← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
Answering the Biggest Questions about Ghostwriting (How to Start)
00:39:03
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- [00:00]
A
I started ghostwriting in 2016, and since then I've ghostwritten for over 300 different industry leaders, CEOs, Silicon Valley founders, even crypto billionaires and Grammy winning musicians. I also wrote a book about it called the Art and Business of Ghostwriting. So if you're curious about this little known world where CEOs will pay you a premium to write social content newsletters and educational email courses, here you go. I'm going to answer eight of the biggest questions beginner ghostwriters have and how you can get started ghostwriting yourself. Okay. Diana asks, at the start, were you targeting a specific industry or did you ghost write for clients in different fields before settling on a niche? So in the beginning, and keep in mind, this was 2016, I was 26 years old. I was just starting to get into this. No one was calling themselves a ghostwriter at the time. So a lot of this was me just figuring it out, trial by fire. And in the beginning, I didn't really have a niche, other than which I suppose in hindsight was sort of the beginning of a niche. The only thing that I doubled down on was really this idea of ghostwriting for founders and executives. I wasn't saying I ghostwrite for anyone, like for context. Back then, there was a different company that specialized in ghostwriting books for people, but these were like everyday people. And normally their customer was someone who was 70 years old and they were thinking about their legacy and they wanted to put their stories into a book, and then they wanted their kids to have that book that is a completely different type of customer. Right. So I wasn't actually saying I go straight for anyone because that person certainly wasn't part of it. And so really the beginning of my niche was just I go straight for founders and executives. Of course, that is still very broad because that's founders and executives of, well, every company in every industry, right? And idea that we talk about a lot in PGA is this idea of having an information advantage. And an information advantage is where you're writing in an industry where you already speak the lingo. You're very familiar with how people talk, what the pain points are, what the outcomes that people want are. You speak that industry, right? And so by definition, you have an information advantage. And the thing I now tell ghostwriters constantly to do, especially when you're first starting out, is to look for places where you have an information advantage. Maybe you've worked in that industry, maybe you're just a hobbyist in that industry, maybe you have a parent in that industry. And you just happen to know a lot about it because you grew up watching your parents do it.
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Right?
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We take for granted all of these places where we have an information advantage. And so the problem that I ran into was because I said I go straight for founders and executives, I would attract founders and executives all across the board. I would get one founder who was the CEO of a publicly traded biotech company, and I would get another founder who was starting a lingerie company. And so the challenge that I ran into is obviously I do not have an information advantage in every single industry on planet Earth.
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Right?
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And so what I, what I ended up having to realize in the decision that I made is that I had to pick. And so over time, and especially as I started to build my agency and me and my co founder had a lot of conversations about this, we started to notice which clients we enjoyed the most, which clients were the easiest to work with, and which clients paid us the most money. And we sort of, we started to see patterns. And this would be subjective for each person. You know, if you were ghostwriting, you would see these same patterns, but they, it wouldn't be the same archetype. And so we just found that a lot of clients that met this criteria, you know, they all in some way wanted to position themselves to be a thought leader, but they were also game to write about sort of non domain expertise topics. Like they wanted to write about leadership, or they wanted to write about productivity, or they wanted to write about things that, that are fairly universal. The clients that were the most difficult were the ones who were like, I'm the CEO of a clean energy company and I want to get super in the weeds and talk about like the science behind clean energy. It's like it was so hard for us to do that because I and my co founder then we would have to find a writer who has domain expertise in that really specific thing. And it was just too hard. So going back to, you know, in the beginning, you always want to look for where you have an information advantage. And as you get going, it's okay if you attract different types of clients, but you want to look for the pattern of, well, who's the easiest to work with and what client is most efficient. For me, you know, I can sit down and write about this topic, no problem. It just comes out of me. Whereas this topic, well, that's harder. I have to research that longer.
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Right.
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So not all clients are the same. You might have two clients, both paying you three grand a month, but one you can get done in an hour, and the other one, you have to take 15 hours.
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Right.
