Latest / The Daily Writer / 5 Reasons Ghostwriting is a Great Business for Writers

Transcript

5 Reasons Ghostwriting is a Great Business for Writers · The Daily Writer

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: There are countless ways to make income as a writer, but have you ever considered ghostwriting?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: If not, I'll share five reasons this could be a great direction for you.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the Smart Business Writing Podcast.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Kent Sanders, and I'm a ghostwriter and professor of communications.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: This is the show that helps you write amazing content so you can save time, stand up from the competition, and get more leads that turn into customers or clients.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most fascinating things about being a ghostwriter is hearing other people's responses when you tell them what you do.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: People will say things like, What is ghostwriting exactly?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: How does ghostwriting work?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or I had no idea that ghostwriting was even a thing.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Some people wonder why a writer like me would want to write articles, books, or other content for other people without necessarily getting the credit.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, no matter what the response is, there's one thing that they all have in common, and that is curiosity.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: People are generally really curious about ghostwriting.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And as I was planning out the next couple months' worth of episodes, it dawned on me that maybe you're curious also.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought it would be fun to share why I chose ghostwriting as my primary way to make income as a writer.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think my reasons will probably resonate with you as well.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: But first, let me give you a little backstory.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I need to set the context because getting into ghostwriting was a very strategic decision for me.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: This was not something that I just picked randomly or decided to do on a whim.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: This was a very calculated decision on my part.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: So let's back up several years.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Around the year 2013, I started to blog on a regular basis.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: I had no intentions of making money at that point, and I was just writing to express myself, but also I wanted to teach others what I was learning about creativity, writing, and life in general.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Then in 2014, I wrote my first book, which was a very niche book on Evernote for pastors.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Evernote is a productivity app, and I've used it for many years.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: I actually developed a full-fledged course on using Evernote, uh, specifically for pastors.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: That was several years ago, and um Evernote has changed my life.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I recommend it to lots and lots of people, and I love using it, and it helps me to stay organized.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I wrote that book, uh, specifically for pastors, because that's the world that I come from, and I really wanted to serve that community with the book.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: However, that being said, the book didn't sell very well.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think it only honestly sold less than 75 copies, probably.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a digital book.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there was never a print edition.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I've given away far more digital copies of that book than probably ever sold.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: However, I will be eternally grateful to Church Mag Press, which was the publisher for that book.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: They gave me the opportunity to do my first book, and I will always be grateful for that.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I wanted to build on the confidence that writing that first book gave me.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: So the next year in 2015, I wrote my second book, which was The Artist's Suitcase, a book about creativity.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I started to make just a teensy weency bit of money from the book, which gave me the confidence and also the desire to start thinking about building a business with my writing.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Once you put a book out there and it starts to make some money, then you you all of a sudden think, hey, this is like a legit thing, and I could build on this and do more with it.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, around that same time, I started getting involved with an online community called 48days.net, which was the precursor to Dan Miller's 48 Days Eagles community.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you want to listen to my conversation with Dan a few episodes back, that's on episode 158, where he talks about how to develop a business around your writing.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: A great episode.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: I would encourage you to go back and listen to it because there's a ton of great stuff that Dan Miller shared there.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, anyway, when I was in 48days.net, I met a guy there named Ray Taylor, who was a podcast producer.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: We got to be friends and he invited me to write show notes for a podcast that he was producing.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And over the next few years, I continued to expand by writing podcast show notes for several other clients, as well as doing editing and some other writing-related work for people.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: However, the problem was that even though I was starting to make a little bit more money in my side business, I was going way too many different directions, and I didn't have any real focus or niche for what I was doing.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the more people that I got to know, the more opportunities came my way, and the more spread out my focus began to get.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, my focus expanded way too much because I didn't have any clue what direction to go.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have any clarity about what exactly was I doing with my business and what problem was I solving.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: There were times when I was focused on building a speaking business.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, at another point, I was focused on becoming a consultant.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, at another point, I was focused on just writing books.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I really had no clue what I was doing and no clear direction.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was like the dog who was constantly distracted by squirrels.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Every few months there was a shiny new direction in my business.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it all came to a head last summer.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I had an opportunity to put together a consulting proposal for a prospective client, and this was by far the biggest proposal that I had ever put together.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: I spent about 50 hours putting this proposal together.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: I did a bunch of research on this industry, put together a killer proposal that involved on-site consulting, uh, curriculum development, uh, creating a book, uh, creating some courses, and oh, also producing a podcast for this particular company.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was like a full-fledged, large-scale kind of thing.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I would have actually had to hire a couple of team members to help me pull this off.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: That was kind of how large the scope of this was.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, after I sent that proposal to the client, they decided not to move forward with it.