“You talk. I listen. I write it down and clean it up. You look it over and make corrections. And that’s it.”

And very often, that is it. Someone without the time or skills to undertake a large writing project finds me, and tells me they want to write a book. We sit down and talk through a subject they know or what they want to say. If it looks like I can turn it into a successful book for them, I take their raw commentary and turn it into a first rough version, and get their input on it, and then turn it into finished prose.

It isn’t that hard. It doesn’t even have to take place in person. I’ve written books for people I’ve never met face-to-face, meeting and chatting over Zoom, Facetime, smartphones, even plain old email.

Sometimes we even skip the discussions altogether. There are clients who simply want to be an author, period. They don’t care what you write, so long as the subject is one they want to be seen as having written about, and so long as people can agree that it’s competently done. These noble souls give a ghostwriter complete carte blanche, asking only that I write a competently written book about a topic to which they wish to attach their name.

If each chapter I write along the way pleases them, I receive a check for that chapter, and like all ghosts, fade away. And in the end their names appear on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, or on stacks of books for sale at their seminars

Is it that important to be an author? Well—yes. In the academic world, it’s publish or perish: promotions, invitations to conferences, tenure, all rest squarely on your list of publications.

In the business world, being the author of a book gets you media attention, establishes your expertise, distinguishes you from the competition, sells your services, describes your innovative new business concept—not to mention bringing in a lifelong additional stream of income that pays the cost of getting it written in the first place.

The authors of books on politics and religion win power and change the world: Dianetics founded the religion of Scientology, Profiles In Courage (ghostwritten by Ted Sorensen) helped put John Kennedy into the White House, Das Kapital brought down Imperial Russia.

Yes, books make a difference.

But actually writing the damn things can be hell on earth—time, research, revision, the sheer despair of looking at a truly bad first draft and realizing that if the world sees the rubbish you wrote, they’ll regard you as a fool. Even worse, the dread suspicion that you really don’t know what you’re talking about, and you may actually be a fool. Worse than even that: an empty blank page staring at you those days when the words just don’t come.

Writing is not just technically hard; it’s emotionally hard, even humiliating. It’s no wonder that aspiring authors want help. They need it.

But ghostwriting is much more than pure transcription. If you think so, open up the recorder on your smartphone and talk for twenty minutes on a subject you know. It’s, like, uh… it’s like… the stuff, I mean the stuff you want to like, um, SAY, y’know? It’s, it’s, it’s not… it’s not like… well, it just isn’t! Y’know?

I’m a ghost. So I do know. I also know how to take material like the above and turn it into something clear, lively, persuasive, and entertaining. Kind of like this! But it’s a more complicated process than it looks. I also know that there are some major benefits to it that are not always immediately apparent to a client.

I’d like to touch on a few of those–on some aspects and rewards of ghostwriting that aren’t quite too obvious or well advertised. But are worth the price of the ticket, and then some.

So. What does a ghost do that is generally not well known—but is critically important?

Clarifying The Idea

First and foremost, before even starting to write, a ghostwriter does his best to locate value in the proposed book. After all, people read books to find something there that matters to them. It can be information they want to learn, stories that entertain them, insights that challenge them, comments that make them laugh, outrages that make them cry. They want to go from a bored, passive, everyday state to a more alive, higher, stronger one.

What is it about a client’s story that can spark that interest, that fire?

Say, for instance, a client hires you to write a book about becoming a successful real estate investor. That story can be entertaining—if the client has dozens of hilarious stories about crazy renters, crooked sellers, wild auctions, falling roofs. It can be inspiring—if the client rose from awful poverty or severe handicaps to wealth and generosity.

It can also have no personal elements at all, and even no fundamental originality, and still work. Content, strangely enough, can be the least important thing about building a book. After all, there are dozens of books on successful real estate investment, and the techniques in each one are much the same. Just reading several books on the subject and synthesizing all their soundest points can produce a very valuable book all by itself. The client doesn’t have to meet you, speak to you, or say a thing—just give you the assignment and cut a check.

