Why I ghostwrite

in ghostwriting •  8 years ago 

Unless he was bald, short and talentless, I am no Charles Dickens and certainly no Stephen King, I don't have the accent.
However, to keep me in beer tokens, I ghostwrite. That is, I write books for other people. Some of them are actually about ghosts but that isn't where we're going with this.
The reason I mention it is because I believe there are a lot of folk out in Steemit land that obviously love to write and a lot of the stuff I've read on here has been top drawer, but don't get paid a great deal. So I shall introduce you to ghostwriting for the talentless in Kindle land and what it involves.
There are a few recruitment sites out there but the best know for starting this enterprise is a site called Upwork.
At Upwork you can set up a profile of the type of writing you are capable of and the types of work that might interest you. Also, you can set yourself a minimum fee that potential agent will be expected to pay. This is obviously the important part. The getting money part.
As I mentioned up at the top, I don't consider myself a literary genius, nor a particularly good writer but the work is there even for me.
Currently, I write short novels of about 50, 000 words for the princely sum of around $400 a book. The agent then takes the book and designs a best selling cover and gives it a ridiculous title before slapping it on Amazon Kindle for a couple of dollars.
Then they go out and hunt down people to give it favourable reviews and in a couple of months have turned the few hundred they pay me into a few thousand.
This you see is why there is little money on kindle for the struggling author working on a shoestring. A fantastic book, well edited with a nice cover does not sell. It is that simple. It is lost in the millions of other books on there and unless you have both the time and the money to market and pay for reviews, it will remain lost. Your Shakespearian piece of classic literature, lost to the mindless masses.
So far I have written maybe 20 of these novels. One of them has done remarkably well and made my agent a lot of money. The downside to spying on your creation is your name is not on it. All you have is the satisfaction of a job well done and a slight tear in the eye of pride at it's success and sadness as someone else takes the credit. Obviously, as a ghostwriter you sign over all rights to the book once you submit it to your agent. That baby you cradle and cherished is snatched from you without a bye nor leave.
So there you have it. There are very few subjects that agents don't want be it romances, horror, sci fi, historic. There is a market out there for all of you. Just accept that the payment will not make you particularly wealthy.
Here is the link to upwork for anyone fancying a shot at anonymous writing.

https://community.upwork.com/

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