The economics of ghostwriting books

Gotham Ghostwriters founder Dan Gerstein explains the ghostwriting process.

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The economics of ghostwriting books

I’m sure just about everybody has had the experience of looking at a celebrity memoir and wondering: did they actually write that? In many cases, they didn’t, at least not by themselves. There’s actually an entire shadow economy of ghostwriters who do the bulk of the work on these books — not just for celebrities, but all kinds of public figures ranging from big-name CEOs to politicians.

But how does one go about hiring a ghostwriter? And what’s it like to work with one? Dan Gerstein, the founder of Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency that specializes in connecting clients to professional ghostwriters, recently answered these questions in an interview:

What we typically recommend is that the writer spend a fair amount of time upfront before anything is written talking about the vision for the book, make sure they're on the same page in terms of the process they're gonna follow. There's clarity about who's gonna do what. And then secondly, there's an opportunity for the ghost writer to, in casual settings, hear how the author talks, right? Because it's one thing to get their voice from tape recorded interviews, but that's kind of like book speak. And if you really want to be able to kind of tap into the author's voice, you also wanna augment that to some extent with kind of just hearing how they are in kind of more relaxed, informal settings. And that's why, you know, one of the big changes coming outta Covid was that there were a lot of in-person interviews pre covid and then, you know, follow ups via phone.

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Transcript

Hey, Dan, thanks for joining me.

Hi, Simon. Great to be here.

So I'm having you on because I read this New York Times article that you're interviewed in about this conference that you organized with ghost writers. And we'll get into that in a few minutes. But I really wanted to talk about just like all the economics, the ins and outs, of the ghost writing industry. But before we talk about that, and before we even talk about, you know, your current firm, how did you get into ghost writing in the first place?

So my introduction into ghost writing was through speech writing. I was a speech writer in Capitol Hill for about a decade. I graduated to being a communications director in the middle of that, but I kept a lot of my speech writing duties and decided to move to New York after my then boss Senator Lieberman ran for president and was not successful. ,

So you worked for a speech writing agency, or you worked for

No, for Senator Joe Lieberman. I was full time staff.

So Joe Lieberman, was it Vermont or Massachusetts? 

Connecticut.

Connecticut, okay. So you were hired specifically by him to write speeches for him? 

Yes. I also did some policy work, and then I graduated to be a communications director. I had a really amazing experience with him, learned a ton, but he ran for president and it was unsuccessful and it was a natural transition time. So I moved to New York and I started doing …

Sorry, just to back up just a little bit. Yeah. What were the qualifications for becoming a speech writer for Joe Lieberman?

You know, I had never written speeches before. I was a reporter at a college. I worked at the Hartford Courant, which was the main paper that actually covered him. It was a little serendipitous that the time I moved to Washington and I went to his office for like an informational interview. Their speech writer had been fired a few months before, and the communications director was completely overwhelmed and needed some help. So they gave me basically a trial doing some more basic writing tasks, and I did well. And then they gave me some basic speeches to write. Then I ended up getting hired as his press secretary for his reelection campaign. And part of my responsibilities were writing things for him, and I did well. And so at the end of the campaign, he got reelected. I got offered to be his full-time speech writer in Washington.

And he ran in for president in 2000.

He ran for vice president in 2000 with Al Gore, and then four years later, when Gore decided not to run Lieberman ran for the Democratic nomination.

Okay. And then I know I've listened to interviews with John Favreau, the speech writer for Obama. And Obama is obviously a great speaker, the relationship was a very collaborative type of relationship where Favreau would write the first draft, but then Obama would go through several drafts with red ink and stuff like that. Do most speech writing relationships work like that? Like I get the sense that like Trump's speech writers were basically, there was no collaboration that was happening between them. They were just throwing stuff up on teleprompter and he was reading off of that.

