You were quoted £20,000 for a ghostwriter
The quote is not unreasonable — £15,000–£50,000 is the normal professional range, and it buys six to twelve months of somebody's working life. Whether it is worth it depends on one question: is your constraint time, or is it process? If time, hire them. If process, you are paying a great deal for something you can run yourself.
What the £20,000 is actually for
Every row is real work. The question is not whether it is worth doing — it is which rows you could do yourself.
| What they do | Roughly | Could you do it? |
|---|---|---|
| Interview you | 15–40 hours, recorded | Yes — with a good question set, which is free below |
| Transcribe it | 60–160 hours of audio processing | Yes — this is now cheap and fast |
| Read everything you already have | A week or two | Yes, and you have the advantage of knowing what is in it |
| Find the structure | The hardest part, and the real skill | With help. This is where an outline critique earns its fee. |
| Write the draft | 4–8 months | This is the row you are really buying |
| Revise with you | 2–3 rounds | Yes |
| Deliver it, on time | The thing that actually gets books finished | Only you know |
A separate free preview: A free outside view of your own pages
A separate editorial preview of one extract; it does not read the whole book or do the specialist job this page describes. Send up to 5,000 words. You get back what the draft appears to be doing to somebody who wasn't there when you wrote it, the strongest thing in it named, the exact place a reader starts to drift, and three revision priorities in order.
A separate editorial preview of one extract; it does not read the whole book or do the specialist job this page describes. An AI-assisted read of your own pages. Not a human edit, not a line edit, and not a scored report.
The one question that decides it
Is your constraint time, or process?
If you have real expertise, no spare hours, and the book has a commercial job to do, hire the ghostwriter. Forty hours of your life instead of four hundred is a rational trade at a senior professional's day rate, and this is the case ghostwriting exists for.
If what you lack is a structure, a method and the confidence to start, the ghostwriter is an extremely expensive solution to a cheap problem. And the book will not sound like you — which for memoir, family history and anything read by people who know you, is the whole value.
The voice, which is the part people regret
For a business book, a good ghostwriter's voice is often better than yours: clearer, more disciplined, better at the shape of an argument.
For a memoir, a family story, or anything your children will read, the voice is the book. And it is the hardest thing to buy. Authors who regret ghostwriting almost never regret the money — they regret opening the finished book and not finding themselves in it.
If the words started as yours, spoken or typed, the voice survives. That is not sentiment; it is the practical reason the process order matters.
Running the same process yourself
It is not a secret method. Every ghostwriter does roughly the same thing.
Structured interviews, recorded — and you can be interviewed by a friend, or answer the questions aloud on your own. Transcription. Reading everything you already have. Finding the through-line across all of it. Testing the structure before writing into it. Then a chapter at a time, then editing.
The two genuinely hard parts are the structure and the finishing. The interviews are the easy bit, and they are the bit most people could do for themselves with a decent set of questions.
About Your Book Pro
Your Book Pro is a book-writing platform built in Britain. Start with an idea, notes, half a draft, a podcast, or a finished manuscript, and use our purpose-built AI tools for planning, feedback, editing, proofreading, cover designs, and to create print-ready files. Writing is totally free: you can type, upload or speak your book as much as you like, and use only the editing tools you need with Plus, or go unlimited with Pro.
Produce world-class drafts at the fraction of the cost of hiring a human editorial team.
Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits, and a plain export of your own words is free.
The process maps directly. The free interview question sets give you the structure a ghostwriter would use. Transcription turns recordings into clean verbatim — every word kept, nothing rewritten. Themes from Bulk Audio finds what the material is actually about across all of it, which is the structural step that is hardest alone. Plan Feedback tests the shape before you commit. The Editing Suite does the chapter work, and Detailed Editorial Feedback reviews the result.
1,000 welcome credits on every account, never expiring, so the first whole-book review costs nothing.
And when the ghostwriter is genuinely right: real expertise, no time, a commercial book. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and a good one is worth what they charge. If you go that way, the guide on hiring one honestly is worth reading first — the paid sample chapter alone saves people twenty thousand pounds.
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Email me my free review linkQuestions people ask
- How much does a ghostwriter cost?
- £15,000–£50,000 for a full-length book in the UK, paid in stages over six to twelve months. Under £8,000 usually means an outsourced draft you will also need to pay to edit.
- Can I hire a ghostwriter for part of the book?
- Yes, and it is often the better deal — someone to structure and write the difficult third costs a fraction of a full commission.
- Will a ghostwritten book sound like me?
- A good one will approximate your voice from interviews, and it is an approximation. For memoir, that gap is where the regret lives.
- What's the cheapest way to get a book written?
- Talk it yourself. Recording is free, transcription is cheap, and the words are yours — which for family and memoir is not a compromise, it is the point.