with American idioms. Other inconsistencies irritated me, too. I didn’t recall the author’s propensity to tell rather than show, and what showing there was conflicted with descriptive assertions of the heroine’s intelligence, compassion, and strength of character.

In short, the story certainly wasn’t worth reading twice.

Familiarity with it bred my contempt for it.

This deep immersion within a genre means that I no longer approach a book with eyes wide open in excitement: A new story! Insteady, I approach a new book with suspicion: Will this be the same story I’ve read before? Intimate familiarity with a genre is good in an editor and a writer, but perhaps not so beneficial to a reader looking for a new twist on an old plot.

With millions of books published every year, one might safely state that, when it comes to literature, there’s nothing new under the sun. Every overarching plot has been done before ad nauseum. What makes the story worth reading is the journey, but in many cases, the journey is familiar, too. Authors strike the same plot points in the same succession at the same places with little deviation to refresh those tired old story arcs.

It’s a true joy when a story delivers something new, something refreshing.

Those millions of books in competition with every other book means writers are rightfully leery of their ability to deliver a unique and original story, something and exciting. Imposter syndrome descends upon the writer. The writer becomes frustrated and condemns his or her inability to produce a story that will set the literary world on fire.

Let’s be honest: very, very few writers will ever set the literary world on fire. Those who do often have robust and effective marketing efforts.

If you’re writing genre fiction, then you should understand that genre and the expectations of its readers. This makes writing genre fiction both easier and more difficult. It’s easier because you know the formula; you understand what readers like and expect. It’s more difficult because there’s comfort in familiarity, making the writing of the story prone to sticking to well-worn ruts in the characters’ shared journey.

Injecting originality into the familiar doesn’t necessarily mean going wildly off-course. It may mean altering expression to engage and hold the reader’s attention with poetic language. It may mean introducing a unique tangent that diverts the old plot to a new direction which does eventually lead to the foregone conclusion—it’s just a different route in an “all roads lead to Rome” sort of way.

Whatever refreshing a worn out trope means, it does not mean abandoning good story structure, effective character development, abandonment of verisimilitude, or the failure to suspend disbelief.

If you have already written your story (preferable a second or third draft) and you need assistance refreshing the formulaic plot, then you’re looking for a developmental editor. I’m not a developmental editor, but I can refer you to some. (I offer sentence-level editing which comes after you’ve revised your manuscript following developmental editing.)

If you’re working on a story premise or a plot and want to produce a story that refreshes it and makes it exciting again, then you’re looking for a ghostwriter. I’m the ghostwriter you seek. Let’s talk and make your story great.

Author

Hard boiled, scrambled, over easy, and sunny side up: eggs are the musings of Holly Bargo, the pseudonym for the author.

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Karen (Holly)

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