This week’s roundup is all about how to get started ghostwriting:

• Why you want to call yourself a “ghostwriter” and not a “freelance writer”
• How to get your first ghostwriting client
• What you should charge ($$$)
• And how much money there is to be made as a ghostwriter

Sound exciting?

Let’s not beat around the bush—and dive in!

Freelance Writers are commodities. Ghostwriters are premium service providers.

This is the first big idea we want you to know.

When you call yourself a “freelance writer,” you are sort of announcing to the world that you are a commodity. You are just another blog post machine, and the same thing as every other freelance writer on Fiverr. As a result, you are easily replaceable.

But if you call yourself a “ghostwriter,” all of a sudden, the perceived value of your work changes. Dramatically. Freelance writers sound like independent contractors who get paid to write 600 words of fluffy content for the sake of building SEO on a company’s website. Right? But a ghostwriter sounds like something “premium,” and something only credible, successful, intelligent thought leaders have the luxury to afford.

You want to be the latter.

Not the former.

Do you want to get started ghostwriting? Here are some resources for you to start going down the rabbit hole.

1. How JK Molina Built A 6-Figure Business Ghostwriting Tweets From A Third World Country (45 minutes): This live session will not only give you a crash-course on how to get started ghostwriting, but it will inspire the hell out of you. JK Molina is one of Twitter’s best-kept secrets, and in addition to regularly writing viral Twitter Threads, he also ghostwrites for a handful of successful creators and industry thought leaders. His secret? Structuring his ghostwriting services around making the people he works for more money—which allows him to charge 10-20x more than the average “freelance writer” earns.
2. Top Internet Ghostwriter Reveals How To Rapidly Master Any Skill From The Ground Up (1 hour, 20 minutes): Craig Clemens is one of the best sales copywriters on the planet, but most people don’t know that his “claim to fame” is ghostwriting sales scripts for leaders in the health and wellness space—and those sales scripts have generated more than a billion (yes, with a B) in product sales. Well, in this interview Craig talks to Nicolas Cole about how to quickly master any new skill, as well as what it’s like to be a ghostwriter for founders, C-level executives, investors, etc.
3. 5 Ghostwriting Templates (5 minutes): This is one of Cole’s most viral Twitter Threads ever. After ghostwriting more than 2,000 articles for Silicon Valley founders, C-level executives, investors, Grammy-winning musicians, Olympic athletes, NYT best-selling authors, and more, Cole reveals the 5 templates he uses over and over again to consistently create high-quality content on behalf of industry leaders.

Want to know how much you should charge as a ghostwriter?

For context:

• There are ghostwriters who charge anywhere from $100 per 800-word article all the way up to $1,000 or more per article.
• There are ghostwriters on Twitter who charge $1,000 all the way up to $10,000+ per month for Twitter writing (a mix of a few Tweets per day and 1-3 Threads per week).
• There are ghostwriters who charge anywhere from $25,000 all the way up to $250,000 (you need to be a best-selling writer on your own to command this high of a rate) per book they ghostwrite. These books can range from PDFs and eBooks all the way up to print books for one of the Top 5 publishing houses.

The key to figuring out how much you should charge as a ghostwriter is to base your value on the outcome you can unlock for the individual. “Freelance writers” get paid to write X number of words. Ghostwriters can get to write something that achieves an outcome:

• Leads to X number of sales
• Establishes credibility (which then leads to X number of sales)
• Create an asset (like a book) that can create a new revenue stream (again... leading to sales)

The highest-paid ghostwriters don’t get paid to write.

They get paid to make the person they are writing for more money.