It can take a long time to write a book. If you’re an entrepreneur, your hands are already full—but you can still write a book that will grow your business without maxing out your bandwidth.
By publishing a book, you become more authoritative, more credible, and gain an audience of readers who like and trust you because they know your story. Your book becomes a tool that you can use to get the word out about your business.
You can take your book, put a sticky note in a section that’s relevant to a client, and mail it to their door. Who doesn’t love a surprise package? Now they have a book with your name on the front and all the amazing value that you offer.
Unlike flyers and business cards, people keep books. It can help you land new clients, book more speaking gigs, and conduct more outreach that feels valuable to your prospects. A book can grow your business.
The reason so many people put off writing their book is because they don’t know how to accomplish it. We tell ourselves we don’t have time, don’t know how to write a book, or that we’ll start writing it next year.
If that sounds familiar, I want to introduce you to an idea that I promise is the absolute best way to grow your business as quickly as possible: ghostwriting.
What is Ghostwriting?
There are a lot of misconceptions about ghostwriting. When you work with a ghostwriter, you sit down and share your story with them. If you’ve written anything on your own—whether that’s a draft, blog posts, or content for your podcasts or YouTube channel—share that content with your ghostwriter. A quality ghostwriter will want to get to know you and hear your voice so they can make sure the book captures your personality.
The goal is to get people to read your book and feel like they know you. I find that many first-time authors end up sounding pretty dry, almost like they’re in English class, whereas professional ghostwriters are trained to match our clients’ voices. If you’re concerned that a ghostwriter will lose your voice, let me assure you that your voice is far more likely to get lost when you try to write the book yourself.
After your ghostwriter has interviewed you and gone through the materials you’ve shared with them for your story, they will work on your manuscript. At Page & Podium, we go chapter by chapter and share each chapter with you to get your feedback. There’s zero chance that the ghostwriter will end up writing a book you hate. Our process eliminates that risk because we’re constantly getting your feedback.
Once the chapters have been drafted, polishing is the next stage. We hand it over to a professional cold-eye copy editor who has never seen your book, does not know about your topic, and does not know you. Their outsider perspective allows them to catch errors and ensure everything reads well. After that, it will be proofread. Page & Podium will then either help you get a book deal or help you self-publish.
It’s our process to work with you until your book is the quality you want for your business. Ghostwriting is not plagiarism or cheating. It’s the best way to move your business forward as quickly as possible. You can check out more of our content about ghostwriting on our website and our YouTube channel.
Let me break down some of the reasons why this is the best way for entrepreneurs to efficiently move their business forward at an effective price point.
Ghostwriters Save You Money and Time
Think about something that you’re super experienced in, and then think about something that you’re not.
Which one takes you longer? Probably the one you have less experience with. When you work with a professional ghostwriter, you’re offloading an unfamiliar task to someone who has more experience.
Let’s break down the numbers. At Page & Podium, the average book we publish is about twenty chapters. Each chapter is usually ten to fifteen pages, give or take, depending on the style. We allocate five hours per chapter just for writing, and an additional two hours per chapter for developmental editing.
Developmental editing is different than polishing. It’s about ideas and structure, and it’s something we do before we get to those professional editors I mentioned earlier. When we start to add up the time—seven hours per chapter for twenty chapters—we spend 140 hours in the drafting phase alone. What is your rate of pay? Do you charge $100, $200, $300 an hour? What is it costing you to put aside that amount of time to write your book? The number is probably big.
Even if you’re a very good writer, you will have moments when you stumble. It will probably take you a little longer than if you used a ghostwriter. It’s also going to be just you and you alone doing the writing, but you’ll still need to get feedback and do revisions. We do that for you. The person who drafts your manuscript will be different from the person who does the developmental editing, because we need separate sets of eyes at all times.
By the time we move from drafting into copy editing, proofreading, and designing the book’s interior layout and cover, it starts to add up. Page & Podium packages often top out at two hundred hours per client, which doesn’t include any contractors that are brought in for specialty needs. If you try to write the book on your own, you’re going to need to bring in a beta reader, which are sometimes free but not always. You’ll also need to hire a copy editor, proofreader, and a book designer.
