Ghost Writer – Why You Might Need One
Not completely certain what a ghost writer is or does? A ghost writer is someone who undertakes a writing assignment for you – often on a freelance basis – and sells you the complete copyright. In selling you the copyright they are relinquishing their right to be credited as the author of the work. As they’re selling this right to you, you can rightly and legally put your name on the written item as the author.
For website owners, there are good reasons to use ghost writers:
- If you want to display the work that someone else holds copyright to on your site, you need to get their permission. You also usually need to have their name on the article. Often, they’ll ask for a link back to their website. If you’ve hired a ghost writer to write your content articles and blog posts, you don’t have these issues at all.
- You may wish to come across as an expert in your field – indeed, you probably are an expert. That doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to write about it. Many people don’t have good writing skills – hence the huge number of freelance writers earning a good living as content writers! Alternatively, you may have excellent writing skills but find the task of writing boring and time consuming. If that’s the case, a ghost writer will write your items much faster than you could.
- Time. Websites require quite a bit of content to bring traffic to the site. Often the site owner has their hands full processing orders or marketing and simply doesn’t have the time to write the number of articles or blog posts they need to have. Outsourcing this work to a ghost writer often makes sense. The items can be written quickly, professionally, and don’t tie up the site owner’s time. Some site owners order hundreds of articles to boost their traffic and there isn’t the slightest possibility they’d have the time to do it. It would take several weeks or months – whereas as a ghost writing service could probably have the completed articles back to them in a week or two.
- Giveaway reports and e-books are excellent marketing tools but again, site owners either don’t have the time to write or they know that a ghost writer can do the job better than they can. Often, the site owner has the topic expertise and simply requires the ghost writer to express it well. The writer is usually given most of the information that will go into the report or e-book. Under that circumstance it makes sense to hire a ghost writer so that you can be credited as the author of the information.
Ghost writers are also often hired to write personal stories. You may have a personal experience or an interesting life story that you want to turn into a book. Writing a book is a daunting task and finding a publisher isn’t easy. If you don’t have the writing expertise to make the manuscript appear professional and the book an enjoyable read, publishers aren’t likely to consider it favorably.
If you need to hire a ghost writer, there’s one very important thing to remember – make sure they know it’s a ghost writing job! The last thing you want is to forget to mention this and find that on completion, the writer believes they hold the copyright even though you have already paid.
Most experienced content writers will understand that the job you give them is to be ghost written, by the very nature of the task. An inexperienced writer may not, so make sure you mention in your initial enquiry that you are seeking a ghost writer, particularly if you are using a freelance site where writers of all levels will bid on your job.
