By Ken Korczak One of my favorite sayings about the writing business is: “It takes a certain brilliance to write a book -- but it takes a genius to sell that book.” Boy that seems true.
A similar concept can be applied to ghostwriting. One might say: “It takes a lot of writing skill to be a ghostwriter -- but it takes a genius to find clients who will pay you to ghostwrite for them.” Well, you don’t have to be a genius, exactly. I’m not, and I made it happen. You can, too.
But it won’t “just happen.” You’ll have to work at it.
Since I posted my first article around the blog-o-sphere about how I earn $10K a month as a ghostwriter, I’ve been fairly inundated with messages asking me for more specifics about how I find clients, how I make money, how I got started in ghostwriting, how much I charge, and much more. So let me offer some specifics right now.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I started some 20 years ago before the Internet became what it is today. There was no such thing as Adsense, revenue-sharing sites like this one, no affiliate marketing, no spam (GAK!), almost no one had their own Web page -- and Internet marketing and advertising was one big black unknown. Oh can you imagine such a time?
Thus, I jump started my ghostwriting career the old fashioned way -- with solid, tried and true marketing techniques that had next to nothing to do with the Internet. However, many of these basic principles still apply today, whether they be Internet based, or using more traditional media.
As I said, my first ghostwriting job came by pure luck. A mail-order publisher had read one of my articles, approached me about writing a book, and we made a deal. The book was a medical home remedies guide -- I wrote it for $3,500. The publishers was thrilled with the results. The book sold well. I was offered a second book, and I was off and running.
This publisher proved to be a steady client for the next 10 years, or so. But he didn’t always have work for me. That meant I had to go out and find new clients if I wanted to keep the writing cash coming in.
Believe me, people, finding new clients almost never happens by accident. Much the opposite, it takes a directed effort and a strategy to not only find people who need books written -- but who have enough money to pay for your service.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I no longer have to do any marketing at all. I’m established, so people come to me. I get tons of referrals. My biggest problem now is saying “No“. But if you are just starting out, you have work to do before you get to my situation, which you will if you work at it.
The first thing I ever did to find a new ghostwriting client was buy a short classified ad in the national magazine “Success.” My reasoning was that entrepreneurs of many variety and with money were reading publications like this, so I thought this would be a good target market for my services.
Even tiny classified ads in magazines like Success are expensive. I think at the time the publication’s rates were something like $15 per word with a 10-word minimum. That means you need to make every word count. Here is what my ad said:
GHOSTWRITER -- Fast, experienced, affordable. Satisfaction always guaranteed. Call 218-436-2020.
The ad resulted in just 36 phone calls. Of those 36, just two resulted in paying writing jobs. The first was a pharmacist who wanted a small booklet on prescription drug safety. I finished that in two days and pocketed $300.
The second job garnered from the ad was a wealthy east coast businessman whom hired me to write his first book -- and continued to shovel me writing business for the next 12 years. Thus, the results of my one small ad for less than $200 resulted in at least $100,000 in writing business over the next decade.
So now I had two steady clients. I landed the first repeat customer by shear luck, and the second I had attracted with a classified ad. But even these two clients did not have work for me all the time -- far from it. I generally write a full-length book in 6 to 8 weeks, often less. With only two clients who needed me maybe twice a year, I had to find more work to fill in the chinks, so to speak.
So I bought more classified ads in more magazines -- but most of them produced exactly zero response. That’s always painful and frustrating. Those ads are expensive, people! When you pay $200 or $500 for an ad, and it results in no business, that’s a problem, to say the least.
Some of the ads I bought resulted in lots of calls, but then never resulted in a single paying job. That’s one thing you will quickly learn about ghostwriting. Perhaps one in every 30 or 40 person you talk to will end up being a paying client. It can be very frustrating because most of the people you speak with are very excited about writing a book when they first call you -- but just about all of them dampen quickly. I think most people call in the “thrill-of-the-idea” phase, and then they cool off, for whatever reason.
IMPORTANT NOTE: One of the major keys is knowing how to talk to a potential client when they call -- how to make a deal, how to say the right things, to coax them forward into the project -- but perhaps I’ll cover that in another column.
So, it quickly became clear to me that small ads in big circulation magazines were not only expensive, but risky -- two things I am allergic to! Nevertheless, my next strategy was perhaps more of the same, expense and risk. That’s because my next move was direct mail.
