Ghostwriter

A ghostwriter is a writer who authors books, manuscripts, screenplays, scripts, articles, blog posts, stories, reports, whitepapers, or other texts that are officially credited to another person.

Description

Celebrities, executives, participants in timely news stories, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written material. A common form of literature ghostwriters are hired for is a celebrity's memoirs. In music, ghostwriters are often used for writing songs and lyrics. Screenplay authors can also use ghostwriters to either edit or rewrite their scripts to improve them.

Ghostwriters may have varying degrees of involvement in the production of a finished work. Some ghostwriters are hired to edit and clean up a rough draft, others are hired to do most of the writing based on an outline provided by the credited author. For some projects, ghostwriters will do a substantial amount of research. Ghostwriters are also hired to write fiction in the style of an existing author, often as a way of increasing the number of books that can be published by a popular author. Ghostwriters will often spend a period from several months to a full year researching, writing, and editing nonfiction and fiction works for a client, and they are paid either per page, per each word or via total word count, with a flat fee, with a percentage of the royalties of the sales, or by using some combination thereof. The ghostwriter is sometimes acknowledged by the author or publisher for his or her writing services, euphemistically called a "researcher" or "research assistant", but often the ghostwriter is not credited.