Common Misconceptions About Making Money as a Ghostwriter

As someone fortunate enough to earn decent money ghostwriting for high-powered professionals in the tech industry, I often hear from people who seem to harbour one or more key misconceptions about what it takes to do this kind of work successfully.

I have no doubt that these folks have nothing but the sincerest of intentions as regards their willingness to improve their skills and to learn how to better market their services.

Unfortunately, I suspect that they continue to struggle with landing (and keeping) new clients because one or more of their core beliefs about content writing and/or about the steps needed to convince people to hire them are getting in the way of their potential success.

As I discussed in a recent post, wannabe ghostwriters (and similar forms of content writers) must cultivate a specific mindset before trying to apply different tactics for acquiring paid work by writing for others.

Before you start marketing yourself as a content writer or engaging in negotiations with prospective clients, you should first familiarize yourself with the following six key misconceptions about online ghostwriting.

It’s very easy to “fall back” into accepting the legitimacy of one or more of these claims, so be sure to remain ever-vigilant with respect to how you think about and market yourself and the specific value you offer through your services.

As a preview, here are the six mistaken beliefs I’ll be deconstructing:

Ghostwriting is easy;
All you need to make money as a ghostwriter is writing talent;
Novice ghostwriters can’t earn big money;
Upwork/Fiverr are the only options worth considering;
Ghostwriters work very closely with every one of their clients; and
Ghostwritten content must always be 100% original.

Misconception #1: Ghostwriting is easy (“I’m a writer, after all…”)

“I write my own blog posts and people seem to really like them. How hard could it be to write content for others?”

To be blunt, ghostwriting is not an easy undertaking, neither as a one-off project nor a months- or even years-long job/career.

True, it’s far less (physically) demanding than bricklaying or farming and less (intellectually) taxing than working as a physicist or surgeon but ghostwriting is still by no means easy.

Becoming a successful ghostwriter — i.e., making a living (or a worthwhile side income) writing content for others — requires that you:

Become something of a subject matter expert in any and all areas in which your clients do business [otherwise you can’t write intelligently or persuasively about the topics with which your clients are most concerned and in which they’re most experienced];

Take the time to learn about your clients’ business objectives, company missions and “voices”, audience personas and customer needs, and their competitors’ operations [otherwise you can’t craft content that a) explicitly respects your clients’ goals and needs and b) is “fine-tuned” to their specific voices and experiences];

Accept the inevitability of having to re-work (i.e., to provide several drafts of) content in order to ensure that the tone and substance both “fit with” your clients’ expectations [it’s unrealistic to expect that your first drafts will always fully satisfy your clients’ wishes]; and Manage your time extremely well, work effectively with little-to-no guidance or supervision, and successfully meet deadlines on a consistent basis [as I recently pointed out, clients offload the responsibility of writing onto you because they want to pursue different (and often more ambitious) objectives, which means that you must deliver the results for which they’re looking — elsewise you’ll be “fired” and they’ll find somebody else who is more reliable and efficient].

It takes serious effort and dedication to become a professional, dependable, and in-demand ghostwriter.

By no means is ghostwriting simply a process of writing about whatever you fancy and then selling your content to people who are eagerly waiting to “slap” their names on it and take credit for it.

Nor is it even accurate to describe ghostwriting as “just” another form of writing: as I’ll discuss shortly, ghostwriting in the tech/startup domain, which is the industry with which I’m most concerned, has just as much to do with marketing your services as it does with researching and writing content for your clients.