Yeah. I would say there is a spectrum of relationships and in some cases it's like, you know, the speech writer and the chief of staff develop the speech, the principal reads it, maybe has a few notes, and then they deliver it largely as it's written for them. And then there’s the other end of the spectrum; there are very, very hands-on principals who want to do prep planning conversations. They will heavily edit. They want to see an outline, they'll heavily edit the first drafts. There'll be lots of conversation, multiple drafts. I would say the more common experience is that, you know, the higher you go up in the food chain where the stakes are higher, the principal wants to make sure that the speech really reflects their voice and drives a strategic message and all of that.

And so they'll be involved. At the same time, the longer that there is a writing relationship and a collaboration, the less time you actually have to spend on each individual speech. And that's what ended up happening with myself and Senator Lieberman. After five or six years of working for him, I knew his voice backwards and forward, and I knew the stories he liked to tell. I knew the jokes he liked to tell, and so I didn't have to spend that much time with him. And there wasn't the heavily edited process that there may be in the beginning of the relationship. And when I first started writing for him, there was a lot of red ink spilt.

So he had a failed attempt to run for president. Then you decided to move to New York. What was that decision and what was your plan? 

I was burned out on politics. It was the natural time to make a transition. I had kind of done what I really hoped to accomplish, and felt that it probably made sense to move. My mother grew up in New York. I had roots here. I kind of felt more at home here culturally. So it was not a hard call to make. And I ended up doing some communications consulting mostly for issue advocacy groups. So it was politically related, but not working for candidates or elected officials. And what started happening was people who knew me as a writer would occasionally come to me in a panic and say, ‘our boss has to give a speech, can you help us out?’ Or, ‘we have to write an op-ed for a major newspaper.’ 

And I just didn't really have the time or, frankly, the inclination to do that work anymore. So, as a favor, I would just introduce them to my other writer friends. I'd say, Joe, talk to Simon. He's terrific. I think he could help you out. I enjoyed that. I'm a natural born connector. I liked helping my friends out, and so I didn't really give it much thought, but it kept happening. And after about the 20th time, it dawned on me that there was an unmet need in the marketplace, and I might be able to solve that and develop a business around it. There was this clear demand for very specialized, high level, long form writing that PR firms and other comms firms really weren't equipped to do. And then there were all these amazing freelancers out there.

Problem was, there's no efficient mechanism to help demand find supply. Sso in most cases, people were looking for a book ghost writer or an elite speech writer. They would just, you know, either phone a friend or Google, and this was not the most efficient way to do this, since you have to screen a lot of people. There's not much standardization, and, particularly when hiring someone to write a book, most of these times it's the first time author, they don't know anything about publishing. They don't know how to evaluate a ghost writer. So my idea was, rather than just try and hire a bunch of writers and do everything in-house with a bunch of generalists, was to move in the direction the internet was taking everything – towards customization and specialization – and tap into this unorganized universe freelancers and build and curate a network and then be in a position to play matchmaker.

And so you've never ghostwritten an entire book?

I have never ghostwritten an entire book.

Oh, interesting. I would've assumed that you had. So you were a ghostwriter, but not that kind of ghostwriter.

Yeah, and, and when I launched Gotham Ghostwriters, I had not written a book, but I knew how to write speeches. I knew how to write op-eds, I knew how to write white papers. So at the early stages of Gotham Ghostwriters, I was doing that as an experiment. Those were the primary deliverables and services we were offering clients. But over time, organically, more and more people came to us just for help writing books. And it was clear to me that was where the real demand was, and where we had a chance to really differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. So, you know, six, seven years in, that became the dominant part of our business.

And also, I'm guessing if your job is being a connector and a lead generator, that's the only way you can make money, because that's the only way the projects are big enough. If someone comes to you to write an op-ed, and you make that referral and the person makes like one or two thousand dollars on an op-ed then gives you 10% or whatever your commission is, that's not gonna generate much revenue for you. Whereas I'm guessing, and we'll get into this, the average book contract is much larger, in which case you're commission would actually be worth it.