What the ghost must do, however, is be sure that the book is meaningful to the audience the client wants to reach. It has to be valuable to them in some important way. But it has to be a way that’s in sync with the client too. Some clients are wild, funny and full of stories. Some are a cold blank wall, as perky as an undertaker’s hearse. You can get a good book out of either, but you can’t produce a book that that person could not possibly write. The suit must be tailored to fit.

Research

The assessment of a book’s value is often much more technical than just this. When a client or agent proposes a book, I generally go to Amazon or Kirkus or Goodreads or Publishers Weekly and check out the competition. Are there books out on the subject already? Are they selling? Are they perennial best sellers? How are they trending? Books take time to write. Will that paranormal Zombie romance novel set in Disneyland that the client wants still be a booming category six months from now? Or will it be deader than the protagonists?

It’s more than just a matter of sales. Books fall into particular kinds of categories and genres, and readers have certain expectations. A murder mystery has to have a murder and a detective, for instance, and the murder should happen in the early pages, not on the last one. It shouldn’t be the detective who dies in either case, while the murderer gets away. And the mystery needs to be solved, not (like the victim) left hanging.

You can write a kind of book that violates all these expectations, of course, but if you violate enough expectations, you lose readers and you get bad reviews.

This principle applies to every kind of book. Readers of financial books expect charts. Readers of books on sales want to see sales figures. Readers of cook books want recipes. Readers of nonfiction want chapter headings that tell you what’s in those chapters.

These expectations, these traditions, are a gift. Reading books that are popular in their category gives you a veritable map, a treasure chest of tips on how to lay out and arrange the book, what tone is appropriate, what topics need to be covered, even what the cover should look like. A torn blouse, Fabio’s oily pecs and a misty pirate ship in the background? That’s one kind of book. Three-eyed aliens with ray guns emerging from silver saucers? That’s another. I don’t need to say which is which.

But there’s more to research nowadays than this. I rarely undertake a book without doing considerable keyword analysis. Call it a personal tic from my years in marketing, but I never fail to go through Google Trends, Amazon’s search engine, Adwords’ Keyword Tool, and a few other tools as well beforehand. These ready online options are invaluable. If the topic is hot and people are searching for it, a book on that topic is viable. Period.

Not that a book has to sell a lot of copies to be valuable. A book that doesn’t sell one single copy can be still transform a career. Its mere appearance on a resume distinguishes the client sharply from all other applicants for a job or position.

After all, who do you want to manage your portfolio, or hire–some guy in a suit who looks like every other guy in a suit, or the best-selling author of Tripling Your Portfolio Profits In Six Months?

Authors, whether they have large sales or small, have an automatic presumption of expertise. They are subject matter experts purely by having published on a subject. They’re invited to speak, to present, to appear on screen, to be interviewed.

Sales, buzz, popularity certainly don’t hurt! But books have been called the ultimate business card for a reason. Present it to someone interested in the subject, and a conversation is all but guaranteed. Because it’s the subject matter that matters to them, not where the book sits on a sales list. If you’re about to spend a half million on a house, you damn well want to know how to tell that it’s a good house! If a book looks like it can tell you that, you’ll read it. If the author has something to say about  that subject, you’ll listen. Why is he a presumed expert? He wrote the book!

Voice

Aside from a book’s value and viability, a good ghost always seeks out a third V: voice. For a true ghost is a mimic. It isn’t enough to just write a book. You want to write a book that sounds like the client—ideally, a book that sounds exactly like the sort of thing the client would write if he had all the time in the world, and hadn’t skipped all those English classes.

A book purporting to be by Donald Trump should not sound like Abraham Lincoln, and a book by Lincoln should not sound like Trump. Such books scream “Fake!” and fake books are worse than no book.

Clients’ voices vary. Some clients are blunt, coarse and direct. Some are quiet, nuanced, ironic. Some are witty, others deadly serious. A ghostwriter has to impersonate that individual voice: he has to write as though he himself were the client.

I remember once a client reading aloud from a chapter I’d just finished. His wife was in the other room, and after a few paragraphs he turned his head in that direction.

“So what did you think of that?” he said, calling to her.

“Think of what?” she said.

