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 it costs
What a ghostwriter costs — and when you don't need one
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
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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.
What Your Book Pro does here
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
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
Review my openingQuestions 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.