A potential client once asked me, “Derek, what excites you about a book project? What do you look for in a client?” The answer is twofold: 1. economic impact and 2. intellectual challenge.

I ghostwrite and collaborate on business books because I believe better business advice leads to better business decisions which, in turn, lead to a higher quality of life.

The deeper and broader the economic impact of the book, the more excited I am about helping the people the book will reach. Business Insights is a good example. It teaches salespeople how to use data to analyze retail stores’ sales to come to realizations about what’s happening on their store shelves. The result is collectively millions of dollars that don’t go to waste (as well as lowering retail stores’ physical waste). Instead of bad decisions that lead to a negative economic impact, better decisions lead to positive economic gains.

I also like an intellectual challenge. Part of the reason I love ghostwriting is that I constantly get to delve into a whole world of knowledge and expertise I may not even have known existed. I especially enjoy the work of trying to figure out how to put the book together in a way that makes it easy and intriguing (or maybe even entertaining) for the readers. Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge is a prime example. In order to tell the story of how Dr. Edwards Deming created his System of Profound Knowledge, the author and I did prodigious secondary and tertiary research and readings as we chased the multiple bunny trails and dove deep into the rabbit holes surrounding Deming’s life, influence, and influences. It was exhausting yet exhilarating.

The morning of Day 2 continues the stream-of-consciousness conversation, though with more questions and prompts from me. In the afternoon, we begin working through the exercises I’ve developed after working with business professionals like you for years.

Day 3 begins with going deeper on the previous day’s exercises and arriving at some working decisions. In the afternoon, we arrive at an epiphany and it feels like the book suddenly coalesces. With that lens and the working decisions from the exercises, we finish the day with creating a working structure of how we think your book will come together.

There are basically two models for compensating ghostwriters and collaborators.

In the old model (pre-2007 when the Kindle was released and marked a major shift in the publishing industry), ghostwriters were paid by the publisher. They typically received one-half to all of the author’s royalty advance and then received one-half of the author’s royalties. The author never paid the ghostwriter. Everything was covered from sales of the book itself.

While you’ll still find this arrangement in plenty of instances, it’s much more common for the author to pay the ghostwriter directly. Some charge by the word or the page, some by the project. Often, the payments are tied to certain project milestones. It’s normal to still find ghostwriters who charge 50% upfront and 50% upon completion.

My client-authors typically don’t care how many books they sell. While we all want to be New York Times bestselling authors, that’s not at the top of their priority list. They measure their return-on-book-creation investment by what their business book catalyzes. With Redesigning Capex Strategy, for example, the moment Fredrik and Daniel landed one new client because of someone reading their book, the entire project more than paid for itself. Something similar for Neuroselling: One new client engagement for Jeff Bloomfield saw a serious ROI for his company.

Because my authors don’t focus on generating revenue from their book’s sales, they’re not focused on generating book royalties. As such, it doesn’t make sense for me to use the old business model of getting paid according to book sales. My business model is to charge an all-inclusive flat fee, spread out over twelve monthly invoices.

This lets my client-author and I stay at parity where we both feel that the total amount of money invested in the project is always at par with the total amount of work invested in the project. Asking for 50% up front requires an inordinate amount of faith in the ghostwriter. With equal monthly payments, it’s essentially a pay-as-you-go arrangement that lets both parties sleep more easily at night.

Professional ghostwriting companies might charge as low as $15,000 to put a complete book together. They have a well defined process, book templates, and other standardized tools to allow them to operate a business model based on quantity.

Professional one-on-one ghostwriting starts at about $25,000 for someone who already has a couple of ghostwriting and heavy editing projects under their belt. This makes sense, as you’re paying a solo professional to devote a sizable amount of their working week to one project for the better part of a year, if not longer. Ghostwriters with a few more books behind them may ask for $35,000–$45,000.

When publishers look to bring a ghostwriter on board (while still using a fee-for-services approach), they expect to pay somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000. That seems to be about the equilibrium rate between writing a book that generates enough royalties to justify a ghostwriter while leaving enough profit on the table for the author.

Veteran ghostwriters with several books and probably some bylines to their credit often charge $75,000 up to $100,000 (or more). In every case I’ve seen (though I’ve not seen any kind of formal survey), these ghostwriters have a well-established niche they specialize in.

Once you reach ghostwriters charging $150,000 or so, you’re in rarified air. You usually find such fees for celebrity and/or celebrities’ ghostwriters where the publishers believe the book will be a major success.

Yes and no. For some of the books you see here, I was a heavily involved editor, such as The Eagle & the Dragon and The Five Technological Forces Disrupting Security. For others, like Golden Stripes and Everything I Need to Know About Business I Learned from Hip-Hop, I was a coach or consultant. There are books I have ghostwritten that I have to stay hush-hush about. But most of the books you see were really more collaborations than traditional ghostwriting.

A typical ghostwriting arrangement is where the author has all their information ready to go—sometimes even in a fully drafted manuscript—and needs a professional writer partner to turn it into a book. That’s fairly straightforward.

My authors, however, are more often looking for a collaborator than a ghostwriter. They have decades of experience and insights. They have well established domain expertise. They know they know enough to write a book. But they need a true collaborating partner to help them pull it all together into a business narrative that effectively communicates all of that while also serving as an intriguing or entertaining read.

That’s how it was with The Introvert’s Edge. Matthew Pollard had a well developed sales system that he’d taught thousands of people all over the world. But a great sales training doesn’t necessarily translate into a great business book. We worked together for a year to gather, create, and edit all the additional content, research, anecdotes, and stories to develop a fleshed out book.

The same for Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge. John Willis was already one of the foremost Deming authorities in the country when we began working on his book together, but there was so much more we found once we started digging. He wrote more than 90,000 words himself, and I generated about the same. Together, we wrote over 180,000 words to result in a book we edited down to only 80,000 words long.