“What I just read.”

“You were reading something?” she said. “I thought that was just you talking.”

I have received no higher praise.

It’s for this reason that I always like to talk to a client, or see any first draft material they’ve written. It allows me to catch their characteristic pauses and emphases and habitual verbal expressions.

It’s also why I often ask clients to read what I’ve written for them aloud. If it sounds right and feels right, it is right.

Ghosts need constantly to remind themselves that what they are writing is the book the client would have written had circumstances allowed. It needs to sound and feel like the way they normally put things.

Mind you, It doesn’t have to read exactly like their casual chat, and it shouldn’t. The way we write isn’t exactly the way we talk, and the readers know it, which cuts we ghostly impersonators some welcome slack. Prose is expected to be cleaner and tighter, and at the right moment a little more eloquent, than casual chat.

But what if the ghost gets an assignment for a book by several co-authors. What then?

In that case, I personally try to blend them all, throwing in a characteristic phrase or comment from each co-author. But the criteria there is not what the clients would all say, but a range in which the comments of any of the clients might reasonably fit. If it’s something each one might just possibly have said, it still comes in under the wire. If one co-author sounds like a professor and the other swears like a Marine, I’ll write lines that are plain and clear and sayable by both. Both Marines and metaphysicians say “I’d like a cup of coffee” all the time. Not too coarse, not too literary—just right: between the extremes.

Eliciting Content

Ghostwriting involves conversation. In most cases I’ll find myself talking to a client for hours and hours—hundreds of hours, in some cases. Sometimes (with their permission) I record the talk and go over it. Sometimes it takes place in person, over the phone, over Zoom or a secure channel. Sometimes we’ll exchange emails about  abandoned ideas or rejected draft manuscripts. Those emails may grow larger in size than the manuscripts themselves.

Often a client who wants to write a book about a subject isn’t entirely sure what he wants to say. He or she will circle around it, approaching what they really want to say, and then stepping back into something entirely off-topic. A deeper understanding is emerging, but it doesn’t arrive till the client dwells on it and works with it for a while.

A good listerner can help bring it forth, and this is one of the most interesting and delicate aspects of the ghostwriter’s job—something I think of as elicitation.

This personal exchange is something more than an interview. An interviewer looks for a quotable remark, or tries to catch the person in some gaffe or outrageous comment, or is intent on extracting some particular nugget of information. The ghost is not simply looking for information. He’s attentively following the client’s tone or voice, their expressions, their motivations for wanting a book, taking the client’s style and message and goal and face value, but helping the client excavate the deeper reasons for why they want to dwell on some particular topic.

The ghostwriter’s technique here is closer to that of a therapist. He tries to keep the conversation within the bounds of certain topics, but principally he draws back, so as to allow the client full freedom talk at length.

It’s surprising how liberating this is for certain clients, particularly in the business world. I remember one client who hired me to do a book and then gradually stopped caring about the book entirely, but had me keep coming in to talk to him about his business anyway. His work load was extremely stressful, his home life was a wreck in consequence, competitors outside the company and critics within it made many a working day a nightmare for this gentleman. He simply needed to express himself, to face things as he really felt them to be, to vent.

Needless to say he couldn’t talk to a therapist. If the remotest hint of mental instability got out he’d be ruined. But he’d read on my resume that I had a degree in Psychology and certification in a related field. On that basis I got the job, and it was fascinating. No other client showed me as much about the inner life of business. And, surprisingly, not a few of his business challenges cleared right up. Stating them clearly out loud for the first time not only cut them down to size, but pointed the way to their resolution.

Of course, a ghostwriter who only listens is not doing a proper job. This is why I call it elicitation, not interviewing, and not therapy. You’re not looking for a snappy remark, or the Oedipus Complex: you want the client to share something with the world that they know or believe or have experienced; something that will help their readership too, and lift client and reader both to the next, better level in their life and career. But finding out exactly what that is can be a tricky process.

There is one thing every ghost, and every therapist, must remember. You are there to support. You are  not there to judge.