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So the whole efficiency of your business comes down to being able to figure out where your sweet spot is, attract more of those types of clients, and then get rid of the ones that are inefficient. But I really want to harp on the fact that this is not something that you figure out before you start. You don't sit in a room by yourself and go, I want to start ghostwriting. Let me, let me make all these decisions before I get my first client. No, you're probably going to get 10, 20, 30 clients before you start to see those patterns and before you start to realize, oh, this is where my sweet spot is. The second, the follow up question, you know, how and when did you come up with your service, slash, product category? Again? So much of what I talk about is just doubling down on what works and what's working for you. And at the time when I first fell into the world of ghostwriting, I was also writing on Quora. So if you just think about it very logically, I was writing on Quora. I was seeing a little bit of traction on Quora when I fell into ghostwriting. What's the thing I should probably encourage other people to do right on Quora, because that was the thing I knew how to do.
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Right?
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And so a lot of times your service or your product category can and should be a reflection of the thing that you're already doing for yourself. You. And if you're not doing it for yourself, you should practice on yourself. Because the better I got at Quora, the better I got at ghostwriting for other people on Quora.
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Right?
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Just like if you're really good at writing Twitter threads, it's not that hard to ghost write Twitter threads for someone else if you're really great at creating LinkedIn carousels. Not that hard to ghostwrite LinkedIn carousels for other people. So you do want to view yourself as, you know, the practice ground for these skills. And then all you're really doing is just renting them to other people. All right. Nelson asks, what's the most challenging part of ghostwriting for such high profile clients? By far the biggest challenge that you run into is time. You have to realize that you are dealing with people who in many cases are managing, I mean, anywhere from five or 10 employees, all the way up to thousands of employees. You're dealing with people who are very used to being in power dynamics, where they're the ones telling other people what to do. You're dealing with people who in addition to running their business, many of them also have families. So if you just think about that person, right? And I can tell you, on a very small level, running our business, you know, we have around 20 employees. So just I experienced this, but I imagine that it is a thousand times this for someone that's running a giant company. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, you have people pinging you and dinging you, asking you for things. And that's just part of the game. That's what comes with the territory. You know, like right Now, I have 50 unread text messages. I have, I can't tell, I don't know, a thousand unread emails. You know, I have 500 unread DMS. I have people in my life that are asking things of me, which is fine. We all ask things of each other. You know, I have employees to look after. I want to make sure I'm not the bottleneck on anything. I'm moving projects forward, I'm managing vendors. I'm like, if you just put yourself in that headspace of that's the sort of person that you're working with, you realize that the single biggest challenge that you're going to run into and what causes these types of clients to churn is just not having enough time. And often I find that ghostwriters, really, this is any service provider, any vendor, period, they start working with someone like this and they almost get frustrated. Where they go, ah, I'm asking this person, I sent them an email, they didn't respond, you know, or they go, well, I sent it to them, but I haven't heard from them. And I just, I haven't reached out since. And they defer responsibility to the other person, not realizing that what that busy CEO is really looking for is they are looking for someone to manage them. Like, the worst thing you could do as a service provider, as a, as a ghostwriter is start working with someone like that and then go, let me know what you need and you tell me what to do. Because that's already their whole life. That is what they are doing from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed. They have enough of that. They're exhausted of it. And so what does that person value more than anything else, even. Even more than your writing quality? They value your ability to manage them. They value your ability to follow up eight times even if you don't hear back. And to not get frustrated, right? They value your ability to move the ball forward and take radical accountability and even if the client isn't giving you much to work with, you continue to find ways to keep moving forward. Keep moving forward. Hey, I didn't hear from you. Took it upon myself. I went research these things. Here's what I came up with, right? So that is the thing that that sort of person is looking for. And I find that, you know, it's like you can lead a horse to water. I find that even when ghostwriters become proficient and even when they get a client, they almost view that as that's the end. They're like, all right, I signed a client, I'm done. And really, that's the beginning, you know, because it's very easy to land a client. It's very hard to keep clients. And what keeps the client is you continuing to prove over and over again every day that you are managing them, you are looking out for their best interests. So that is the challenge. But something that I love thinking about is whenever you run into a problem, instead of just saying, oh, that's really hard, or that's really frustrating, reframe to yourself and realize that the harder the problem, the more valuable the reward. So because it's hard, that means when you solve it, you will get paid really, really well.
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Right?
