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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? To answer these questions, I turned to Dan Gerstein, the founder of Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency that specializes in connecting clients to professional ghostwriters.

Watch our interview in the video embedded below:

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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...