Evolving The Book

Writing a book has been compared to a blind man exploring a dark room at night by slowly feeling the walls and furnishings with his hands. Gradually a sense of its contents and dimensions emerge.

So with books. Theye evolve. The book that evolves in the course of the writing process is never quite what you thought it would be at the beginning. In the course of writing it the client may get new ideas. Or, after talking and thinking about it, realize that he’s changed his mind completely on some subject. Or, he or she may realize that some section he thought was important is actually trivial, and needs to be cut, while some seemingly trivial remark is the key to the whole book. Or, they have an idea for an entirely new and different book. (It’s rare, in fact, not to have ideas for several new books while working on one. Staying focused on the current project is a task in itself.)

In the beginning, a ghostwriter does not always so much write the book as help the client find the book; to help the client suddenly come across the unique idea or breakthrough or individual angle that makes a book valuable and unique. It’s truly satisfying to be a part of that process, to be there when the Aha! moment strikes.

It’s also dangerous. Sometimes a client only wants to be an author. He or she may not know what they want to say. In fact, generally they don’t, at least not in book-length detail. And this is an almost insurmountable problem. A ghost can’t elicit something that isn’t there in the first place.

But he can provoke it. I’ve occasionally had to intentionally write passages and pages that are not at all what the client wants or thinks, purely because I know the client will then correct it.

“No, that’s not what I mean,” the client will say.

“Well, what do you mean?”

“I mean this.” And in clarifying, the client will score his breakthrough. Seeing what they don’t want to say helps them realize what they do want to say.

But a ghost floats over thin ice in such scary cases. The client may just assume that you two are not on the same wavelength. Time to find another ghostwriter!

Loyal Opposition

It’s the speck of dust, the irritant, that gives birth to a pearl. Which is to say, sometimes a slightly contentious approach can also be the most fruitful. Clients rarely hire ghosts to criticize their ideas, but it’s exactly that sort of creative, sympathetic criticism that allows the ghostwriter and client to pass into active collaboration, not merely exchanging flat information but co-creating new, novel ideas. All ghostwriting is mutual, and involves building something together, of course. But this is more than building sentences and paragraphs. This is a matter of building new insights and new solutions—or to call it by its proper name: brainstorming.

This is the happier side of elicitation. One operates less as a ghostwriter than a creative consultant in such cases. The client has found his subject, but now is bouncing ideas off you, playing with new ideas, different approaches. This is, in my experience, the most fun part of ghostwriting and it happens most often with business clients. You’re both working together to find new angles, to flesh out the solution to some business problem, to work out a new methodology, to clarify a new idea. It’s what ghostwriting at it best should be: creative collaboration.

Empathy

The listening part of ghostwriting, the collaborative part, the imitation of voice, the careful attempts to think like the client, lead to one of the more mysterious benefits of ghostwriting: empathy. (I almost wrote: telepathy.)

Sometimes, with clients that allow me the leeway, after enough time working together, I’ll find myself writing sentences and paragraphs that I think the client would say. And then the client reads it, and recognizes the lines as his own. “Yes, that’s what I wanted to say, or should have said,” they’ll say. Or, “How did you know I thought that?”

I may describe them in a situation I have not seen or been told about, and I’ll be asked how I knew about the incident, and how I knew what they felt and how they reacted to it.

I don’t know how I know. I just do.

Spooky? Not really. Ghostwriting is not a kind of writing, it’s a kind of thinking. And what it involves is following another person’s style of thought, paralleling and imitating their internal reflections and impressions, aiming at almost becoming that individual, like an actor playing a real person instead of a part—a perfectly articulate version of that real person.

One fails, of course: individuality is unique and impenetrable. But at times, for a while, one comes close; and when it happens, ghost and client link up in a way that is hard to describe—like completely understanding someone, and being completely understood by someone, for the first time. It’s an illusion, as all ghosts are. But a fascinating and productive one.

Black On White

Not all ghostwriting assignments are as complicated or require as much immersion as that. Some really are as simple as a few interviews followed by a great deal of typing, reading, erasing, re-reading and re-typing.