That's exactly right. Our business model is based on volume, and being able to, you know, help a lot of clients connect with custom tailored talent. So for book projects, we're taking a 15% commission on whatever was paid to the writer. But on the front end, the client's paying us a placement fee. And so we're transparent. We break out our compensation based on the services we're delivering. But at the end of the day, that's still a modest percentage of the overall fee that the client is paying for writing the book. So yes, we typically don't do one-off op-eds. In cases where that's what they're looking for. I will just make an introduction to a writer that I think could be helpful to them and let them hire them directly.

So obviously a book project is a huge project. You really don't want to match someone who is a bad writer or someone who doesn't work out because there could be a lot of wasted time and energy in terms of recruiting writers to qualify for you referring work to them. Like, what's a good criteria? And what I've heard, or maybe what I've read or learned through osmosis or something like that, and this might be completely untrue, is that the ideal ghost writer for a book is someone who has actually written and published a book, but it failed commercially. And so therefore they've proven that they can write a high quality book, but they're not financially successful writing books under their own name to where they would be open to taking on ghost writing projects. Is that a complete misconception of who the ideal ghost writer is?

I wouldn't say that is a description of the ideal ghost writer. I would say that is a very common career path. That's how a lot of people who transition from, you know, writing their own books or being a journalist purely to adding or transitioning to being a ghost writer, is that they find that, you know, they have this skill, and they can write at a high level, but it can't command the compensation to earn a living purely by writing under their own name. So in some cases, they'll subsidize their own work by taking on ghost writing assignments, collaborations. In other cases, they'll recognize that, you know, they really enjoy the work of collaborations and they make that their primary writing portfolio.

So let's say you get introduced to a new potential writer to add to your roster of referrals, and you're on an initial Zoom call with them. What are the criteria that you're gonna be looking for before deciding? Because your reputation is on the line for whoever you refer work to. Like, what are the criteria that you're looking for before you add someone to your roster of representation?

So I would say the first thing is that they have a body of work that aligns with what our clients are really looking for. If  their main work is doing content marketing and copywriting and basic newsletters, there's nothing wrong with that, and that's an in demand skill, but that doesn't really align with our area of specialization, which is long form sophisticated content. And then secondly, do they have an area of specialization and or expertise that will really pop with our clientele, right? So we are working with a lot of business leaders and other thought leaders, tech entrepreneurs, heads of advocacy organizations, university presidents, so having people who have worked with clients of that caliber, and then secondly have area specialization in higher education so that a university president will see that they understand their field.

We have a fair number of clients who come from finance or run hedge hedge funds or work at investment banks, worked at the World Bank or some other regulatory institution at the higher levels, and they're gonna wanna work with a writer who has a real facility and understanding with how finance works, how the banking system works. There's not that learning curve and they can just jump in. And then in those cases, the client will then be choosing based not on their skills or experience, because we've already vetted for that, but on the intangibles, you know, chemistry style, taste, and what we call the click factor, which is arguably every bit as important, if not more so than purely just, you know, do they have the right skillset to produce a high quality book.

Interesting. So how do clients or customers find you? I think like the idea that I have in my head and a lot of people other people would have in their head is that, like, there's some editor at HarperCollins, they've just signed a book deal with some celebrity who might not have a proficiency in writing or the free time to do it. And then they're like, okay, we need to pair you with a ghost writer. That's in movies and pop culture, that's how ghost writers are typically portrayed. Is that the natural funnel that you're working with? Or is it something different?

It is not. So I would say that by the time, in almost all cases, a book via a public figure gets to a publishing house, there already is a collaborator attached to the project. So where that point of intersection happens is with the literary agent, right? So when the literary agent signs up, you know, a celebrity or a politician or CEO to write a book, the agent will usually have the prime responsibility to recruit and pair a collaborator with the author. So some of our work comes from agent referrals, but to be honest with you, that's the distinct minority in most cases. We're dealing with authors directly. They're at the very early stages of their process. Many of them are really not candidates for traditional publishing, or they recognize that some form of self-publishing is much more in their interest. And how do they find us? First through word of mouth referrals, second through Googling internet searches. The third is through referrals from the other writers in our network. We have a referral fee arrangement with them so that, you know, if they're too busy or a client approaches them about a memoir and they're a science writer and they're not really equipped to write the memoir, we incentivize them to refer them to us as, you know, a a trusted partner to help the client solve this problem.

