Get Your Career in Shape – was a collaboration with Chris Thibodeaux and Mark Graham Communications
Thinking of hiring a ghostwriter? The idea can feel daunting—ghostwriting is a big investment, and there are scores of ghostwriting companies and hundreds of freelance ghostwriters out there. How will you decide who to work with? What criteria should you use to evaluate ghostwriters?
Certainly, experience and professionalism top the list. Make sure to choose a ghostwriting firm or an individual writer with the know-how, acumen, and professional skills to help you turn your vision for a book into reality. The goal is to find a writer who has strong writing and editing skills, as well as a keen eye for how to structure a book—overall, on the chapter level, and on the sentence level. Much of this can be gauged by looking at the ghostwriter’s previous projects, especially those in the same genre as your book.
When considering potential ghostwriters, another key quality to look for is a sense of empathy. Not only should your ghostwriter be a talented writer, the ghostwriter should also be someone who truly knows how to listen to others.
Why? Because this is your book—not the ghostwriter’s. That means the ghostwriter has to thoroughly understand your vision, the story you want to tell, and how you want to tell it. To gain that understanding, the ghostwriter has to put themself in your shoes. The ghostwriter, like any empath, has to be truly invested in knowing how you feel and what you are trying to say. It’s only through ghostwriter empathy that the final book will look, feel, and sound like your book—not the ghostwriter’s.
How can you gauge a potential ghostwriter’s empathy skills? Here are a few ideas:
- During an initial conversation, does the ghostwriter ask you questions? If the ghostwriter is doing all the talking, chances are, they’re not attuned to hearing about your vision.
- When the ghostwriter does ask you a question, do they listen to your answer? If you get the sense that the ghostwriter is “listening to respond,” rather than listening to truly listen, it could be an indication that the ghostwriter does not have strong empathy skills.
- Do the ghostwriter’s writing samples demonstrate unique voices? If the ghostwriter submits several samples from different clients for your review, and they all sound as if they were written by the same person, it’s possible that the ghostwriter is more skilled at using their own writing voice than they are at honing a client’s unique voice.
Ghostwriter empathy can be difficult to gauge, but one thing that helps is working with a reputable ghostwriting company. At Mark Graham Communications, we use a highly selective process for hiring writers. In addition to confirming that our team members’ writing skills are second-to-none, we carefully evaluate each potential team member’s ability to empathize, thus ensuring our ghostwriters exceed our clients’ expectations for a book that perfectly captures the client’s voice and vision.
If you’d like to know more, please get in touch. We’d love to connect you with one of our talented, empathic ghostwriters, to help you turn your dream of a published book into reality.