One of the first lesson a writer learns is that thinking about writing isn’t writing. Getting words down on paper, putting black on white, is writing. Writing is about producing a set number of pages on schedule. They may be imperfect, they may need to be revisited and revised, they may be thrown away once the better idea they suggested hits, but you need marble before you can bring a sculpture out of it. No book is good from the start. They always arrive in the rough, and it takes time and polish to arrive at perfection. Perfection being a book of which the client is proud, and that enhances their reception in the world.

But the key takeaway for clients isn’t to see the virtue of patience and perseverance: it’s to see that hiring a ghostwriter not a matter of shrugging off the job of creativity: it’s a way of enhancing that creativity.

The real difference is that now you’re not scaling the mountain alone. There’s someone there to help pull you up, to catch you if you fall. To ensure that you reach the peak.

David Pascal

www.davidpascal.com/ghostwriter

The post The Invisible Side Of Ghostwriting appeared first on Ghostwriting Services.

Every field has such a figure – Donald Trump, Real Estate Billionaire; Anthony Hopkins, the Actor’s Actor; Lee Iacocca, Mr. CEO; Margaret Thatcher, Madame Conservative; Walter Cronkite, Mr. Anchorperson; Harry Houdini, the Great Magician; Winston Churchill, Statesman.

Even locally there are always a handful of figures who are the local doctors or lawyers or people to go to.

What gives them that edge?What can make them the acknowledged leaders in their field?  What can make you the acknowledged leader in your field?

Answer: a special kind of marketing. The kind that promotes not a product but a person.

How is it done?  Read on.

Start With A Niche

It’s easier to become a great anything than a great everything. To become notable in a particular field, you have to first choose the field, and the more particular it is, the better.  It’s easier to become a famous liberal or conservative politician than to become a famous politician, and a famous heart surgeon or neurosurgeon than a famous surgeon.

The more focused your area of specialization, the less competition there’ll be for for the top spots.  And the easier it will be to distinguish yourself within it.  Anti-terrorism experts are nowadays not that rare.  Female Iraqi Russian-speaking anti-terrorism experts are very rare.  A quality that would not make an average person unique can make a specialist very unique.

You can expand that niche, or narrow it, but a niche remains the easiest place to start out.

So to become an acknowledged leader in your profession, first ask yourself what makes your profession unique, and then what make you unique within your profession.

Get Qualified

And by qualified, I don’t mean get over-qualified. Shakespeare did not have an MFA in English, and Einstein’s failing grade in math is legend. Future leaders are not always the first in their graduating class.  But, by and large, they at least went to a good school or studied under someone good or have samples of work that shows that they can deliver.

Do you need to demonstrate genuine expertise? The answer may surprise you, but no. You don’t have to be the very best at what you do, or even remarkably good at what you do, to be an acknowledged recognized expert at it.  Led Zeppelin did not have to put Mozart in the shade to fill stadiums. Exceptional skills ceertainly don’t hurt. But even without them you can make a mark.

How?

By organizing and directing people who have exceptional skills. Lee Iacocca was not a great auto mechanic, nor could Leonard Bernstein play the violin. But they could organize and lead and inspire people of talent who could. 
Or you can associate with people with remarkable skills. Oprah is not generally considered a great writer or thinker or a leading actress or vocalist. But she continually connects with leading writers, actors, vocalists. Associate with the acknowledged leaders in a field and fame will rub off on you.

You can also simply explain or evaluate how it’s done. The thought leaders in many a field are not active practitioners in that field. They may well be academics or writers who have never run a company or acted on stage, but who can explain and articulate things powerfully and brilliantly. (Or, even easier, find a ghostwriter who can.)

Join Articulate Communities

Fame is social. No one ever became famous staying home under the blanker. You have to mingle.  And you have to mingle in the right circles.

What circles are the right circles? They’re not always expert circles – but they are always articulate circles: groups that not only hear what you have to say, but actively spread your words and spread word about you. One single journalist with no particular expertise in your niche can make you more well known to those there than everyone you have ever met in it.

Needless to say it pays to cultivate both experts and influencers. And the new social media has allowed articulate communities to spread their views so widely that it merits a later section all to itself. The principle remains: to become a hot topic of conversation, find and mingle with those who converse and whose conversations are followed.