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And that's why people who get paid really, really well are they seem like such outliers, because so many other people experience the same problem and either couldn't figure it out or gave up. Most of the time, it's not that they couldn't figure it out, it's that they gave up or they just didn't try. Or they didn't try very hard.
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Right?
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So the harder the problem, the larger the reward. So you have to reframe whenever you run into these bottlenecks. Like, this is the skill to build, and if I build this skill, I am going to out earn everybody. All right, Robert asks, how do you get into the mind of CEO whose skill sets are obviously deep and broad to produce meaningful copy? So very tactically, when you're ghostwriting for someone and when you get on the phone with them, you want to avoid a scenario where you get on the phone and you go, so what ideas do you have? Because they're not going to know where to take the conversation. And what happens when the person doesn't know where to take the conversation is they just start talking and they think that whatever they are saying at the time is a good idea. And so you end up down this rabbit hole where they're telling you about some idea or something that they know. And in the back of your mind you're going either A, there's no way this is going to perform very well in content or in a newsletter or in an educational email course, like whatever thing that you're working on, or B, you're like, ah, like this is cool, but there's so few people that are going to resonate with that, you know, so you have to go into the call thinking, well, what is the thing that this person would be most equipped to talk about and what are the topics that other people would find most interesting? And you have to be the one that guides the call. You have to come up, you know, you have to show up to the call and go, hey, client. I think these two ideas would perform really well. I think these two ideas would speak to this sort of person that you're trying to attract and you have to corral their thinking and basically tell them which direction to run. And I find, you know, it's sort of in the question itself. But if you just think of the two extremes, you know, you're either speaking very broadly about things that really anyone could touch on. Like any CEO could share. Here's my morning routine. Any CEO could share. Here's how I manage people, here's how I hire people, here's how I fire people, right? And that's great. The thing that makes it unique is how they specifically do it, right? So it's not that, you know, talking about hiring is novel. What's novel is talking about how you hire specifically, right? Like, so that's one side of the spectrum. The other side of the spectrum is very deep domain specific knowledge. And it depends on the client, depends on the goal of what you're working on together. But this is also stuff where if they're super knowledgeable about something, you want to extract these different points and go, all right, today we're going to write this thing and we're just going to drill into this point and what you're going to run into is you have to realize that writing and clarity of thought is a skill. And no matter how successful the person is, even if they're the CEO of a multi billion dollar company, the skill of articulating your thinking and the skill of being able to explain how or why you do something or how or why something happens is a different skill. You should think of it almost like someone who's never done public speaking before and then they want to start public speaking. It doesn't matter if you're the CEO of $1 billion company, if you've never done public speaking. I promise the first hundred times that you give a speech, it's going to be rough. And you have to develop the skill, right? And so writing or really articulating to the ghostwriter is a skill. So you can't expect the client to just show up and go, oh, let me just rattle off all this genius stuff that you can turn into content. You have to be the one to show up with the questions and really organize their thinking and help them build the skill. This is something we saw this when I was building my agency. So much of the value of our bi weekly calls and when we would do these little interviews with clients to extract content, we found that clients started looking forward to their calls because they viewed it as showing up to the gym. They've, they viewed it as, wow, this is the one time in my week where I get to practice articulating what I think about my industry.
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Right?
