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How much does it actually cost to hire a ghostwriter?
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Today we're talking about the shocking truth behind the whole process.
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Talk about AI.
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Does it make it cheaper?
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Two budgets that you gotta allocate for, the pricing, so kind of the different tiers, how long does it take?
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How to find one who to hire.
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Spoiler alert, the cheapest ghostwriter that you can hire is usually the most expensive book that you'll ever write.
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But let's talk about first the question you're probably asking along with everybody else.
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It's AI.
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Can I just press a couple buttons on AI and just spit out a ghostwritten book?
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Hasn't this just totally killed the ghostwriting industry?
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I would say yes and no.
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Yes, if you want a really crappy book, and no if you care about the quality.
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Because here's the thing the writing was never really the expensive part.
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I mean, for a really long time, you got overseas ghostwriters, you got cheap ghostwriting agencies, whatever.
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Writing is a commodity.
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What's not a commodity is the stories, your voice, like that is the hardest part is figuring out your voice, your stories, your concepts, all those things.
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So we're gonna get into why you need to distill that and how you can integrate that in the process.
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But AI doesn't replace that.
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Now it can help with that, it can augment with it.
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You know, we've got a ghostwriting process and we're using AI as part of the front end of that to just distill a bunch of stories, concepts.
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So it can shortcut that.
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But at the end of the day, the best book is going to win.
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And the most expensive part, the hardest part is pulling out the stories out of your head, figuring out what you're actually saying, what's the goals, making it sound like you.
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But then there's two budgets that you really got to allocate for.
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So you're probably coming here for the pricing piece, which we'll talk about in a second, but I would say it's actually more than that.
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You've got your time and you've got your money.
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Now, depending on where you're at in your life or your career, you know, if you got more money than time, well, you need to spend money to save time.
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If you got more time than money, well, then yeah, you're probably gonna spend time to save money.
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You know, the cheaper the ghostwriter, the more time it's gonna take you, generally.
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You got to think about not just the money component, but how much time do you want to budget or invest into this book?
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Now I think it's been gonna be one of the best investments you ever make on a monetary basis or a time basis.
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You know, think, hey, is it 10 hours?
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Am I willing to do 20 hours, 100 hours?
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What does that look like?
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And then based on that, now we move into the actual pricing tiers.
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So you've got four main tiers here.
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It starts at 25k.
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This is really the floor for a ghostwritten book.
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Can you get it for less than that?
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Sure, but it's probably gonna suck.
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It's gonna be AI slop or something else.
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You're probably getting ripped off if you pay this price, and it's probably not worth it because a real human ghostwriter is not gonna write it for that amount.
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Now, then you move up to the next tier, which is more of the 50k price point.
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So, this is a solid book.
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You know, we're gonna talk about how to find one and all that stuff, but you got to look at hey, am I hiring for a person?
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Am I hiring for a process?
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Am I hiring a proven ghostwriter?
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Like, what are the criteria that you need to think about and look for here?
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Well, 50k is when you start getting into hey, this is a quality written book and it's gonna minimize your amount of time that you spend in the process.
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Then we move into tier three.
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This is 100k.
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This is more the elite ghostwriting price point.
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This is where you the quality really starts to shine.
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Your time is gonna go down, you've got experienced writers.
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Maybe this is a solo person shop and they're writing three books a year, and so they can do that, they can make a good living, you know, two, three hundred grand a year and they're writing quality books and they're good, or maybe it's a process.
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I think a process is better than a person, but I get into that in a bunch of other ghostwriting videos.
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And so now you're starting to get into okay, this is a real investment, real quality book, and then 150k plus this is a massive range.
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I mean, 150k is probably the floor for this tier.
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This is you've got a big advance from a traditional publisher, you've got a massive audience, you are a president, you've got a lot of money, you've got a built-in reason why you are exponentially more likely to succeed, and a built-in reason why your time is probably pretty dang valuable.
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These ghostwriters can be upwards of three to five hundred thousand, and those are kind of your proven winners.