And in those cases, we'll pay a referral fee based on what we earn. So I would say those are the three main channels through which clients find us.

When it is like an individual author, is it generally understood that they are probably wealthy enough to where they're gonna front the upfront cost of hiring the author? It's not like, oh, upon payment of advance or upon securing the book contract or anything like that. Like they need to make that upfront investment.

I would say for our agency, that is the majority of clients, right? They recognize they need professional help, they care about the quality of the book they're gonna put out in the world, and they're prepared to compensate a professional collaborator at market rates. There are definitely some that come to us and they have limited budgets, and in those cases, what we try to do is help them find professional help short of a full on ghost writer. So it could be a coach, it could be an editorial advisor, developmental editor to work with them once they've written the manuscript. So there's definitely ways that people who may not be the strongest or more confident writers can produce a quality book without having to invest tens of thousand dollars to hire a ghost writer. And that's a choice that, you know, people have to make for themselves.The other exception is in cases where the author, to kind of limit their financial liability, will hire a writer to do a proposal, which is a much less significant investment cost wise. And then if the book sells based on that proposal, then they'll use most, if not all, of the advance to then hire the collaborator to work with them to write the full book.

So if there is gonna be a ghost writing collaboration, like where they're actually writing the full book, the way that they're paid is through some kind of set fee versus a royalty agreement or anything like that.

The norm is there will be a defined project fee for writing a full book that gets broken out into payment installments. And more often than not I would say the two most common structures are you get half upfront, half upon completion, and the half upfront protects the writer's interest because there's an opportunity cost of committing to take on a new project, they have to turn away other work, and it locks in their time. And then having the second half tied to delivery and acceptance by the author, the author's protected because the second half of the fee is contingent on the writer delivering a quality product. It's also not uncommon for the fee to be broken up into thirds. So there's some milestone in the middle that's performance based in terms of like, you know, half the chapters have been delivered in acceptance.

Sometimes it's broken up into quarters. Every once in a while, the author will feel more comfortable doing monthly installments – so if it's $60,000 and in six months they'll do $10,000 a month payments. It's very rare to do it on an hourly rate, but there are some writers who really prefer to do it that way. I would say they tend to be at the higher end of the food chain and have the leverage to insist on that. It's very uncommon for there to be a pure rev share model for a ghost writer, because most books don't earn back the advance, and there are no royalties. Often  the advances are not large enough on their own to cover the writer's full fee. There are still some times, especially if it's a big brand name celebrity, that the ghost writer will negotiate getting, say, 30% of the advance and x percent of the royalties. But that's becoming less and less common.

And I'm guessing that's hard for your business, because like, how do you even really audit or monitor what the royalties are so that you get your 15% cut?

Yeah, in those cases, you're really just dependent on the publisher delivering the royalty statement to the author's agent, and then there's a kind of ethical fiduciary duty on their part of the agent to share that information with the ghostwriter so that they can then see, you know, what they're owed. 

And what's the level of acknowledgement of ghost writing within the book? I feel like it's becoming a little bit more coming out of the shadows, like where the ghost writer is either given a co byline sometimes, or at least acknowledgement in the acknowledgements page. Is the industry opening up a little bit in terms of like secrecy and stuff?

Definitely. We are in a state of transition and this idea of coming out of the shadows, that was the central theme of the Ghost Writer convention that we held on January 22nd in New York. And I think a lot of it is driven by generational change. I'm 56, so my peers, people over 50 who are not digital natives, they're accustomed to the traditional notion of a ghost writer being hidden, right? You're there to help the author, but you have no public recognition. You're supposed to be discreet, you don't acknowledge who you worked with, so I would say among, you know, high level public figures, that's their general posture. Now, there are exceptions to that, but that's their general posture. 