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And you would be surprised how many of these people, they live and breathe their businesses, but they never really have time in their calendar to go, let me think about how I'm thinking about what I'm building. And that is the beauty of these types of content calls. So you really have to take ownership over that and show up to the call and go, I think this would perform well. I think that you have a lot of domain specific knowledge or you have some great stories to share about this thing. And one little final pro tip here for you. You always want to dial in one idea at a time. You do not want to try and cram 10 ideas into one piece. You want to extract one thing and go, that's what we're going to talk about for the next 30 minutes. And anything that's unrelated, you can let them talk, you can let them go on tangents, but you basically, when you get the transcript afterwards, you just take all that stuff, you put it in another folder called Later List. Maybe we'll do those ideas at a later time. But all we're going to talk about is this one idea today. All right, Stefan asks, do you believe it's a good idea for someone new to writing to start ghostwriting if they haven't published anything online before? And the follow up question is, and could you share your experience writing in the sports industry? So quick context. When I was building my agency, I ended up ghostwriting for a handful of different Olympic athletes. In my opinion, the opportunity with athletes is many of them realize that their careers are only going to last 10 years, maybe I mean, some even shorter. And so what are you going to do after that? And when you're a professional athlete, you have this window of time where, you know, again, depending on the sport and depending on the fame level and everything. But for the most part, you have this window of time when you are, quote, unquote, celebrity status. And many of them, many athletes are starting to realize that they are not going to play their sport forever. And then what do they do? And, you know, it's sort of like entrepreneurship. Everyone sees the billion dollar companies, but they don't see all of the failed companies. Athletics is the same thing. You see all of the people currently playing in the NBA or currently playing in the NFL or NHL or whatever it is, but you don't see how many of them, after they're done playing professional sports, all of a sudden have to go get a regular job because they didn't make, you know, $80 million playing their sport and they got to put food on the table, right? And so many athletes are starting to realize this, and maybe not starting to realize it, but they're, they're starting to realize the other opportunity that they can have with the Internet now. And for many of them, it's to build an audience. And that might mean building an audience around their sport, it might mean building an audience commentating on the industry. It might mean building an audience where they train the younger generation on, you know, everything they learned, especially athletes that went through, you know, multiple injuries and things like that. It's like they want to pay it forward and share the things that they learned and help the next generation avoid. And so athletics is a great example of a ton of education. Like, if you just think about it for a second, athletes possess a tremendous amount of education that never leaves their brains. So they spend the first quarter or first third of their life becoming the best in the world at a sport. And then when they're done, they're done. And no one takes the time with them to go, hey, can you share all of the things that you now know about your sport? And if you just think about that, that that's always been my thesis with ghostwriting is how much of the world's knowledge is locked in people's brains. And again, athletes are a great example of this. So as a ghostwriter, what's the opportunity? Well, you go to athletes and you say, hey, do you want a career after sports? Do you want a career after you're done competing? Right? Do you want a career when you're injured and you can't play well? Why don't you share What? You know, it's the same thing as every other industry. It's just, you just have to, you know, position the lens the right way. The question of, do you believe it's a good idea for someone new to writing to start ghostwriting, even if they haven't published anything online before yet? So can you? Yes. Should you? Sure.
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Right.
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They're like, get into ghostwriting. There's no reason why you shouldn't. But is your life easier or harder by not writing your for yourself on the Internet? Well, it's harder. It's not to say that you can't do it. We have plenty of people in our premium ghostwriting academy who don't write on the Internet and they don't write under their own name and they don't build a personal brand. They don't do any of those things, but they use cold outreach and they tap their network and they provide the service and they land clients, and that's totally fine.
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Right.
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It's just worth asking the question, how many more clients could you attract? And how much easier would it be to convert those clients if you used yourself as the practice dummy?
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Right.
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Practice on yourself. Take things that you want to get better at, write them under your name, and then just rent whatever's working for you to other people. So I don't think it's a do you have to question. I don't think it's a can you, should you question. It's just a, would your life be easier or harder if you did this? And if you were writing under your own name, your life would be easier. Okay. Patar asks, if you're ghostwriting articles, which is what my agency specialized in, how would you measure the success of it? And I love this question because it really reveals. And Patar, you're not the only one who's asked this. I mean, so many people have asked me this question. It really reveals how little people understand about the value of their value or the value of what they're really providing the client with some sort of ghost writing service. Okay. Oftentimes, I find that freelance writers, ghostwriters, service providers in general, they think that their offer needs to promise something like, I will get you 10,000 followers