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You they can point to, hey, I guess I wrote this book for this celebrity, this book for this business person.
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I mean, they kind of have their pick and they often will get a cut of the royalties as well because they know, hey, this is gonna succeed.
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So I want to have some upside, not just the flat upfront fee.
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Now there's the question about do they charge flat rate or per word?
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So generally, if you're working with experienced ghostwriters, they're gonna charge a flat rate, right?
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Per word is more kind of a budget way to price it, budget way to look at it.
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I kind of filled these in here, it's a little bit hard to read, but you can see on the low end it's 20 cents a word, you know, middle tier is 50 cents or more a word, uh, and above that is a dollar a word.
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I didn't put this for the top tier because let's be honest, they're not charging by the word, they're charging a flat rate per project.
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So that's kind of how I would look at that.
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Now, your nonfiction books, those are somewhere between 20 to 70,000 words.
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Maybe on the upper end of that, depending on if it's a memoir, business book, you know, kind of autobiography, whatever, that's probably gonna be more research, probably gonna be more expensive.
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Then if it's just a standard down the middle, here's a book about my business, right?
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That's gonna be pretty straightforward, add in some stories.
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So you're thinking about complexity and word count.
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Those are kind of the two big things that are gonna drive pricing.
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And now I'd say maybe the third piece is how much do you care and want to be involved?
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Because let's just be real, if you have them edit it 700 times, or if you want to be super involved and do dozens and dozens and dozens of hours of interviews, well then that's a lot of their time.
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And so they're probably gonna charge you more.
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The irony is somewhere in the middle, is someone, you know, we work with a bunch of authors ghostwriting.
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The irony is the more that someone pays, often the less they want to be involved.
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And so we almost have to charge a premium for the people who kind of want to write the book themselves, but pretend like they want to use a ghostwriter.
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So don't be that person.
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Either choose to go with a ghostwriter and trust your writer.
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And obviously, yeah, work with them, share your stories, all that stuff.
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If you're enjoying this video so far and you'd like our help ghostwriting your book, we've got very limited slots.
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We are the best of the best when it comes to quality ghostwritten books and a process, not a person.
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So click the link in the description.
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It's a totally free consultation.
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We'll walk you through your goals for your book, your challenges, and we'll map out how we can ghostwrite your book and help you be more successful.
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Click the link in the description, book a call.
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Let's talk soon.
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Now that we're clear on the pricing, let's talk about how long does the process take.
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Well, I think a lot of people think, hey, it's just gonna take a few weeks, especially with AI.
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Like, why can't I just get a draft quickly?
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Now, sure, can you get a draft in 90 days?
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Maybe.
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Depends on how good the person is, how good their process is, and how quickly they can capture your concepts, your voice, all that stuff, and how much prep and pre-work that you've done up front.
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I will say, as a general rule of thumb, it's gonna take six to 12 months to go through the process.
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Now, this is the part that's really frustrating for people is a lot of that is upfront work.
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So it feels like you're going nowhere.
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It's interviews, it's the outline and getting super clear on that before they start writing.
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It's the sample chapter.
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A lot of people try to rush that, they end up with a horrible book, or the process ends up taking longer.
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So if someone promises you a full book in a few weeks, that should worry you.
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That should say, hey, is this not going to be that quality?
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Or, you know, are you shortcut in the process?
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So use that as a quick pause, or they're just trying to overpromise to get your business.
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So the upfront part, this is kind of like me in high school.
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I remember my English teacher would say, Hey, you should do an outline, you should do, you know, the mind map, all the things.
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And I said, That's really dumb.
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Let's just start writing.
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This is what a lot of people think that way when they start the ghostwriting process.
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So spend the time up front, or you'll be rewriting 60,000 words later.
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I've heard so many horror stories of people working with ghostwriters, friends of mine, who a year later they just finally scrap it and write the whole book themselves.
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To not do that, you gotta find a good ghostwriter.
