What it costs
What a ghostwriter costs — and when you don't need one
Ghostwriting a full-length book costs £15,000–£50,000 in the UK. That buys six to twelve months of a professional's working life — fifteen to forty hours of interviews, the structure, a first draft and two or three revision rounds. It is not a typing fee.
What good looks like
- A sample chapter written before the full commission, paid for separately
- A clear contract covering copyright, credit, confidentiality and what happens if you stop
- A defined interview schedule — you will need to give a lot of hours
- Named previous books, even where they cannot say which were theirs
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.
What you are actually buying
A ghostwriter interviews you, then writes the book in your voice. You own it and your name goes on it. For a full-length memoir this is typically several months of work and is priced accordingly — it is the most expensive service in publishing that most first-time authors consider.
Why it costs that
A ghostwriting fee is six to twelve months of a professional's working life: fifteen to forty hours of interviews, transcription, reading everything you already have, finding the structure, a first draft, and two or three revision rounds. At £15,000–£50,000 that works out at roughly a mid-career professional's day rate, which is what it is. Fees above the range usually mean a name with credits you would recognise; fees well below usually mean an outsourced first draft you will also pay an editor to fix.
How to spend less
Hire for part of the book rather than all of it — someone to structure and write the difficult third costs a fraction of a full commission. Or run the process yourself: the interviews, the transcription and the reading are the easy parts, and the structure is what an outline critique buys for £150–£400. If your constraint is time rather than process, though, hiring is the rational choice and we would rather say so.
What good looks like
- A sample chapter written before the full commission, paid for separately
- A clear contract covering copyright, credit, confidentiality and what happens if you stop
- A defined interview schedule — you will need to give a lot of hours
- Named previous books, even where they cannot say which were theirs
Questions to ask them
- How many hours of my time will this need, and over what period?
- What happens if I don't recognise myself in the first chapter?
- Who owns the recordings and transcripts afterwards?
- How is the fee staged, and what is refundable?
Red flags
- Full payment upfront
- No sample chapter offered
- Unwilling to put copyright assignment in writing
- A price quoted before they know the length or the material
Honestly
A ghostwriter is the right answer when you have no time and the book has a commercial deadline. It is the wrong answer if what you actually want is for the book to sound like you — because the thing that makes a memoir worth reading is usually the way the person tells it, and that is exactly what gets smoothed away.
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.
These prices are here to be used, not to sell you something — brief a freelancer with them, sanity-check a quote, or work out what you actually need. Where Your Book Pro changes the arithmetic, the page says so; where it does not, it says that too.
A ghostwriter is the right answer when you have no time and the book has a commercial deadline. It is the wrong answer if what you actually want is for the book to sound like you — because the thing that makes a memoir worth reading is usually the way the person tells it, and that is exactly what gets smoothed away.
What it costs
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Full-length memoir | From £20,000 | Usually staged across milestones. |
| Business or thought-leadership book | From ~£30,000 | Often higher; frequently commissioned by the company rather than the author. |
| Family history, private printing | £8,000–£20,000 | Shorter, no commercial publication, lower fee. |
CIEP suggested minimum rates effective 1 March 2026, Books.by, publishing.co.uk, The Ghostwriters Agency. Dated 30 August 2026.
Try speaking the first chapter
Email me my free review linkQuestions people ask
- Why is ghostwriting so expensive?
- It is six to twelve months of somebody's professional life, not a typing job. The interviews are perhaps a tenth of the work.
- Can I pay a ghostwriter in stages?
- Yes, and you should — typically 25% on signature, 25% on approved outline and sample chapter, 25% on first draft, 25% on approval.
- Who owns a ghostwritten book?
- You do, if the contract says so. UK copyright defaults to the person who wrote the words, so an express assignment on final payment is essential.
- Is a £5,000 ghostwriter a bargain?
- Almost never. At that price you are usually buying an outsourced draft that needs an editor you will also pay for.