Ghostwriters: Your Unexpected Business Asset
“When you bring order into your life your time will multiply, and then you will be able to give God more glory by working more in his service” (St. Josemaría Escrivá).
The concept of using a ghostwriter might feel a bit foreign. You may wonder, “Isn’t that just a thing for celebrities and politicians?”
But ghostwriters don’t just write famous people’s memoirs. In fact, a ghostwriter can be a valuable asset for a small business owner, too.
What Exactly Is A Ghostwriter?
A ghostwriter is a writer for hire, specifically trained and skilled in writing in another person’s voice, who crafts content without taking authorial credit. Ghostwriters, or “ghosts” for short, can help individuals and businesses by writing marketing assets, crafting and shaping stories, editing, brainstorming content, wordsmithing, and more.
Whether you’re struggling to put pen to paper or simply seeking some professional feedback on work you’ve already created, a ghost can be a worthy investment for your business, freeing up your time, energy, and resources to focus on growing and scaling.
Ideally, a ghostwriter should specialize in a niche. Beware a ghost who claims to be a jack-of-all-trades. Mastering a particular subject matter requires hyper-focusing on a specific industry’s news, trends, and conventions, so when seeking a ghost, look specifically for one with demonstrable experience in your field.
How to Use a Ghostwriter to Grow Your Business
When most people think of a ghostwriter, they picture someone actually doing the writing for them, from soup to nuts. In many cases, that’s true; ghosts can craft an entire article, white paper, or memoir from initial idea to finished, published product. But they can do much more, and they can be pulled into a project at any point in its evolution.
Here are a few examples of unconventional ways to use a ghost:
Helping you develop, refine, or strengthen an idea for an article or story.
Copyediting a completed piece of writing.
Taking a rough, raw outline or set of notes and spinning it into a finished work product (much like a live, human ChatGPT).
Helping you identify and locate your audience.
Working with you to create a content calendar and create, schedule, share, and repurpose content.
It may feel strange to relinquish your writing to another person. But to do their work, a ghost will likely spend some time getting to know you, your business, your voice, and your values. The goal is not only for the finished product to sound like you but also for you to have provided your input throughout the entire process.
A productive, valuable relationship with a ghost does not mean simply rubber-stamping a piece of work without ever laying eyes on it. Regardless of the specific tasks you’ve hired your ghost to do, you should take ownership of the work by being involved in its creation. Even if it feels dauntingly time-intensive, it still requires less time than if you’d done the work from scratch without any additional support.
A Powerful Business Asset
Though it does involve an upfront cost (the best ghostwriters are not cheap, particularly the ones who hyper-specialize in a particular niche), working with a ghost will save you money in the long term. Once you establish a working relationship with a ghost, they will get to know you and your business well enough to create content for you with less of your time, direction, and involvement. This type of outsourcing translates to hours of your billable time. With these hours freed up, you can focus on growing your business, rather than constantly feeling the pressure to write all of your articles, blog posts, social media captions, and other assets from scratch.
For example, imagine you spend $1,000 to hire a ghost to write several blog posts for you. But your billable time is worth $150, and it would have taken you at least 15 hours to research, write, and edit the blog posts yourself. That translates to $2,250 of billable time. If you hire a ghost, instead of spending those 15 hours writing the blog posts, you could spend it serving your current clients, finding more clients, or investing time in creating new products or services for your business.
I am a ghostwriter, but I, too, have hired other writers to help me create marketing content for my business! It’s proven to be a worthy investment time and time again, allowing me to focus on growing, scaling, pivoting, or, frankly, resting.
Is Ghostwriting Ethical?
Throughout the years, I’ve had several clients express some concern about whether hiring a ghostwriter and passing the work off as their own is an ethical practice. Indeed, it might seem strange to put your name to someone else’s words, but ghostwriting is a convention used across industries, from medicine and law to academia. Busy professionals frequently use third-party writers to help them push their research and writing projects over the finish line. Even practicing attorneys, who are held to stringent moral and ethical standards, often use ghostwriters to help them complete legal briefs and motions. This practice passes ethical muster, provided the attorney is engaged in the work and is comfortable claiming ownership over it.
To combat any potential ethical objections, if you use a ghostwriter, you should take the time to work closely with that person to develop a topic, thesis, and story arc that is consistent with your personal and professional values and that speaks to your audience. Also, you should always review the ghostwriter’s finished product to ensure you are comfortable putting your name to it—and you should always, always review it for factual inaccuracies. This review will give you the buy-in sufficient to overcome any personal or public objection to having someone else help you write.
Conversely, if you hire a ghostwriter but never lay eyes on the work they create for you, the content might start sounding “canned” or generic, as you won’t be able to confirm that it is consistent with your own voice, values, or message. While it is still not an illegal or patently unethical practice, it can certainly pose an issue of personal conscience. If you spend the money and invest the time in choosing a ghostwriter, you should also commit to doing all you can to ensure you’re setting them up for success. Your written work is a part of your personal and professional legacy, and it’s in your best interest to ensure it is the highest quality possible.
The Human Element Will Never Become Obsolete
In a world where we can outsource many basic services, it’s worth taking time to figure out how you can stand out among your (human or AI-powered) competition. With the constant and relentless burdens that consume our time and energy, it can be difficult to create the space in our schedule for this type of reflection and innovation. AI tools may produce good, clean writing, but they will never produce good, clean writing that captures your voice and values. But a ghostwriter can—and will. Consider whether hiring a ghostwriter could benefit you, freeing up your time and energy to grow, scale, and nurture a business that will withstand the test of time.
Alexandra Macey Davis is a lawyer-turned-freelance writer and author. Most recently, she has written for Verily Magazine, Coffee + Crumbs, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and FemCatholic, and she writes a monthly Substack letter called Chrism + Coffee, a call to find peace and rest in both the sacramental and the ordinary. She is the founder of Davis Legal Media, a ghostwriting and content strategy company serving the legal industry. Her first book, Pivot: The Nontraditional JD Careers Handbook, will be published in late 2023. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband and two boys.