Who typically commissions a ghostwriter?

By some accounts between 40 percent and 80 percent of all the books published every year are ghostwritten, although there are no specific sales figures available for ghostwritten titles. Even going by that lowest percentage it seems there is a lot of work available for those writers willing to set their “named author” status to one side. But who hires a ghostwriter in the first place?

In order to answer the question I interviewed a number of ghostwriters about their experiences of the commissioning process. Most of the writers are novelists or non-fiction writers in their own right and/or have become published writers since gaining experience as ghostwriters. Their routes into ghostwriting are varied, but all were journalists, speechwriters or authors before taking on ghostwriting assignments. One – Stephanie Krikorian – was a television producer although her ghosting began only after she co-authored her first book. Thus the importance of previous experience as a publishable writer cannot be overplayed.

The quick answer to the “who commissions a ghost writer?” question is that almost anybody that is part of the publication process starting with the subject or purported author of the book and ending at the publisher, can hire a ghostwriter for a specific project.

Most of the writers I spoke to have literary agents and find their work through them. Michael Robotham, a former ghostwriter and now successful crime fiction author, for example wrote 15 autobiographies and all of these projects came to him via his agent, Mark Lucas. According to Michael, “Within the publishing world you get known. If a book does well then one publisher will ask another who wrote it and they will happily give up that information and contact your agent. Promotion is done within the industry.”

This is also the case for Stephanie Krikorian, a US-based celebrity ghostwriter who gets her assignments, “Either through referrals or through my agent. I very rarely solicit, in fact I can’t think of a single incident in which I approached someone.”

Other ghostwriters, such as renowned celebrity ghostwriter Andrew Crofts work entirely through their own websites and are most often hired by the subjects of their books. For writers of Crofts’ caliber this often means that not only do they write the book, but that they also put together a publishing proposal to guarantee the book gets published.

Ghostwriting books is not always about celebrity autobiographies, however, and ghostwriters such as Julie-Ann Amos, who by her own admission services the, “lower end of the market,” are also hired directly by the named authors of the books – in Amos’ case through word-of-mouth promotion and a web presence. In her experience clients that have yet to be published often make the first move by hiring a ghostwriter themselves and then try to promote their book as a finished product or even go down the self-publishing route.

Ghostwriter and non-fiction author Tom Bromley has a slightly different experience of who hires him as a ghostwriter. In his previous professional life he was a commissioning editor and he has found that contacts he made within the publishing industry have been invaluable in finding him ghostwriting assignments. These range from the clients themselves to editors, publishers and, of course, his agent.