But people under 50, particularly millennials who are digital natives and where, you know, the transparency of the internet, where everyone sees the wires, there are no secrets. And it's interesting, you cited John Favreau, right? When Obama ran for president and then got elected, Favreau became kind of a mini celebrity. That was a real, I think, demarcation point in the idea that speech writers and ghost writers don't need to be a not totally anonymous. And I can tell you right now, from having worked in politics, having been a speech writer, that there's no way,  if Obama was uncomfortable with Favreau getting this recognition, that he would've stayed silent about it, right? Like he would've put his foot down and said, no, you have to kind of shut up and, you know, stay in your place. We've seen more and more examples of, you know, authors not just acknowledging that they worked with a ghost writer, but in a way publicly embracing them, right?

So, J. R. Moehringer got a lot of buzz and attention when he got hired by Prince Harry to write his memoir, he was all over the news. It's not like Prince Harry was talking about J. R. Moehringer all the time, but he was also not, you know, trying to deny it or cover it up. He was very comfortable with the notion that he was working with a collaborator. Demi Moore had a memoir come out a couple years ago, and she had engaged a very accomplished magazine writer named Ariel Levy to help her with her memoir. Not only did she publicly thank her, but I found this remarkable at the time, Ariel Levy actually did some interviews in support of the book. And 20, 30 years ago, you know, literary agents would've lost their mind at the idea of a collaborator doing media interviews about a celebrity's book.

No one batted an eyelash with that. And I think that is a harbinger of things to come, in large part because again, you know, the stigma or this, the insecurities of the authors that they have to maintain this illusion that they did it by themself, is rapidly disappearing. And I think that's all for the good because, you know, you consume pop culture like me, TV shows, they have writers' rooms, movies, they have multiple writers credited, pop songs often have multiple writer credits. Storytelling is a collaborative enterprise and has been since the beginning of time, and it's just this weird thing in modern book publishing where we've had the idea of the author as the sole writer, even when we all know, if you have any understanding of publishing, you know, for a long time, some of these top editors at publishing houses were basically also functioning as collaborators because they were heavily involved in the writing and rewriting of the text. That doesn't in any way minimize the fact that it's the author's book. It's their idea, it's their vision,  and it's primarily their words. It's just they've had some help. Again, I think it's something that's really good for publishing and storytelling in the long term.

You mentioned the Prince Harry biographer. He wrote a piece for the New Yorker that went kind of viral, and he was talking about, you know, working with celebrities. And luckily his collaboration with Prince Harry ended up working out well. But he talked about how a lot of these people who get paired with ghost writers, they're incredibly famous, they have huge egos, the relationship can be a really difficult one, and a lot of ghost writing projects end up getting spiked before publication because those relationships don't work out. What's kind of your experience on that route? Do you, without naming names, do you have any funny horror stories or anything like that of ghost writers who have just like, found it incredibly frustrating to work with their clients?

Yeah. I would say just as a general proposition that there's a distinct pattern when you have an author who is not prepared to invest emotionally – forget about the financial side – invest emotionally in the telling of the story and put in the time. Because even if you're hiring a ghost writer or a collaborator for the book to really reflect the author's voice and be compelling and give something to the reader, the author's gotta be very involved in the telling of the story. And I think that where ghostwriting assignments tend to go off the rails is when an author has unrealistic expectations of what their responsibilities on their side of the ledger are. 

