Ghostwriter Certification

May 4, 2012 by Lona

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 they could ghostwrite. So up go the shingles and in come the clients!

That was the plan. It doesn’t work that way. Ghostwriting is a craft in and of itself. It has a unique skillset you won’t learn anywhere else. There are a lot of writers out there that call themselves ghosts, but they don’t actually ghost. They write. When the book or article or blog is finished, it may contain some of your ideas and concepts, but it won’t be yours. It won’t sound or feel like you, and chances are you won’t have contributed much to it for it to even intellectually be something you can call your own. The book was written for you. Not ghostwritten.

Ghostwriter Certification teaches exactly how to do just that – GHOSTwrite. The craft and art of writing a book closely with an author so the author’s words shine on the page, their voice is clear and bright, their ideas brilliant and dazzling. The author owns that book, the ghostwriter does not, because while the technical skill was the ghost’s, the meat of the book was the author’s. The author created the book – the ghost wrote it.

Because it’s not my book. It’s yours.