The motivation for business leaders and celebrities to work with ghostwriters for non-fiction books is understandable. Experts have great stories to tell, plenty of lessons they want to share, and a brand to build. What they don’t have is the time or the knowledge to turn that expertise into an engaging narrative.
When the result matters more than the process, hiring a ghostwriter to create a non-fiction book makes sense. The author makes a sound investment that produces a valuable asset.
But for fiction writers, the process can be as important as the product. Novelists are romantic figures. They sit at their desks, coffee steaming, their fountain pen forming worlds on the page. Non-fiction is work. It’s educational, informative, and effective. Non-fiction is fun, a chance to imagine and to play with words.
It’s also hard. Novels have structures. Plot unfolds across acts and through scenes. Characters develop over arcs. Themes are marbled into the book, and beats flow in a steady rhythm.
Writers frequently have a world they want to share but freeze at the sight of a blank page. Or they start writing but quickly run out of steam, uncertain where to take the story next. Often, they run into the difficulty of translating images in their head into paragraphs that describe those settings. The more clearly they can see the inside of the spaceship, the volumes in the wizard’s library, or the sun setting behind the Tuscan hills, the more they struggle to find the best words to communicate those images.
That’s when they turn to a ghostwriter. They have what they believe is a great idea for a book but they understand that they don’t know how to put that idea in book form.
When To Hire A Fiction Ghostwriter
The problem comes when they expect that book to become a bestseller.
It might do. It’s possible that the concept is so powerful that a ghostwriter can run with it all the way to an agent and a publishing contract and a movie deal, and a giant income for an author with a good idea. But agents are overwhelmed and the chances of landing a book deal are tiny.
A ghostwriter costs money; as an investment, hiring a ghostwriter to write a bestselling novel is only slightly less risky than buying several thousand Powerball tickets.
There are two occasions when you should hire a ghostwriter for fiction.
The first is when you just want the book. You don’t care about sales—though they’d be nice—you just want to see your idea on the page and you know you won’t get there alone. A fiction ghostwriter will help to prepare the outline, develop the characters, and write the book you want to read.
That book might sell but if it doesn’t, you’ll always have novel you wanted.
The other occasion is when you’re prepared to publish and market the book yourself. If an agent doesn’t pick it up, you’ll work with a hybrid publisher or place it on Amazon then put in the effort to make the sales. That will take more investment. It will also take knowledge. Book-marketing is a skill, one that can be learned or purchased.
And it will usually take a series; it’s much easier to make a profit writing fiction when one sale leads to another. You don’t have to become a book packager, like the Stratemeyer Syndicate, but you will be able to bring the characters in your head to life and place them in the world you imagined. And that’s the best reason to hire a fiction ghostwriter.