A ghostwriter writes a book that is published under your name. You supply the material — interviews, notes, expertise, memory — and they supply the writing, the structure and the discipline of finishing. You own the result. In the UK a full-length book typically runs £15,000–£50,000, and the price is mostly time, not typing.
What is a ghostwriter, and what are you actually buying?
Do you actually need a ghostwriter?
Three questions. Answer them honestly and the decision usually makes itself.
- [object Object]
- [object Object]
- [object Object]
The interview questions a ghostwriter would ask you
The structured question set professionals use to get a book out of someone in interviews — grouped by what each section is for. Tick the ones that fit your book and we'll email you the brief.
What the money actually buys
Not typing. A full-length ghostwritten book is six to twelve months of somebody's professional life: fifteen to forty hours of interviews, transcription and research, a structure, a first draft, two or three revision rounds with you, and the discipline of delivering it.
At £15,000–£50,000 that works out at roughly the day rate of a mid-career professional, which is what it is. Prices above that usually mean a name with credits you'd recognise; prices well below usually mean an outsourced first draft that arrives needing an editor you'll also pay for.
Who owns it
You do — but only if it says so in writing. The default position in UK copyright law is that the author, meaning the person who wrote the words, owns the copyright. Ghostwriting contracts override this with an express assignment of copyright to the client, usually on final payment.
Get it in the contract. Check it covers the manuscript, drafts and any derived material, and check whether the ghostwriter retains the right to name you as a client. Many will ask; whether you agree is negotiable and worth deciding before, not after.
This is a contractual point, not legal advice — for a book with real commercial value, have a solicitor read the agreement.
Credit, and the range of arrangements
Fully invisible. Your name alone. Standard for business books and most memoir. Costs more, because the ghostwriter gives up the credit.
'With' credit. Your Name with Their Name. Common in celebrity memoir and sports books.
'As told to'. Signals a spoken source. Used in journalism-adjacent memoir.
None of these is dishonest, and the practice is far older and far more widespread than most readers assume. A large proportion of business books and political memoirs by household names are ghostwritten, and always have been.
How a ghostwriter actually works
Almost every ghostwriter runs the same process, and it is worth knowing because it is the process you can run yourself.
They interview you at length — typically fifteen to forty hours, recorded. They transcribe it. They read whatever you already have: notes, emails, talks, blog posts, a half-finished draft. They find the structure, which is where the professional skill really is. They write a chapter and send it for voice approval. Then they draft, and you revise together.
The two 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.
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.
We do not supply a ghostwriter, and we won't pretend a tool is one. What we do is run the same process on your own material, in the right order and for a fraction of the cost.
You can talk your way through it rather than type — the interview question sets give you the structure a ghostwriter would use, Transcription turns the recordings into clean text, Themes from Bulk Audio finds what the material is actually about across all of it, Plan Feedback tests the structure before you commit to it, and the Editing Suite does the drafting and editing work chapter by chapter. It stays in your voice because the words started as yours.
When a ghostwriter is genuinely the right answer: when you have real expertise, no time, and the book has a commercial job to do. Forty hours of your time versus four hundred is a rational trade at a senior professional's day rate. What you lose is the voice, and for memoir that loss is usually the whole book.
Try the Book Coach — free, no account
Upload notes or recordings you already have
Email me the questionsQuestions people ask
- How much does a ghostwriter cost in the UK?
- £15,000–£50,000 for a full-length book is the normal professional range, paid in three or four stages. Under £8,000 for a full book usually means an inexperienced writer or an outsourced draft.
- Is using a ghostwriter cheating?
- No, and it is far more common than readers assume — particularly in business books, sports memoir and political autobiography. The material and the authority are yours; the craft of putting it into sentences is bought, as it has been for a century.
- Do I have to disclose it?
- Legally, no, in the UK. Amazon KDP does not require disclosure of a human ghostwriter. Whether you want to is a personal call, and many authors thank their ghostwriter in the acknowledgements without labelling the arrangement.
- Can a ghostwriter work from recordings alone?
- Yes, and most prefer it. Forty hours of good interviews plus your existing notes is the usual raw material. What they need is your time, not your typing.
- What if I don't like the draft?
- This is why voice approval on chapter one exists. Any contract should stage payment against approved milestones, and should say what happens if you part ways at each stage. Agree this before you pay a deposit.