in 60 days or I will make you an extra 30 grand for, from your sales funnel or whatever, whatever it is, they think that they need to promise some sort of specific follower count or specific amount of money. And first of all, let's just level set. Nobody in marketing, period, has any idea whether something is going to work or not. Marketing is like working on Wall street, you have all these people who are like, stock's going to go up, stock's going to go down, right? One person thinks it's, it's absolutely going to go to the moon. The other person's like, no, we're going to short this. Ultimately, no one has any idea. Everyone's just trying things, right? And marketing is the exact same. Doesn't matter if you are an individual and you're selling these services or you are the head of marketing of a multi billion dollar company. You don't know. And so the whole, the whole game that everyone's playing is let me try things and see what works, right? And so even if you're the head of marketing at a giant company, you're not really sitting there going, well, I'm going to come up with this campaign and when we run this campaign, we are going to make insert specific amount of money or we are going to get insert specific amount of followers. Because so much of that you just don't have control over. You might make way more, you might make way less, right? So you just are trying things to see what works when it comes to something like articles or really this is true for any service. I'm telling you, I built my ghostwriting agency doing Nothing but ghostwriting. 800 word articles. It was the only thing that we offered. We ended up writing more articles each month than Inc. Magazine or Forbes. And we sold so many ghostwritten articles that we were doing over $2 million a year in revenue. Okay? So I know because I've lived this. And not one time, not a single time in any sales pitch did I promise when you write articles, you are going to get 10,000 more followers or when you write articles, your business is going to make an extra 50 grand this month. Not one time. And the way that we framed the value was very simple. Do you understand that it's important to write on the Internet? That's the question to the client. The client goes, yes, that's why, that's why we're on the phone. I go, okay, good. So you understand that when you write on the Internet, people view you as a thought leader. It's easier to connect with other industry peers. Inbound opportunities probably increase. Generally, we just know when you create content on the Internet, more good things happen. Client goes, yes, I understand. I go, okay. And just to confirm right now, you are not go. You're not writing on the Internet. Client goes, correct. That's why we're talking on the phone. I am not currently writing on the Internet. I go, okay, great. So the value of us working together and me helping you with these articles is that right now you're not writing on the Internet. And when we work together, you will be writing on the Internet, which we've already established. You and I agree leads to good things and that is the promise, right? They aren't doing it now, they're doing it. Okay. Same thing is true for creating opt ins. Like in our premium ghost training academy, we train ghostwriters to create five day educational email courses. Well, what's the value? You go to a client, you say, hey, right now you don't have an opt in. You have a problem called lots of people come to your site and you don't have anywhere for them to type in their email. What's the value of us working together? You have an opt in, right? 0 to 1. And so, so much of this is like misunderstanding. You don't need to make some outlandish promise. The problem is you haven't sufficiently grounded the client in the real zero to one opportunity. They aren't doing it. If they did it, more good things would happen, right? And opt in is a great example. Right now people are coming to your site. You're not, you don't know who they are. You're not collecting emails. When you have an opt in, now you know who they are. And a lot of people become potential customers that you can nurture. You didn't have it, now you have it, right? And so often I find that ghostwriters, it's like they don't realize that the value is that, that zero to one moment. And when you can do that successfully, that's what the client's paying for. The client isn't paying you to go viral. The client isn't paying you to get them 20,000 followers in 60 days.
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Right?
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And if that's their expectation, you need to reframe that for them and go look, it might happen. You might write something crazy viral and you might get a million followers in 60 days. I don't know. You don't know either, right? But we can agree that you need to be producing more organic content or you need a weekly newsletter to nurture all of the people on your email list, or you need an opt in because you have a bunch of web traffic, you're not doing anything with it, right? You don't have those things. Now you do. That's the value. All right, Cody asks, what types of businesses do you steer away from, if any. So in general, I mean, again, it goes back to the question of where do you have an information advantage? I would encourage you, wherever you have that information advantage, that is the place to start. I, over time started steering away from companies that it was just very clear, not even that I didn't know anything about their industry, but I didn't want to know anything about their industry. There were a lot of clients that we got that were in industries that I didn't know anything about, but I was really excited to learn more. Like, some of my earliest clients in 2016, 2017 were crypto clients. And I remember this, it was like my fourth or fifth ghostwriting client ever. Like very, very beginning of the journey. And he was a crypto investor and we got on our first call and he basically was like, do you know what Ethereum is? I said, no, I have no idea what Ethereum is. He goes, well, let me educate you. And he was educating me because he wanted me to help him write about Ethereum. And as I started to learn about Ethereum, I became obsessed with it. I thought it was the coolest technology ever. And I looked forward like I couldn't believe that I could just get on the phone with this guy, ask him whatever questions I wanted, and then send him an invoice. It was insane. Ghostwriting is so cool. And so I was really excited to take that on because I actually wanted to learn about