I don’t care about how many get-rich-quick stories you have heard about direct response marketing using snail mail. I’m here to tell you the truth: It’s expensive and risky. Never believe anything else. But I wanted to keep writing and making money, so I took $1,000 from earnings on previous ghost projects and rolled out my humble direct mail campaign.
I decided to compose a simple two-page sales letter telling people about my ghostwriting services, and started mailing them out. Because I wanted a steady, sustained effort, and not a “one shot” deal, I choose to send out 50 letters per week, every week, year round.
IMPORTANT NOTE: There is a right way and a wrong way to write a sales letter, and a very specific way to compose your message when you are soliciting ghostwriting work, but I won’t cover that here. But if you have the skill to be a ghostwriter, you should have the bling bang to write a great sales pitch for yourself.
Who did I send the letters to? Well, you can’t just get out a phone book and send out sales letters for a specific service to just any Joe and Jane on the street. That’s like taking $20 bills and throwing them out your car window on the freeway. No -- and this is so important -- you have to make sure that you are sending your letters to highly qualified prospects. That is, you must be reasonably sure that the names you target are likely to have a need of what you are offering.
If you were selling punk-metal CDs, would you want to send a bunch of sales letters to a retirement community in Florida? Of course not. You want teens and college students for that product. So when you’re trying to sell ghostwriting, you target people who want a book written, but don’t have the time or skill to do it themselves.
But where do you get such qualified names? One primary source is list brokers. These are companies that specialize in collecting names and addresses of people who have a demonstrated interest in a particular product or service. (Again, I am not talking about Internet-based lists here).
YET ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE: Not all list brokers are created equal! Be careful! Work with only reputable brokers. Get a recommendation from a trusted source if you can.
Another terrific source of names for your mailing list is from magazines. They will sell you names from their subscription lists. I bought names from money-oriented magazines since I was looking for busy, wealthy business folks and entrepreneurs. Magazine lists are good because you know what subject matter the readers are likely to be interested in. If people are reading Field & Stream, you know they are interested in hunting and fishing, for example.
So how did I do with my direct mail? I'm not sure, but I think the first few thousand letters I sent out resulted in nothing. It was a lot, anyway. But I kept at it, relentlessly sending out 50 to 100 letters per week, and eventually, I got prospects to bite. Eventually, I started building my client list.
Now, I’m far from an expert on direct mail, but I’m certain my steady effort had a cumulative effect. I always included five or six extra business cards in each mailing, and asked my prospects to give my card to anyone whom they might think would need my services. Over the months, the result was thousands and thousands of my business cards getting into circulation out there in prospect land . Many times I got calls from people who said they had been hanging on to my card for months, or even years, and just decided to call now.
By the way, the cumulative effect is important for magazine advertising as well. Ad experts will tell you that buying just one ad in one magazine once is usually not enough. You should run the same ad in the same place at least three or four times -- sometimes an ad has to run several times before people began to “see it.” Think about the last time you were in a dentist’s office. They have magazines piling up from months on end -- that means your ads are staying out there, accumulating, and increasing the chances that they will be seen.
Everything about marketing yourself as a ghostwriter means building up your identity slowly over time. If your first efforts seem to produce tepid results, don’t worry. If you keep on keeping on, if you are unflaggingly persistent, your strivings will began to accumulate and gain traction. Eventually, you will achieve a kind of “critical mass.” Suddenly, your phone will start ringing as persistently as a frog croaking for a mate in a ditch.
As I said -- I am at the point in my ghostwriting career when I never have to do a single bit of advertising or marketing. Ask any established business person and he or she will tell you -- 90% of all new business comes by way of referral -- that is, word of mouth advertising. Here is what Raleigh Pinskey says in his terrific book, 101 Ways to Promote Yourself:
“Many say that 90% of all business comes as a result of referrals. This is especially true of those who offer a service .... you can’t ignore a marketing technique that brings in as much as 90% of your business.”
He’s right. Furthermore, the best thing about word-of-mouth advertising is that it is 100% free! That’s what I call the best of all worlds. You spend no time, money and effort on marketing -- just all your time making writing and making money.
I’ll end here for now. But I hope this article has given you some ideas about how you can get your own ghostwriting career off to a start. This is a topic that could easily fill an entire book. Indeed, there are a number of good books already available that explain the in and outs of finding clients for a writing service. You should be doing your homework
Anyone should feel free to e-mail me: writer@wiktel.com with any questions about ghostwriting -- and if you are a person who needs an experienced writer to write a best-selling book for you -- well, you can go ahead an send me a note as well! You just never know, I may have room for you in my schedule.