Once you add up the time you’ll need to invest, you can see how much easier it will be to get a return on investment if you hire a ghostwriter.
The Best Way to Get Feedback
Using a ghostwriter will give you many sets of eyes on your business’s message.
An amazing book that’s talked about in all kinds of entrepreneurial circles is Howard Schultz’s memoir Onward. Howard Schultz wasn’t the founder of Starbucks, but if you read his memoir, you’ll learn about his path to get to the top of Starbucks, including stepping down from a C-suite role before coming back as CEO.
My favorite part of the book is when he walks into a Starbucks and notices that it smells like cheese. Howard Schultz is someone who really values the Italian café version of a coffeehouse. When he smelled the burnt American cheese from their breakfast sandwiches, he lost his mind. He became so obsessed with that cheese odor that, as he says in the book, he stopped thinking rationally. It’s an amazing business lesson—we often get hung up on trivial things in our business that don’t really matter.
The title of his book, Onward, is a theme he regularly returns to. It’s a word he once used to sign off a memo he sent to his staff. It was his way of saying that they would work hard and fight against adversity and they’d pull through in the end. That word has stuck with me ever since I read his book.
Businesses like Starbucks are recognizable because their branding is so dialed in. People know exactly who you are and exactly what you do. In Howard Schulz’s case, they know that he values quality above all. I bet that you, too, would love for people to know the reasons why you make your decisions. As ghostwriters, our job is to distill your ideas into a core theme. That’s what Schultz’s ghostwriter did, and it’s what Page & Podium’s ghostwriters can do for you, too.
One of the fastest ways to boost and refine your brand is to work with a ghostwriter. When you work with a ghostwriter, you’re not paying extra for that consulting. It’s part of the package deal, because it’s necessary for what we have to do to complete the book.
Boost Your Confidence
Working with a ghostwriter will give you confidence and authority from the very first chapter.
When I published my first book, I felt like an imposter. I literally said to my co-author, “Why would I ever write this? No one’s going to read it. I’m just going to stick to my comfort zone.”
I’ll share more about that later in the series, but for now, let’s say I fought through it. I found a way to get the book published by a traditional publisher. In spite of that success, I continued to doubt myself and wonder whether I had any business writing a book until I went to my first conference after the book came out.
I walked into the conference as an objectively low-tier person in my field. Not exactly entry level, but pretty close. A woman whose work I’d long admired came up to me, shook my hand, and said, “Congratulations on an amazing book.” I didn’t know what to say. I don’t even remember what I said because I think I blacked out. It shook me to my core.
When I walked over to the place where my publisher was selling copies of my book, they had sold out. Think about how that would make you feel to find out you’d sold every copy. Getting your book out is not just about showing people you’re a published author. It’s about how it makes you feel inside.
We show up more powerfully when we feel like ourselves. This is the same when we know that we’ve communicated clearly, beautifully, and in a way that reaches others. You can do that by writing your book on your own. But what I often see happen when entrepreneurs try to write their first book on their own is that it turns out to be a dry recitation of all the ideas they’ve shared before on social media. In other words, the book doesn’t offer anything to engage the reader. It may not even sound like you.
We’re not trained in school to write in a way that feels conversational and relatable. Instead, school trains us to write in a way that feels academic. You don’t want an academic book. You want a voice that feels like you. When you have that, people will walk up to you like they know you personally, and it will change your life.
That’s why I firmly believe that every entrepreneur needs a ghostwriter they trust. If you feel like that might be me or my team, I hope you’ll reach out. Head over to our contact page to fill out an application. You can also find more information on our website about our two tiers of ghostwriting.
The first is called the Changemaker Package, which is a smaller package that gives you more control over the writing process. We also offer a signature package known as the Thought Leader Package. This is the package you want if you’re hoping to get a book deal from a traditional publisher.
Happy writing!
