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Your Life Story in a Beautiful Book – Personal Biography

How to hire a ghostwriter

One of the most common questions I get involves how to hire a ghost writer (or ghostwriter). Folks assume I am a ghost writer. The first thing I can help you with here is a basic understanding of what each type of writer does. Knowing this, you are armed with vital information.

Ghostwriter — by definition, a ghostwriter does not get his or her name on the cover or inside of the book as author or co-author. Hence, the word “ghost.” It means a ghostwriter’s name is invisible as author. This should not be as important to you, when looking to hire a writer, as what kind of experience that writer has. A ghostwriter is often thought to write novels, but there are hundreds of ghostwriters out there looking for work who are not good novelists. So it pays to put on your detail hat when looking at how to hire a ghost writer.

Memoir writer— writes a memoir, but you need to know what a memoir is: a first-person account of a life that is typically not researched nor fact-checked. We cover this elsewhere on this website. Here at Real Life Stories, we are experienced memoir writers!

Biographer–writes a biography, which is a properly-researched, third-person narrative that covers the broader perspective of this person’s life. In other words, a biography includes many, many pages of information that have been gained by research and is information that the person who told his or her story does not necessarily know. We cover what a biographer does here.