Ghostwriting is evil. Now that I’ve shared my obvious bias, let me try my best to give you my impartial views on ghostwriting.
Ghostwriter Defined by Son of Sappho
A writer who writes anything for remuneration (usually money) without receiving the official credit for it. This means that you do the work, sell it to someone else, and they get all the credit for it.
Three Reasons to be a Ghostwriter
- You should get paid a lot more money;
- You can do it as a second job without anyone knowing about it;
- You could get the opportunity to be paid for creative work that you might not otherwise get.
Three Reasons not to be a Ghostwriter
- You usually can’t use any of the work in your portfolio;
- It’s next to impossible to get ahead based on your name, since you are always promoting other people;
- You’re less likely to ever create the type of work that you envision, since you are always creating another person’s ideas.
I’ll certainly grant that there might be times a writer doesn’t care about having their name on something. Perhaps you wrote a boring manual that you don’t want in your portfolio, and maybe you got paid really well to write it. For me, if I write anything that is at all worth mentioning, I put that in my portfolio, and I’ve never had to hide any of the work I’ve done.
Imagine for a moment that I go to an artist and ask him to paint a beautiful sunset for me, but I tell him that I’m going to own 100% of the rights to that painting. I pay the artist accordingly, and I get to put my name in the bottom right hand corner and tell everyone I painted it. I’m not suggesting this has never happened in history, but the idea of it is preposterous, and I feel the same way about ghostwriting.
I can’t even begin to understand why anyone would want to let someone else take credit for their work.