Table of contents:
- Begin with the End in Mind
- Confirm your “Why”
- What kind of book are you writing ?
- Outline a structure
- Start writing
- Time for Editing
The book ghostwriting process may vary from writer to writer, but the end result is the same – a finished manuscript.
Depending on the ghost writer, that manuscript may be edited, proofread, and ready to hand off to the publisher, or it could require a few more rounds of edits before it is truly considered done. That’s one of the aforementioned variations since different ghostwriters approach editing differently.
But the finished product is the same – a polished manuscript ready for publication.
Begin With the End in Mind
To start, many ghostwriters reverse engineer the ghostwriting process. That means defining the project as a whole and setting guidelines for its completion based on the desired end result.
Assuming we’re talking about book ghostwriting, some parameters to agree on upfront may include:
- Due date, such as “April 1, 2025”
- Maximum length, as in “up to 60,000 words”
- Amount of outside research to be conducted, such as “up to 5 hours”
- Maximum number of interviews, such as “up to 6 outside sources”
- Total number of rounds of edits, such as “up to two”
- Any photo research required, such as “up to 12 hours of photo research on-site”
- Speed of responsiveness, such as “client will return draft within one week”
It can also be helpful – though not essential — to choose a tentative title, to keep everyone focused on the core message.
Confirm Your “Why”
After you’ve clarified the project details, it’s time to start work on the actual content.
The first step is to get clear about why you have decided to write a book. What, exactly, do you want to have happen as a result of publishing your book? Your answer will help decide what material belongs in the book and what information is not essential.
So, what is your book about?
As you think about what you want to write about, also keep in mind:
- Who is your target reader
- What they will expect to gain by reading your book
- How you can make the material even more interesting or compelling
- Why you are writing it
These factors should be kept front of mind so that everything you’re including in your book will help answer these questions.
What Kind of Book Are You Writing?
Now that you know why you’re writing a book and who your target audience is, it’s time to zero in on how, exactly, you’ll cover the subject you’ve chosen.
It can be helpful to start with a general idea about genre. That is, what category would your book fall into?
If it’s a business book, you would expect to find it in the business section of your bookstore. If it’s more of a lessons learned or personal story about a time in your life, it might be a memoir or biography. If it’s instructional and designed to help teach the reader something about themselves, it might be self-help. Or if it’s less about personal growth and more about how to do something, it could be a how-to. And if it’s completely made up, it is probably fiction.
These are just a handful of the different book categories available to choose from.
Before you start planning your approach to your topic, be clear about your perspective and what the reader will take away.
Outline a Structure
Knowing your target market and your book’s purpose, it’s time to plan out how you’ll approach your book’s topic.
It’s time to craft an outline, which will later become your table of contents.
Many books follow a chronological structure, so that what happened first in the big-picture story is shared early in the book and more recent material ends up toward the end. Memoirs are frequently told chronologically, for example, as are corporate histories.
You can also think about your topic in terms of a sequence. What does your reader need to know first, before they can learn about subsequent chapters? For example, if you’re teaching the reader how to speak Italian, you’re going to start them with simple language lessons and then move along to more difficult verb tenses and more complex terms later in the book.
The Hero’s Journey is another frequently used story structure. Using this approach, you start by telling the reader background information for context, followed by a “departure” to right a wrong or explore an issue, then how they deal with the crisis or situation, followed by their successful return. This works well for business turnaround stories, for example, where the CEO has to figure out what’s going on, what the actual problem is, and then how they can address it — the journey.
Self-help books or big-picture titles often follow more of a problem-history-solution type of approach. With these, you identify the core problem upfront, explain how the situation arose, explore potential solutions, and then walk the reader through how to address it, or how others have attempted to. You’ll see this often in retirement-related finance books, where the author acknowledges the problem of not having enough to retire, explains how many people get to that situation, and then reveals several potential solutions to catching up.
Start Writing
Armed with a fleshed-out book outline of 10-15 chapters on average for a business book, you can begin writing.