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the person who was my contact at that company actually ended up leaving a short time afterwards.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: So even though it was a good thing that that never went through, probably for a whole bunch of reasons, I was still really, really disappointed by that development because I felt like I had worked so hard in putting this thing together, but yet I felt like it had failed.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I realized that I was completely confused about my direction and I needed to get some clarity about it if I was going to build a side business that was going to be successful.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I realized I had been approaching my side business all wrong.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Up until that point, I had been chasing whatever sounded interesting and whatever businesses other people were being successful in.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm embarrassed to admit how many courses, programs, books, webinars, and free PDFs that I went through that I thought would help give me the answers and be like this silver bullet.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you've had that experience also, where you listen to, you know, a certain podcaster for a while, or maybe you read one of their books, you download some PDF from them, or you go through a course and you're like, oh, this is going to be my definite direction.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you think that one thing is going to be the silver bullet that gives you all the tools and gives you all the answers.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, from my perspective, I could never find the silver bullet or find the answers.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I knew that I had been doing this wrong the whole time.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: So what I did is I sit down and I thought, okay, what kind of life do I want to build?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: What do I want this side business to look like and how could it filter into the kind of life that I wanted to create?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, I needed to find a business that fit my ideal life instead of trying to fit my life around my business.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: So in a moment of great frustration and confusion and discouragement, uh, one evening last summer, I grabbed a pen and a legal pad and I wrote down all the qualities that I wanted in an ideal business.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And this was now going to become my filter for the opportunities.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was going to give me some clarity and direction.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it was actually going to eliminate a bunch of things, even though at the time I didn't know what it was going to eliminate.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I knew that I had to figure out here's the qualities that I want to develop in a side business, and I'm only going to pursue things that fit into those criteria.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: So after I went through just a lot of thinking and writing down a bunch of potential criteria, I boiled it down to five things, which I'm going to share with you now.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, I wanted to set my own schedule.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be confined to somebody else's schedule or work hours that someone else was imposing upon me.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, I wanted the ability to work from anywhere.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: I did not want to have to go into an office or be confined to working from a particular place.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: I already do that in my day job.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I love being a college professor.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: I love teaching at St.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Louis Christian College.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I already have a place where I go and, you know, I'm on a set schedule there and all those kind of things.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't want that in my side business.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Number three, I wanted to do work that potentially paid well instead of doing low-paying freelance jobs.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be a freelance writer who was just a commodity.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of writers in the freelance writing world, you know, they're putting themselves on sites like Upwork and, you know, nothing against Upwork necessarily if that's what you want to do, but there's a lot of competition in the freelance writing world.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't want to become a commodity that people only wanted to hire if I was the cheapest or if I could get as much work done as fast as humanly possible and not have it be very good quality.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to do the type of writing that potentially paid really well.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: So again, that was just a very strategic thing.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, criteria number four, I wanted to use my writing gifts.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Writing is my most marketable skill, so it made sense that I would use something that I already had rather than having to start from scratch and develop a brand new skill set.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, number five, I wanted to work with high achievers and highly successful people.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: I knew that if I wanted to grow as much as I could on a personal and professional level, I was going to need a business that put me in the orbit of highly successful people.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: So this means people who are forward-thinking, visionary, they have a great network, they're financially successful, and maybe most important of all, they can afford high-end writing services, whatever that might look like for me.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if you boil all this down, what I was really looking for as I was building a business is freedom.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted freedom with my time, with my money, with my location, with my giftedness and being able to use my writing.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the freedom to network with high achievers.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I shared these five criteria with my wife, and she was totally on board with these.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: She thought these were great.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I was set on all these.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I went about trying to figure out okay, what is my what is my business going to be?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: If these are the five things that are on my filter, what could I actually pick?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, before I get into that and how I landed on ghostwriting, let me share with you how this was so helpful because it eliminated a lot of other possibilities.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think when you're trying to decide on your side business or decide on a direction, when you're trying to get clarity, it's really important to have some way to eliminate lots of possibilities so you don't get confused and distracted and paralyzed by all the options out there.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: So let me give you a couple of examples of side businesses that I could have done, but I chose not to.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let me grab a drink of water real quick.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Hang on just a sec.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm back.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: So kind of a side note.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, on this podcast, I just like to have a conversation between me and you.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you can tell this is not highly edited.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes I'm just gonna grab a drink, or uh if my kid comes in the room, I'm gonna say a quick hi to him or or whatever.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I don't do like a highly edited show that's super duper polished, uh, which you probably have picked up on at this point.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so let me give you a couple of examples of things I could have done, but I did not do because they didn't fit my criteria.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'll get into the ghostwriting part of this.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, example number one.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: A few years ago, I signed up to be a seller for Fulfillment by Amazon.