In Part One, we discovered that a ghostwriter can indeed make your work sound just like you wrote it yourself. Part Two answered the question, ‘who owns the finished product, the author or the ghostwriter?’

In Part Three, let’s talk about three simple reasons why you will use a ghostwriter.

1. Lack of time: Not many business owners have the luxury of time to write a whole book or even a series of blog posts. They are up to their ears running their businesses and doing the things they know and best. Ghostwriters write, entrepreneurs run businesses. The two make a perfect team.
2. Lack of skills: Entrepreneurs are experts in their industry, but that doesn’t make them good writers. A photographer has an abundance of knowledge about capturing images but writing about how to take great pictures is a distinct skill set. When a ghostwriter extracts that knowledge from the photographer’s head and puts it onto paper, AND does it in that photographer’s style and voice, now you’ve got a match made in heaven.
3. Lack of desire: Let’s stick with that photographer. He or she loves expression through visual imagery. It’s more than a love—it’s a passion. But writing about that passion? Maybe not so much. So let the photographer stick to capturing amazing photographs, and the ghostwriter do the writing. It’s a natural partnership between two experts doing what they do best, and what they love doing.

Do you see yourself in any of these? Do you know you need and want to be an author to launch yourself as an expert, but don’t have the time, skills, or desire to write it yourself? I am here to help get your goals realized. Reach out to me at sue@suetoth.com for your free 30-minute book consultation.

In our first look at the misconceptions surrounding ghostwriters, we discussed voice. If someone else writes your work, will it sound like your voice? Short answer: yes.

So now that we know the work sounds like you, we need to know, does it actually belong to you?

No matter what you hire a ghostwriter to write for you, anything from a photo caption to an entire book, once you have paid for it, the work belongs to you. You are considered the author. These are your ideas, insights, and experiences expressed in your voice.

Legally, ghostwriters do not own the content they create. When I work for you as a ghostwriter, I go into the relationship with the understanding that I cannot claim credit for your work.

And that’s okay. That’s the whole point of working with a ghostwriter. I’m here to free up the ideas in your head and get them onto paper. Perhaps writing isn’t your “thing” or maybe you simply don’t have the time. All you need is a little help with the technical aspects of the writing. The ideas are all yours, and they remain so throughout the entire process.

So don’t worry about someone else taking ownership of your ideas: they are yours, and a ghostwriter cannot take them away from you.

Ready to learn more? Let’s talk. Reach out to me at sue@suetoth.com for your free 30-minute book consultation.

Coming next: The ethics of ghostwriting.

In addition to my editing and writing work, I also teach writing skills classes to college students. It’s a pretty basic course, and covers all the things that they learned back in grade school, most of which have been long forgotten, if they were even paid attention to in the first place.

A recent lesson was on the use of commas. Since the semester is nearly over, it’s getting increasingly difficult to get through to the students and actually get them to care about things like correct usage of commas. I tried the standard “Let’s eat grandma,” which got a few chuckles, but I still didn’t feel like it drove the point home well enough. And then I remembered THIS article.

It has to do with a woman who fought a parking ticket and won. The reason she won was because the wording in an ordinance was unclear due to a missing comma! That did it! I guess it gives new meaning to the saying that money talks!

Read the full article here.

What do you think? Are commas a problem for you? If you need help with commas, or any other writing issues, feel free to reach out at the contact form here, and I can help get you through the tough stuff.

It’s not a day off from work. We don’t get to take a three-day weekend. There are no special sales at the mall. For those of us in the editing community, however, today is a very important day—National Grammar Day.
Continue reading Happy National Grammar Day! →

Why, you ask, would an editor give advice on how to save you money on her services? Won’t that make less money for her, you ask? In the short term, yes. But looking at the bigger picture, you’ll get a better editing job if I don’t have to worry as much about the small stuff. Therefore, I would love it if you’d read and take to heart this article on running spell check before submitting your work for editing. Thanks to libroediting.com for their wise words.