Writing is a Lifestyle Preference

We run a small S-Corp I currently call Rainbow Writing, Inc. We handle projects ourselves - and also we farm them out to what I call my cattle pen, the Rainbow Writing, Inc. Outsource Team. I hire good, capable people to work in the freelance writers field, and it helps them with their careers.

To be a ghost writer is definitely a way of life. This article is about how freelance writing is a developable field. Most people seem to think it is solely about hiding “ghost writers,” making money, or otherwise pushing around extremely talented writers. Seriously, it is about taking the work up for overburdened people at low prices so they can afford to be our clients. They thus manage to keep the field of literature going in the face of “vanity publishing.” It’s really only self publishing.

On the other hand, there’s something to keeping your byline. I don’t take other people’s byline, or credit to their name, when they are considered to be a book author and I am only rewriting or otherwise writing their stuff; they get their bylines instead, and I might be credited somehow. When I write my own books, I use other names called pseudonyms due to various technical issues, but I’m currently working on the first book I ever have put out with my own name on it.

Writing is something you can just rattle off. It’s something you can make a coffee table book from too. But if you go for only money, chances are, you only host celebrities. Paris Hilton is not the only lifestyle in all of existence.

The thing to do mostly is to cram down as many books and as much writing enters your consciousness as humanly possible. But when you take up your pen, in whatever form it may take, it needs to hit “paper” and go somewhere lately. I made it there; you will make it somewhere else.

This is especially so when you’ve started to break into the field and you’re a ghost writer -- or ghostwriter -- who has never really ghosted a book for someone else before. You’re probably thinking big bucks, major book contracts, large amounts of cash advances from publishers and huge percentages from the books you will be anonymously writing for big time authors. You may need to slow down and reorder your priorities.

I make enough money at my regular writing projects to support my habit of preferring to work with the first time author crowd. Some of those people’s books do sell well over time, and it’s worth it to me to put the time and effort into ghost writing or editing them that it takes to really polish their work to a gleaming shine and make it productive and meaningful as timeless literature or educational material.

This means more to me than a large check paid for the type of book I truly hate to see my name associated with, and I feel very proud to have more of the first timers’ works on my record than those. I guess in the end it’s a tradeoff: timeless creation of worthy literature versus timely production of flashy, self-gratifying stuff that may not make me feel good to write it. Not that I don’t regularly take on that kind of project. I need those books to get by and make money. But it always gladdens me when I can write something that really makes the author feel like he or she has produced a very fine book, and which is something that will truly lend credit and greater credence to my professional name and career as a writer.

People like that don’t need to face down what looks like to them to be a million dollar price tag – when what they are looking for is describable as a cheap ghost writer. They want an actual inexpensive ghost writer or ghostwriter who understands their needs, both budgetary and otherwise. Someone capable needs to be able to sit down with them and negotiate a fairly low amount of money to be paid out by them, so they can figure on at least getting some kind of returns from their own books.

These potential authors are not Presidents of the United States or famous movie actors, whose books are “guaranteed” to sell. Many of them find themselves “stuck” with what used to be called vanity publishing, and which is nowadays called self publishing. They won’t necessarily find a commercial publisher who wants to take a chance on huge returns from their books in today’s multifaceted but still challenging world of publishing. However, they still have a lot of hope to be read and heard from due to the millions of resources available to them through the ever growing and ever popular World Wide Web, otherwise known as the Internet. There is always hope to have your writing heard from. If you need to hire a freelance writer, a ghost writer, a copy editor, a proof reader, or all of the above to help you express your ideas and complete a book manuscript, that world is readily available to you through the auspices of my company, and many others.