Why I Never Quote Before I Read...

Jul 20, 2012 by

Why I Never Quote Before I Read

If you ask for one of three services, I can quote you a price right up front. An A&R is always $500, a proposal is always $5,000 (industry standard), and I charge $150 an hour for mentoring or consultation. For anything else, I never quote before I read. And I hear you ask me “why?”. If you meet a ghostwriter or editor who will indeed quote long before they’ve seen your material, you are not dealing with a professional. You are dealing with a (most likely) hungry freelancer. Someone who does not quite know what they’re doing, and is competing with every other freelancer out there. Trivia: If you are gathering prices and mine is the lowest, I take that to mean I need to raise mine. No project can be accurately priced until I’ve looked at...

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Ghostwriter Certification

May 4, 2012 by

Ghostwriter Certification

Ah, the crux of it. No one quite knows what it is, but it seems like it’s self-explanatory. It’s not. Ghostwriter certification training is a complex, intense and ridiculously difficult training program offered by Claudia Suzanne and Left Coast Institute. It’s been a privately-taught course for several years, but will be moving to CalState Long Beach come 2013, and as I understand it, become more expensive–but not easier. GCT is grueling, time-consuming and painful, but it’s incredibly necessary. Let’s go back a few years. Fifteen years ago, there were around fifty ghostwriters in the US. They were counted, in fact, at one point. But as the publishing industry began to implode, and then eat itself, ghostwriting became a fallback position for out-of-work writers, editors and journalists. Because they knew how to write, they assumed...

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Why You Need A Ghostwriter

Apr 27, 2012 by

Why You Need A Ghostwriter

Search Google for the term “ghostwriter” and you get quite a few hits for the TV show and movie (see image) but very few hits for an actual professional. Most people don’t know quite what they’re looking for, and even if they did, they don’t understand how it works or why they need one – after all, everyone knows how to write. We all learned in high school, right? Wrong. I spend most of my time un-teaching my clients what they learned in school. For fiction it doesn’t really matter if you split your infinitives if it helps make the point. No one’s really going to care about a few dangling participles. In fact, I like to dangle my participles on occasion. But a ghostwriter is an industry expert. Someone who knows how to...

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