it, right? And then Fun fact, in 2017, after working with this client, I ended up putting my entire life savings at the time, which was like 20 grand, into Ethereum and I still haven't sold it. So that was, that ended up being a great, a great decision. But I think the real question comes down to what do you want to learn? You know, I had clients in other industries. Like I, I had one client who was like super deep into affiliate marketing and gray hat type marketing stuff and it and like gaming, the SEO industry and all this stuff. And I was like, I don't really care about that. I don't really want to write about that. So I said no to that client because that just wasn't interesting to me. Whereas I continued saying yes to other clients that were in industries that again, I didn't know very much about. I just found interesting. And I was like, well, you're basically going to pay me to go learn about something that I'm already interested in, so sure, I'm game. The thing to think about in terms of steering away from industries or certain types of businesses is one, at a certain point, depending on what you want to optimize for you will want to steer away from businesses where even if you find it interesting, it's just too time consuming. Because as a ghostwriter, and this becomes increasingly true if you scale yourself into a small agency, your primary asset is time. You only have so many hours in the day. And so if you have a client that takes you five or ten times longer than all your other clients, you have to realize that is having a huge impact on your efficiency. Which when your efficiency is bottlenecked, that means that your earning potential is also bottlenecked because you don't have any more hours to sell. And so that's one big question is which types of businesses are really inefficient for you because they just take too long and over time you'll want to cut those and you'll want to double down on the ones that are very easy for you. That's how you scale your earnings. The second component though is there are some industries where there are regulations in place on what you can and can't say. Medicine, for example, finance, fintech. There's a bunch of things legally that you can and can't say or can't promise, even health and wellness, very broad. But you know, I've ghostwritten for a bunch of supplement companies, for example, and there are a lot of things that you can't say about supplements. And so that sort of is up to you of if that's an industry you know a lot about or it's an industry that you're excited by and you want to go straight in. Part of your value, again, it goes back to information advantage. Part of your value. And why the longer you spend in those types of industries, the more that you will attract high quality clients in those industries is because you will learn how to navigate those regulations. And if you know how to regulate those things or if you know how to manage those regulations with your content and you can get ahead of them and you can have intelligent conversations about it and you're not submitting drafts, like saying a bunch of things that everyone's like, yeah, you know, we can't say this right. That is tremendously valuable to those types of companies. You are more efficient, you are more effective to work with. So, you know, that's why over time you can see this question either as is it an efficiency question or is this a value question. And if you're really proficient in one of these industries where there, there are regulations in place, that increases your value tremendously. All right, Darshan asks, how do you come up with different topics for clients? So I Want to create a content strategy for tech product managers who manage 30 plus people on their team and have, you know, 9, 10 plus experience in the IT department. So how do you approach this? Again, I have ghostwritten for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people and all of them all lead back to the same five content buckets. The five content buckets that I used over and over and over again with my clients was the first one. What is the mission? What is the mission? What is the founder's mission? The CEO's mission? What is the mission of the company? What is their mission in their industry? What are they trying to do? And why is that so important? Why does that matter?
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Right?
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Help them talk about it, help them evangelize it, help them educate other people on the problem or the thing that needs to change in their industry. Second one, industry trends. So what's currently happening in the industry? Maybe what new data just came out revealing something going on in this industry?
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Right.
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Any studies that have come out in this industry, Anything that is currently happening, happening as it relates to trends. Third is futurism. So where is this industry headed?
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Right?
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So maybe take some of that data of things that are happening now and then go to the client and go, let's project this out 5 or 10 years. What's going to change? And the beauty of this content bucket is it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong.
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Right?
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Because anytime someone speaks on the future, it's really just thought provoking. So that's interesting. Maybe that'll happen.
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Right?
- [32:44]
A
And if you're right, you look like a genius. And if you're wrong, well, nobody remembered. Anyway, content bucket number four is education. So where does the client have proficiency and what could they explain to someone else, either in their role or someone else who wants to be in their role, how to do actionable content. And then number five is stories. So anything that they can share that is unique to them and something that they've experienced. So again, I was talking about this with a previous question is anyone can talk about hiring. It's not that talking about hiring is novel. What's novel is that specific person talking about how they hire. So if you're ghostwriting for a project manager that works in it, it's like, well, how does a project manager with 10 years of experience in IT hire? Oh, I want to know what that person has to say and thinks about hiring.
- [33:40]
B
Right?