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're not familiar with that program, it basically means you're just selling stuff on Amazon.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of people who make a great living doing that.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, um, I gave Fulfillment by Amazon a try a few years ago because I knew a lot of people were doing really well.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I spent the better part of a summer learning their system and getting my supplies, listing about a thousand of my own personal books on Amazon, and then shipping them all to Amazon, which was a whole ordeal in itself.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was an absolute ton of work, and it was just there was just a lot to it.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now I did make some money selling books on Amazon.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think I made between$1,500 and$2,000 after my expenses.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a lot of work, and for me, it was not fulfilling work.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lot of shipping, listing, scanning, you know, uh shrink wrapping books, which which actually shrink wrapping was the most fun part because you get a shrink wrap or you you get the machine and you put the wrapping on it, you have the little heat gun.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why, but I just thought that was kind of fun.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not when you're doing a thousand books, but it's fun for about 30 minutes.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: So despite the fact that it did contain that element of fun, I did not make very much money with it, and it was a massive hassle for me.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I know that a lot of people do very well with fulfillment by Amazon, but I did not find a lot of satisfaction in doing that.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the kicker in this Amazon story.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Once I decided to shut down my Amazon FBA business, I had three options for what to do with my inventory that Amazon still had.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: They still had about 800 of my books.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I only had three options.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, I could pay Amazon to keep storing them.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, I could pay Amazon to ship them back to me, which I was not going to do.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And number three, pay Amazon to destroy the books.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: So in the end, I just wanted to be out of that business and just be done with it and move on.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I actually paid Amazon to destroy the books that I had paid to list and to not to list that I had paid to ship to them a few months before that.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: So talk about an ironic end to a failed business.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: You're paying someone to actually destroy your inventory.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's really crazy.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: As you can see, Amazon FBA did not meet all my criteria.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I could work from anywhere and I could do it on my own schedule, and I could potentially make a lot of money by selling stuff on Amazon.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: However, it was not emotionally fulfilling to me because it did not involve any creative work or any writing, and also it didn't help me connect with other highly successful people.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, it didn't meet that criteria, although I could have gone back into that.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's one example.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Example number two.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: In my day job, I'm in a I'm a college professor, and a lot of college profs also teach for other schools.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I used to direct our school's online degree program, and we used a bunch of part-time teachers, which in the higher ed world we call adjunct instructors.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very, very common for adjunct instructors to teach online courses for several schools at once.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that is a direction that I could have gone.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I could have uh gotten in touch with a few other schools where I know people and tried to become an instructor for them for the classes that I would have been qualified to teach.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: That could have been a potential side business for me, that I could have built up and did a lot of that.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: However, it didn't meet all my criteria.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: I would have location freedom, but not time or money freedom.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Adjunct teachers are usually not paid very well, so it automatically wasn't out really because of that more than anything else.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And trust me, whenever I was running our school's online degree program, I processed all the invoices for our expenses and what we were paying people and all that stuff.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew what each online adjunct was getting paid, and it wasn't very much.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, when you're teaching online courses part-time, you are really shackled by other people's academic deadlines.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: My personal idea of freedom in a business is not grading 60 online assignments at 11 p.m.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: while I'm getting paid very little to do it.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, no offense to adjunct instructors or any friends of mine who are listening who are involved in that, but that's just not something I wanted to do.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I could give you a lot of other examples of potential side hustles or potential side businesses that didn't meet all of my criteria.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, again, those criteria were working on my own schedule, earning more income, work from anywhere, use my writing gifts, and work with highly successful people.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And as I thought about all the potential things that I could do for a side business and I eliminated all the things that didn't meet my criteria, there were only two things left that I was really interested in that met my criteria, and those things were copywriting and ghostwriting.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, copywriting and ghostwriting, they are similar in many ways, and obviously there's some overlap, but they are two distinct things as well.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Copywriting is more concerned with sales letters, marketing copy, and basically using words to sell things.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm very interested in that.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: I love the psychology of copywriting, I love the art and craft of it.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm highly interested in copywriting.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, anybody trying to do any kind of persuasion is going to be using copywriting to some degree.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: But in thinking about those two things, copywriting and ghostwriting, I chose to focus on ghostwriting because I prefer to write books and articles instead of writing things like sales letters and website copy for clients.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're if you have a ghostwriting business, you're always going to be doing some copywriting.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's just part of it.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, I get a lot more joy out of working in depth on a long project like a book than I do other kinds of content like sales letters, web copy, and that kind of stuff.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And also, all things being equal, I lean a lot more toward the teaching and storytelling side of writing more than the marketing side.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: So ghostwriting was a natural fit for me.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: So let me break this down.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: How does ghostwriting fit all of those five criteria that I listed earlier?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, it can give you time freedom.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: You can set your own schedule and you can decide when you're working with clients and doing your writing.