A ghostwriter is a professional writer
who is paid to write books, articles,
stories, reports, or other texts that
are officially credited to another
person. Celebrities, executives, and
political leaders often hire
ghostwriters to draft or edit
autobiographies, magazine articles,
or other written material.
Ghostwriters may have varying
degrees of involvement in the production of a finished work;
while some ghostwriters are hired to edit and clean up a rough
draft, in other cases, ghostwriters do most of the writing based
on an outline provided by the credited author. For some
projects, ghostwriters will do a substantial amount of research,
as in the case of a ghostwriter who is hired to write an
autobiography for a well-known person. Ghostwriters are also
hired to write fiction in the style of an existing author.
Ghostwriters will often spend from several months to a full year
researching, writing, and editing nonfiction works for a client,
and they are paid either per page, with a flat fee, or a percentage
of the royalties of the sales, or some combination thereof. The
ghostwriter is sometimes acknowledged by the author or
publisher for his or her writing services.
Companies or organizations hoping to generate interest in their
blog site sometimes hire ghostwriters to post comments to their
blog, while posing as different people and using pseudonyms.
© 2010 The Third Entity, Inc. / Inspiration Press
About Ghost Writing