The other way is – and I've seen this a fair amount – is when not a lot of thought is put into the chemistry and the fit between the author and collaborator, and a decision is made either based on a literary agent who represents a star writer and wants to get him some work and will, you know, place them with the new author they just signed up without necessarily thinking of the author's best interest. Or, you know, and we've seen this with some of our clients, where the author delegates the vetting and hiring process of the collaborator to a third party. You know, it could be their chief communications officer or their corporation, it could be their PR firm, whatever. And in those cases, you know, even with a trusted proxy, too often what happens is they go based purely on resume, right? Oh, this person wrote three New York Times bestsellers. They wrote, you know, they worked with, you know, a peer of the authors who works in the same field and that determines who they hire, and then the author and the writer start working together, and there's no chemistry and there's no trust, and that's off. That's definitely a context where things can go wrong, and where the authors are just like, you know, I don't wanna work with this person, they don't get me, or their work styles are too different and they'll fire the writer.

I'm suddenly reminded of the funny anecdote of Trump's ghost writer for the Art of the Deall that he found the collaboration sessions to be like, utterly useless and getting him nowhere. So the system they finally figured out was that he would just sit in on Trump's phone calls. And so he was just like, basically he was given some line or something like that where he could actually, like every time Trump's phone rang, he could listen in on whatever bizarre conversation that Trump was having all day.

Yeah, that was Tony Schwartz. He has some great stories to tell .

Yeah. So I don't wanna get too down into the weeds because it probably differs from ghost writer to ghost writer. But like, is it generally just accepted that when a ghost writing contract is signed, the process is that the ghost writer will schedule X number of Zoom sessions or sit downs with the author to try to, you know, first map out an outline, but then also just kind of record and gather the details and try to learn the voice that they can then incorporate into the writing?

Yeah, I would say that's a pretty common baseline or template for the process. The most successful collaborators kind of walk this fine line where they have a system that they've developed that really works well for them, and they've, you know, honed it, working with different authors so that it can apply to a lot of different types of principal. But at the same time, they're flexible enough to adapt their baseline system to the work style in need of the new author they're working with. It can vary, there are some authors we've worked with, you know, they prefer to speak into a tape recorder while they're working on the treadmill, like they're super busy and trying to schedule interviews every week can be challenging. So their hack for that is that when they have time while they're exercising, they'll tape themselves and then send the recordings to the writer.

But I would say in terms of like best practices, what we typically recommend is that the writer spend a fair amount of time upfront before anything is written talking about the vision for the book, make sure they're on the same page in terms of the process they're gonna follow. There's clarity about who's gonna do what. And then secondly, there's an opportunity for the ghost writer to, in casual settings, hear how the author talks, right? Because it's one thing to get their voice from tape recorded interviews, but that's kind of like book speak. And if you really want to be able to kind of tap into the author's voice, you also wanna augment that to some extent with kind of just hearing how they are in kind of more relaxed, informal settings. And that's why, you know, one of the big changes coming outta Covid was that there were a lot of in-person interviews pre covid and then, you know, follow ups via phone.

But then once Zoom became the standard currency for remote communication, right, that's a lot more intimate than a phone call. And so it made the work for ghost writers a lot easier and more efficient because they were able to limit, first because they had to, due to the threat of the pandemic, but coming out of Covid to, you know, use Zoom or other kinds of video conferencing to do interviews with the author, discuss drafts, go over notes, things like that. And tha was more effective and made the author more comfortable than purely doing a phone call. So that's been, I wouldn't say it's a revolution, but it's a real change that has, I think, advanced the work of ghost writing.

So in 2007, Amazon launched the Amazon Kindle, and prior to that, self-publishing was given the pejorative of Vanity Publishing. But in 2007 and the following years, self-Publishing became respectable in its own right. And now it's like a completely viable path for really good professional authors to not even bother with the large publishers and self-publish. So the stigma is pretty much gone and it's provided a lot more opportunities for self-publishing. Was that a huge boon to the ghostwriting industry that suddenly, like any rich person, like they could fully respectively release a self-published book on their own and could fund it, and there was a, you know, marketing apparatus and stuff like that. Did that start providing more opportunities for ghost writers?