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: So time freedom, absolutely, you can do that with ghostwriting.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, you can have location freedom.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: As long as you have a computer and an internet connection, you can do ghostwriting from anywhere.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: No problem.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Number three, you have an opportunity to earn as much as you want.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And really, it just depends on how fast you work, how how much you're growing your skills, and and how much you're growing your business.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you can grow all those things, then you can earn more money per book as you become a better ghostwriter and you become faster.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in fact, uh I've just signed my first two book clients in the last three months.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what I find really interesting.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: If I were to write only four books, four books a year at my current rate, that would equal what I make in my day job as a college professor.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's just writing like that's really just working really less than two days a week on a part-time basis.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you're working in the evenings or early mornings or things like that when you're not doing your day job.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: So that is the cool thing about ghostwriting, is because it is a high value type of service, you can make potentially a lot more money than you could doing things like freelance writing or doing things that are more of a lower-paid thing.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, there's a lot of different types of freelance writing, and I'm not trying to like poo-poo on freelance writers at all.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's not my intention.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just saying specifically, ghostwriting is a high value type of thing, which is one of the major reasons that I chose it, instead of doing something that's more of a lower-paying type of writing work.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, one more thing on this point, please don't misunderstand me.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is not a boastful thing at all.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to put the limelight on myself.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just showing you that when you focus on a highly paid service like ghostwriting, it doesn't take that many projects to begin to see the dollars rack up.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so if you're considering ghostwriting, just kind of keep that in mind.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pretty good, it's a pretty cool deal.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's also that element, an element here where it's a difference in how you're framing what you do to people and how they perceive it.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: That is part of kind of the marketing aspect of being a ghostwriter.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: When you call yourself a freelance writer, most people will tend to view you as a commodity because there's a million people who call themselves freelance writers.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: But when you call yourself a ghostwriter, that's a different category of writing.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: The term ghostwriter is a little bit mysterious and it kind of evokes people's curiosity.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one of the reasons, again, why I picked this is because you have an opportunity to earn more per project than kind of standard freelance writing because what you do is perceived as being more highly valuable.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Here's criteria number four: you can use your writing gifts.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: That was a slam dunk thing for me.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: I love writing, I've been a writer my whole life, so for me it was just a total slam dunk with that.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: I got to do the thing that I was the best at.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not all.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: I also have many years of teaching and church ministry experience.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: As a pastor, I did a lot of counseling, listening, problem solving, and creating content like sermons and lessons.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: As a college professor, I've written a lot of content.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've organized courses, developed curriculum, and I've been advising students the whole time that I've been a professor.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: And what's kind of interesting is that the skills that I developed in both of those areas, ministry and education, they both are really, really helpful when it comes to ghostwriting.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, when you're ghostwriting, it's not just a matter of, okay, the client tells you what they want, and then you just kind of go off and write it.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of back and forth.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's some negotiation.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes uh ghostwriting could be a little bit like counseling because you're reassuring the client this is going to be an awesome project.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they've not done this before, it feels scary and intimidating.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the skills that you learn in those kind of helping professions and education professions, they can be really, really helpful in ghostwriting, at least in my experience so far.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Then finally, criteria number five is you can work with highly successful people.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most fun things about ghostwriting is that I get to spend a lot of time talking with high achievers.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: For example, right now, I'm working on a book for a client who is in the fitness industry, and her life story and what she's teaching in this book is really, really inspiring.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Every time I hop on a Zoom call with her and her husband, her husband is kind of helping with this project as well.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I've just been in a coaching session in a way, like a coaching session for me, because talking with those two, I just I feel like a stronger person.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they help me want to achieve more of my goals.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it really just is motivating to talk to these guys.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I love it.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I love the fact that with ghostwriting that that can put you in the orbit of those kind of people who just by definition are going to kind of pull you to a higher level in your life.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: So there you have it.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: These are five reasons why I chose ghostwriting as my side business and why I think it could be a great potential business for you.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: The main takeaway that I want you to get from this episode is not necessarily, though, that you just do ghostwriting.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's really for you to sit down and develop your own criteria for what you want in your ideal job or career or business, and then figure out how you can how you can find something that fits those criteria.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of just taking something and trying to learn to love it, why not figure out what your ideal business is and then just figuring out what fits that criteria so that you can you can serve people in your business with a lot more joy and you can do it from a place of abundance and from a place of wanting to do it rather than feeling like you have to do something that you don't really want to do.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to encourage you, and I want to remind myself to be intentional about the kind of life and business that we want.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: As always, you can find lots more resources for writers at KentSanders.net.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, remember that your writing has the power to change people's lives.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you in the next episode.