Fortunately, when you work with a ghostwriter, the heavy lifting responsibility is on them.
I always prefer to use the outline as a roadmap, though I start with Chapter 1 rather than the introduction. It’s so much easier to write the book’s introduction later, after the rest of the book has been drafted and you can more accurately describe what the reader will find in upcoming pages.
As a ghostwriter, my job is to gather all the required information needed to write your book. That will come mainly from you and any materials you’ve gathered, as well as through interviews of people who have relevant information, and through online research, to fill in statistics and confirm historical information.
I always ask my clients if they can choose a day and time each week for a 60-minute meeting with me, such as Wednesday at 3:00 pm or Thursday at 11:00 am. That time can more easily be protected when it is on the same day each week.
Then, before our meeting, I send questions in advance about the chapter’s content, to help jog your memory. This is especially useful to gather relevant stories that will make the chapter more interesting.
Once in our Zoom session, we’ll use the questions I sent as a guide, though additional questions naturally come up. The more you tell me about decisions or situations or experiences, the more details I’ll want to hear.
I’ll ask lots of questions and restate what you tell me sometimes, to be sure I understand your reasoning and description of events.
Once we’ve talked through the planned material for that chapter, we end our meeting and I go away to draft the chapter. After I’ve pulled everything together, typically in 1-2 weeks, I’ll send it to you for your review and feedback.
We’ll spend a lot of time on Chapter 1, since it will become a template for subsequent chapters. That means that we may have another meeting about your input or it may take me a few days to incorporate your feedback. But we’ll polish this one so that I know going forward how long each chapter should be, how many stories we’ll want to include, and how we’re approaching the subject matter.
Then we’ll consider Chapter 1 done for now and we’ll move on to Chapter 2. As before, I’ll send questions in advance, we’ll talk them through, and then I’ll send a draft for your review and feedback. However, with the rest of the chapters, we’re not going to invest as much time revising and editing them until the manuscript is done. I put aside the editing until we get to that phase – at this point, we’re still in draft mode and the focus is on creating chapters from scratch.
When all of the chapters have been drafted, including the introduction, we’ll start the editing phase of the book publishing process.
Time for Editing
I may be unusual in how I approach ghostwriting a book, but I prefer to hold editing until we have a complete draft of your manuscript (a manuscript is the written draft before it is published. You might refer to your book as a “title” once it has been released).
I like to wait to start editing because I know that after you read the manuscript from start to finish, you may want to move paragraphs around. You may want to combine chapters or split them. You may decide that some content is irrelevant or redundant. You get the idea.
It’s difficult to do this, however, until you see the full draft. Also, if you start editing while you are still writing, it can take much, much longer to finish writing the book.
The first round of edits is structural, where we focus mainly on ensuring that all the information is there that should be and that it’s in the right order. If stories are missing or there isn’t enough history somewhere, this is when we add it.
With that done, we move on to a second round of editing where we focus more on style and tone. This is where we work on making sure the material sounds like you wrote it. We rewrite words and phrases you would never use. We add humor if needed. And we generally make sure the content flows easily for the reader.
After you re-read the manuscript from start to finish and are happy with it, we then hand it off to the publisher you’ve chosen. They will have their own editor read through it, which is always appreciated because editors who are seeing the book with fresh eyes can sometimes spot holes or missing pieces of information that we overlooked.
When you get to this stage and are dealing directly with your publisher, your ghostwriter’s job is done. Most are very happy to remain available to you for quick questions or advice, such as taking a look at potential cover designs, but for the most part, you’re dealing with your publisher directly.
Now it’s time to start promoting your “forthcoming book” and making sure anyone and everyone knows your book will soon be available for pre-order. I always enjoy brainstorming marketing ideas with clients early on and while it’s being printed, you can really go all in on marketing and promotion, to be sure you leverage your new author status as much as possible.
Want to talk about your book? Email me at marcia at marcialaytonturner.com to see if I might be a good fit.
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