Yes, absolutely. I think it's a confluence of a couple trends, right? So first off, with the rise, not just of book self-publishing, but other forms of self-publishing, whether it's, you know, posting on LinkedIn using medium, blogs, Substack, and social media, you've had this democratization of storytelling and publishing. And then I think  – this is my own theory –  but I think there's enough anecdotal evidence to support it, is you have so many people who are sharing their stories or their ideas on social media, and they get, you know, 50 likes, and that's infinitesimal in terms of your ability to sell books. At the same time though, it creates a feedback loop with the author of those social media posts that like, oh, people are interested in what I have to say. And so the bar used to be very high because you had to convince a publisher they could make money from your book. Now the bar is much lower for someone to sort of feel like I have something to contribute to a conversation, or people are interested in my story, or I want to get my story out there.

And with the self-publishing becoming so much more sophisticated and accessible to the layperson, I think it's created a real revolution and had a profound effect in terms of the stories that get out into the world, and the ability for people to share expertise and insights that never saw the light of day in book form because a publisher couldn't figure out how to make money for them. And then you add in, as you know, you've talked a lot about in your work, Simon, you know, the boom in demand for thought leadership content among business and advocacy leaders. You layer that on top,  and that has created an environment where there's huge demand for what I call smart content, smart long form content. And therefore, for a lot of these people, even if they're strong writers, they just don't have the time to produce it on their own. And so that is what is, I think, fueling this boom in demand for ghost writers and professional collaborators.

And then the whole reason that we're having this conversation now is I read this New York Times article that you recently organized a ghost writing conference. What was the motivation behind that?

I think there were a couple things. So one was, you know, you had this group of professionals that's getting more and more recognized, but had had really no opportunity to convene, commune, connect , share best practices, learn from each other. This again was where my speech writing background comes into play, I saw something similar several years ago happening with the speech writing community, and that was even more surprising because speech writing is a job in the sense of like, people get hired by corporations to be full-time speech writers in politics and other institutions. And yet as a profession, it had no annual conference or no place to gather, no association. And so a colleague of mine, David Murray, who was then the publisher of Vital Speeches of the Day, we decided to kind of, as an experiment, pull together a group of speech writers in a mini conference and see what kind of appetite there was for having some sense of community.

And the response was overwhelmingly positive. And that led to the formation of the Professional Speech Writers Association. And from that experience and seeing that grow, and they just had their 10th annual world conference, I really felt like there would be a similar benefit to the ghostwriting community to have a place to gather and have a conversation. And so for this first venture, we really consciously framed it as a convention and not a conference because we wanted them to understand this was for and about ghost writers, right? We didn't invite a lot of agents or editors or other people who work with ghost writers. I think that helped really kind of focus the conversation around the work we do. And now coming outta that, there was definitely a real interest in expanding that so that we do bring in other partners, other people who either hire ghostwriters or partner with them. So that's something we're looking at for next year. The second reason for doing this though was for an external audience, to help educate the broader public, and particularly the reading public, about the role ghost writers play, the value they deliver to modern storytelling, and that's where this idea of kind of the coming outta the shadows was to both kind of celebrate the work we do, but also educate people about the work we do.

Obviously you got a write up in the New York Times, but otherwise, how are you educating the public about what you do?

I would say it has been through both earned media – so there's been, you know, there was an article in the Times of London there, the Wall Street Journal's gonna be publishing an article. We got some good attention in Publishers Weekly and Publishers Marketplace for the more inside industry partners. But I would say every bit as important has been the efforts by a lot of ghost writers and the people we work with to share some of the insights that came out of the conference on social media. It really gave a context and opportunity for people to, you know, talk about the work they do. And then what we've done is we've posted both kind of written summaries of the key panels and the insights that came out of them, as well as some of the video.

And again, that creates another opportunity to put content out in the world that's shareable, that will be seen not just by ghost writers or even people in publishing, but by the larger networks of the people who are sharing this. And I wouldn't say it's like we've had a viral explosion, but when you have dozens and dozens of writers and their friends sharing their experience, sharing some of the summaries from the conference, it starts to have a cumulative impact that we hope to build on, not just following this conference, but in future events.