- [33:41]
A
And you can go back to these five content buckets over and over and over again. It works for any, any sort of industry leader in Any industry. Lastly, Angus asks, how does the business model shift as the business scales? Is there a ceiling for a solo ghostwriter? So, first off, I find that most people ask this question way earlier than is reality. So they will get to ten grand a month and they'll go, have I reached the ceiling? No, you haven't even gotten close to the ceiling.
- [34:13]
B
Right.
- [34:14]
A
Just to give you some context, okay, getting to 10 grand a month as a ghostwriter is incredibly easy. If you acquire just a handful of these skills, it is not hard to get a 10 grand a month. Okay? And the difference between 10 grand a month and 20 grand a month basically comes down to one thing, and it has nothing to do with writing. The difference is the amount of effort that you put forth with outreach, how hard you work to drum up new business, and your ability to sell on the phone. That is it.
- [34:48]
B
Right?
- [34:49]
A
Because even if you kept outreach, the same, if you can close more of your sales calls, your business will grow. So that is the only difference from 10 grand a month to 20 grand a month is just outreach and sales. And to be perfectly honest, it sort of stays that way to 30 grand a month, 40 grand a month, 50 grand a month. It's not really until around 40 or 50 grand a month that you will start to realize that there isn't very much headroom for you as an individual to grow from there. Now, there's obviously a barbell, but some of, you know, you can count them on one hand. But some of the highest paid ghostwriters in the world are usually New York Times bestselling authors themselves that now ghostwrite for other celebrities and other people. And I know a couple of them, they make 1 to 2 million a year. So you're looking at, you know, 100, 150 grand a month. But they only do one or two projects per year. And so it's not a consistent monthly run rate. You know, they'll probably get a big check, and then they work on a book for six to eight months and then they get another big check.
- [35:59]
B
Right?
- [36:00]
A
And that is a very unique and different type of ghostwriting. And I also don't like using that as the barometer because it's such an outlier. Like, again, you can count on one hand the number of people who do that. Instead, you want to look at, you know, well, what is the average person and how do they build a ghost writing business and how do they scale themselves? And again, around like 30, 40, 50k a month, you start to realize as an individual ghostwriter, it's hard to get higher than that. And that's because you only have so many hours in the day and you can only charge so much, right? You there, there's a ceiling on getting people to pay a premium. And so usually around then, you're confronted with the decision, well, do I want to stay where I am? And maybe the business model will change a little bit where you have enough clients and you're at a steady 30 grand a month, for example, and then maybe you want to launch some digital products. That's one route. Business model changes a little bit. Or you decide, I'm going to scale myself into a small agency. So I'm going to hire a ghostwriter, I'm going to hire an account manager, you might even hire a sales rep. And you can build a small three, four or five person agency, and then you can go from 50 to 100 grand a month pretty easily. But again, in order to support that, you need a lot of outreach, you need a lot of deal flow, and you need to learn how to sell really well. And so I find again, going back to the question that people ask this earlier than they need to, and it's almost as if they're trying to solve a problem they don't have yet. Everybody, this is such a pattern I observe especially, and I'm saying this to my former self, no shade, because I did the exact same thing. My boss used to call it early twenties syndrome. Early twenties syndrome is where, you know, 22, 23, 24, 25, it, it lasts all the way until you're 29. Early twenties syndrome is where you constantly are looking for the next thing, not realizing that you're really just finding a clever way of distracting yourself from doing the thing right in front of you. And the thing right in front of you is the path to growth. Like, you have to get good at this thing before you worry about that thing over there. And I find so often, again, previous version of myself, I can't tell you how often I made this mistake too. But I find that people will say or ask, you know, how does the business model change? How do I scale? But they haven't even gotten to 10 grand a month yet. And you don't need to worry about how you scale. You don't need to worry about how the business model changes. I promise when you're there, it will change by necessity, right? It'll, it'll confront you much sooner than you confront it. And so instead you need to just focus on, well, how do I get to five grand a month? How do I get to ten grand a month, right? And you just take it in steps. And something I tell myself constantly is the next step will reveal itself. We will be on the path, we will be confronted by something, and it'll be obvious what we should do. But for right now, all I need to do is just do this thing in front of me really, really well.