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So, how do you find a good one?
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Well, you're not just hiring a writer, you're hiring a process.
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This is a really big one.
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A few general guidelines, and then we'll talk about people versus process.
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First off, ask people who've done it.
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Who has had a successful ghostwriting experience?
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Who do they work with?
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Look at the books that those ghostwriters have actually written.
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Now they can't always tell you because sometimes they're under NDA and stuff like that, but at least directionally, do they write in your genre and do they write quality stuff?
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Ask for samples in different voices so you can figure out can they adapt to you?
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And then ask them to walk you through their process.
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That's the big one up front.
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If they can't explain it clearly, they don't have one.
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So I'm talking about a process with milestones, and here's what we're gonna do, and here's how long it takes.
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In the last three books, it took X amount of time.
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A writer is a solo person, solo shop.
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Maybe they've done this a couple times.
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They have no proven process.
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A process is always gonna be the person.
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You've got multiple people that can jump in depending on your voice, right?
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You might not like one writer, and that's totally fine.
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That's why we have a stable of writers.
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We have a process that we use, and that process can predictably create great books.
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Whereas, you know, a person, it just might not be a good match, and then you don't find out till a year later.
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Let's talk about who you hire.
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So a bad ghostwriter, they're they just take your deposit and then bounce.
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All right, they take your deposit, they do two interviews and they say, All right, I'll I'll reach back out in a few months.
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A good ghostwriter has a process and it's front-loaded.
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Okay, again, this is frustrating.
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It's probably not what you want to hear, but they're gonna interview you often up front.
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They're gonna get your distill your voice, distill your concepts, get a lot of approval up front.
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Then they're gonna say, All right, let's approve the outline.
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Okay, now let's approve a sample chapter to make sure I'm right in what you're thinking.
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All right, now let's approve the first few chapters.
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Okay, now let's write and approve the full draft.
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So what ends up happening is it's it feels cumbersome, it feels labor intensive up front, but it the process actually goes way faster.
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Instead of saying, hey, I'll see you in a few months with a full draft, and then you read it and you say, Oh my gosh, what is this?
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This sucks.
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This isn't my voice, this isn't what I wanted.
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And now you're course correcting, they're frustrated, you got to rewrite the whole thing, you're polishing a turd.
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Now, one more thing to look for in a good ghostwriter.
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The best ghostwriters don't just plan to get the book written, they plan beyond the launch.
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Okay, so they need to think about how this book is gonna drive revenue for you, how this book is gonna sell, all that stuff.
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If they're not thinking about that, well, then they might be a good writer, but it's called best-selling author, not best written author.
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So you could have the best writer in the world, and if they're not thinking about that, your book is gonna totally bomb.
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So you need to be thinking about that, or you need to hire someone who's thinking about that.
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So that it's not just getting to the draft done and to publish.
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Because I mean, there's a graveyard of ghostwritten books that totally bomb.
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We got a whole video on this about why most ghostwritten books fail.
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A bunch of them fail early in the process, but then a bunch of them fail when they get put out because by the time you get to the finish line, nobody's thinking about the launch.
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So you need to make sure that who you work with that they're thinking about the launch as well.
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So that's an overview on the process.
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I'm curious if you hired a ghostwriter, how much did you pay?
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Comment down below or comment below with your biggest takeaway.
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So thank you guys so much for watching, engaging with the videos.
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Now, two things I want you to do right now.
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Number one, check out this video.
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It's why most ghostwritten books fail.
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Watch it, avoid those mistakes.
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And if you're an overachiever, if you're thinking, hey, I'd rather hire a person than a process, well, then I want you to click the link in the description, book a call with my team.
00:11:56.310 --> 00:12:01.429
We've got very limited slots each month to work with people to ghostwrite their book.
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We would love to work with you, help your book be more successful.
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Certainly not for everyone, but if you think you might be a fit, click the link, book a call, uh, and let's figure out how we can help with your book.
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And I'll see you in the next video.