Now That I’m a Ghost

I know a lot of people are curious about book packaging and ghost writing and how the whole thing goes down. While I can’t share everything, I thought it’d be fun to provide the basics for people who wonder. Remember, this is just my experience. I’ve auditioned for other companies, but the way things worked was, overall, pretty similar, so if you can remind yourself to add a big, fat disclaimer in front of this post, you should at least be able to get a skeleton idea of the way things work.

Auditioning:

With most work-for-hire, you’re going to have to audition. With the company I’m writing for now, I’ve auditioned three times. First time, I wrote about 4,000 words for a middle grade series that I didn’t get, but the editors kept me in mind. Then I auditioned for the series I’m writing for now but things took a long time because there was a close call between two writers auditioning and so during that time I auditioned for yet another series. My voice ended up being a bit too old for that last series, but good news, I got the second series. That means I wrote a total of about 18,000 polished words to get a 2 book commission. No, you don’t get paid for auditioning, but think about it as client development or something equally business-y. Sometimes you have to make investments of time and energy without any guaranteed payoff. The great thing about writing is that you don’t have to shell out any cash for client development. You certainly can’t say that about every business.

Getting the Gig:

The book packager contacted my agent and told him that they were interested in my being an author for the series. Some basic numbers were given. My agent looked up the series on BookScan to see how sales were doing for those books. The packager made clear that the publisher still had to approve me as an author for the series. If you weren’t clear on this, a book packager does not publish the books. They sell the concepts to the traditional, big box publishers you already know. It can be a lower cost decision for a publisher, though, since a packager will often come up with high concept, marketable ideas and do most if not all the editing for these books in house. So, the book packager editor made a few changes to my sample, preparing it to send to the publisher. I was allowed the chance to approve these changes and off they went. Shortly after, I received a formal offer.

Starting to Work:

For this series, I’m in the beginning stages, but basically I have detailed schedules for both books under contract. These contracts include deadlines for me, the book packager, and the publisher. For my part, I’ll receive a synopsis. I’ll then have a couple weeks to come up with chapter breakdowns and return those to the book packager. I’ll get feedback and have a couple months to turn in a first draft. I’ll get comments on that before having a few weeks to get a second draft to the packager. About a month before turning in the first draft of Book 1 that whole process starts again for Book 2.

Will I Get Credit?

A lot of people ask me this. I will be working under the series pen name. I should get a page in each book that says “Special Thanks to Chandler Craig.” I’ll get several author copies of each book and my agent will get agent copies.

Simple, right?

And if you want more information about Book Packaging and Work-for-Hire you can check my post, Guide in Links: Book Packaging and Work-For-Hire, where I’ve collected more articles on the subject and also a list of where you can find work.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments or share your experiences. I know it’s an opaque side of publishing.

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