Of all the possible reasons not to hire a book ghostwriter, fears of inauthenticity top the list, it seems. Authors have expressed concern that working with a ghostwriter will make their book less theirs.
When authors are worried about authenticity, they say something like: “I couldn’t use a ghostwriter. If I published a book, it would need to be my work.”
What I then try to explain is that a ghostwriter will only enhance your ideas, your framework, and your stories. A ghostwriter will not make up stories and insert ideas that are not your own.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that hiring a ghostwriter can actually help maintain authenticity, not dilute it. Here’s why:
Ghostwriters Help Articulate Your Lived Experiences
Your knowledge, perspective, and experiences are what make you uniquely you. A ghostwriter has no interest in making up stories to fill pages—their goal is to help you tell yours. They want to hear your insights, lessons learned, and observations to share on the page. In many cases, a ghostwriter can help you express your thoughts and ideas more clearly because they are not as close to them as you are. The content is all authentically yours, though it may be organized or communicated in a way that is more accessible to others.
Subject-Matter Expertise and Writing Skill Are Different Talents
You could be the preeminent guru in your field and have a hard time conveying what you know. Ghostwriters, on the other hand, do not know what you know, but they do know how to tell stories, make ideas clearer and stronger, and make dry writing more interesting. Writing is a specialized skill that few CEOs, founders, business owners, nuclear physicists, tech execs, or nonprofit leaders have. That’s why they hire ghostwriters as writing partners and collaborators—to make sure their book reflects their subject-matter knowledge and is easy to read and understand.
Ghostwriters Help Translate Thoughts and Ideas
Having brilliant ideas and insights does not necessarily mean that you can convey them in a way that other people understand and recognize your brilliance. Many experts can make presentations and share their ideas verbally, but struggle mightily when they sit down to write. Again, it’s a different skillset. But a ghostwriter can take your spoken words and translate them into paragraphs and chapters that form a book. They capture your ideas in your voice.
Collaboration and Compromise Are Not the Same Thing
When you hire a ghostwriter to work alongside you on your book, to help gather relevant thoughts and ideas and structure them into a narrative arc that makes sense, you are retaining a consultant, essentially. You’re hiring a publishing expert, but you still have the final say. Actually, you have a say at every step of the way. You decide which information to include and which to leave out, how to frame certain situations or stories, and how you want to be perceived. You are the decider, not your ghostwriter, because it’s your intellectual property. There is only compromise if you decide to allow it.
More Experts are Acknowledging their Ghostwriters
Until the last decade, leaders and experts who relied on ghostwriters to help produce their books were very quiet about it. Ghostwriters were hush-hush. But recently, frequently in the name of authenticity, more business leaders, celebrities, and influencers have openly admitted they had help. “Of course, I hired a ghostwriter,” many have said, because they are not writers or publishing pros. Hiring a ghostwriter is like hiring a tutor to help you do the best job possible; it’s not hiring someone else to take the class for you or take your tests.
Ultimately, people hire ghostwriters for a variety of reasons besides writing skill and publishing expertise. The biggest reason is time; few busy leaders have the time to write a book, while others may have the time but choose not to spend it typing away on a computer on their days off. Some have the time but are slow writers and understand that a ghostwriter can help get their book out in months, not the years it would take them on their own.
Authenticity is going to become even more of an issue as artificial intelligence (AI) gains the capability of looking and sounding like humans (fake videos are already in circulation), but working with a ghostwriter will not weaken your message, ideas, or stories.