Write My Story - How Much Can I Expect To Pay For Ghostwriting Services?

Ghost writers are professionals and therefore their services can be pricey. However, that should not intimidate you. The best way to approach a ghostwriting project is as a relationship with the professional; consider them your own intellectual property Personal Assistant (PA). Other than the fact that being in communication with your ghostwriter enables the ghost writer to tap into your 'spirit' and dominant language style, it also opens up points of negotiation that you can comfortably initiate and pricing is one of them.

Technically and as an unspoken industry standard, no ghost writer gets their pay in full at the start of a project. This standard makes ghost writing services affordable because you pay for the services in installments with milestones to boot. The other hidden advantage there is that you have time to cut your losses early in the game if things do not go well.

At its simplest, the billing for ghost writing services spreads over the entire work period in three installments or milestone targets.
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More information: answers to frequent author questions
•    Ten tips to a successfully completed ghostwriter project
•    Six steps to find and hire a ghostwriter for your book or ebook
•    The most efficient way to author your own book
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The only one that all ghostwriters will insist upon (if they know what they are doing) is an initial payment often calculated at a percentage of the entire project. Factors such as the size of the book you wish written and the extent of the research determine the price of the complete project. That and of course the individual ghostwriter's pricing structure.

A newbie ghost writer will offer to write an initial sample for 'free'. Whereas this can be a great marketing strategy, be wary of it. Ghost writing requires mental exertion and time. An individual offering their skill and time 'for free' no matter how positively it is phrased may have serious inner doubts about the quality of their work.

The value of the initial fee is to assure the ghost writer that you are committed to your project and they can therefore make a time allocation for it. Both author and ghostwriter agree on the tangible milestones to warrant a payment such as the first draft, the second, and so on.

Therefore note that three milestone targets are merely a guideline not law. The drafts on a book or ebook project, by the way, increase in indirect proportion to the author's clarity. The less clear an author, the more the drafts will be before the final one takes shape. 

Billing patterns of the ghostwriter work
You will find two separate cultures in the billing standards of online ghostwriters; billing per hour and billing for words and/or pages. Selecting your billing structure early is significant in determining your overall costs.

The honest truth is no writing project ever goes as per original plan time-wise. Though the disparity is not in eons, it can be anything between tens of hours and weeks. The weeks end of the time issue will be affected significantly by your initial clarity of ideas. A section scheduled to take an hour to write can take two days. In the same breath, it is rare that a section scheduled to take two days to write will shrink to an hour – so the higher possibility is for the time allocation to rise. You rarely will start off with a fixed price of your work with a ghostwriter who bills you in hours.

Furthermore, if your corrections are heavy especially after the first draft, you can overshoot your budget significantly.

It is however second to impossible to start with a book project slated for 200 pages which then shifts into a 250 page project. It is the business of the ghostwriter to make sure all your 'stuff' fits into the agreed 200 hundred pages said as you want it said. That is what you are paying them for.
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Discuss Your Project with Ghostwriter Paula

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More information: answers to frequent author questions
•    Components of the written agreement with your ghostwriter 
•    Ten tips to a successfully completed ghostwriter project
•    Of ghostwriting quality, fees and billing
•    Specifics of billing and online ghostwriting costs for ebooks and books
•    The most efficient way to author your own book