Build Your Web Site

These days a web site is as necessary to a person as a business card or a personal ID. It is the one place where you can make a rich definitive case for yourself, and present the world the image of yourself that you want it to see. Facebook and Twitter present not you, but you bobbing on the surface of your friends and associates.  People who encounter you there judge you by your accompanying crowd, and that crowd can be anything but focused and professional.  Your personal web site is an entirely different story.  You control it totally.  And that make is the best means you have to say exactly what you want to say to the world.

But it can be so much more. A professionally constructed site can show you who’s visiting, what pages they linger over, and how long they stay. It can allow them to download your information kit, hear you talk, see you on video, make a payment, leave a message – the works.  You can sell on it, connect through it, collaborate with others using it, and — best of all — use it to present the world with your ideal image of yourself.

In a world of global information, the first impression many people get of you will be through the web. If you shape that impression rightly, you’ve taken a major step to making yourself the knowledgeable and notable expert to call.

Build Your Blog

What’s the difference between a web site and a blog?

Roughly, a web site is about you and what you can do.  A blog is you, speaking directly.

That’s not to say that there aren’t blog-like web sites with first-person content.  Blog-style sites can feature multiple bloggers, have multiple functions, be comprehensive interactive content management systems, or host truly massive amounts of information.

But the classical blog approach is one person, communicating his or her personal thoughts, often in the give-and-take of online conversation. That can certainly help highlight you as the obvious expert, but more to the point it provides the illusion — and prepares for the reality — of a personal connection.

This personal, conversational style is at the heart of social media marketing.   Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest all stem in various degrees from the blog approach to developing a web presence conversationally.  That matters because while the most important part of being a thought leader involves having a thought, being a leader involves personality.  Blogging is like reading a person’s diary, or following their private thoughts.  If the private thoughts impress, the expected performance can seem assured.

Can blogging alone gain fans and followers, and build and even make a reputation?  Sure.  But why let your blog go it alone? The more tools you have, the more ways you have to build a compelling reputation. Create a dazzling web site, blog and tweet. The farther you stretch, the more you reach.

Article Marketing

Blogs can make you look knowledgeable.  A book can make you the subject matter expert in a field. But is there no middle way between the quick offhand approach of the first and the major commitment in time of the second?

There is. Article marketing. Concise, keyword-rich, properly tagged pieces on particular subjects can drive traffic to your web site, pop up on page one in Google, appear and re-appear in guest posts, and demonstrate expertise and a flair for articulate writing and thinking with a quickness matched only by blogging – and (like blog posts) the articles can be combined into ebooks and even eventually books themselves.  Think of blog posts as the seeds of articles, and articles as chapters from books, and you can build your reputation easily, piecemeal and daily.

Optimize

Optimization means making sure that every digital document you put out onto the net is written, designed and formatted so that search engines and content-hungry websites will pick it up. OK, it’s a little esoteric, and you may have to hire a specialist. It’s worth the money. If no one can find what you have to say, no one will read it.

Optimization is not as tough as it sounds.  Optimizing perfectly may cost a fortune, but it may also distract from what really drives attention — solid content.  Optimize just enough to be both Google-friendly and reader-friendly:  be sure the document is written and formatted in ways that are search-engine and RSS friendly, and you should be fine

But don’t ignore that basic minimum.  What you have to say doesn’t matter if no one reads it. Optimize. No optimization = zero readership.

Use Social Media

Can you get to the top of the list in your profession by working social media alone? Probably not. But if you don’t make it a key element in your efforts, you’re nuts. A thousand followers on Twitter, five hundred friends on Facebook, and two hundred and fifty connections on LinkedIn, has long been considered to be the bare minimum ‘triple crown’ of social media influence, and the closer you approach that goal, the closer you will be to having and maintaining the kind of lasting prominence that builds notable careers.

Of course there are well over fifty competing social media tools, from Instagram to Pinterest to Google Plus, and life is short, and anyway the digital landscape will alter sooner than we know. The fact remains that anyone wishing to advance their career needs to know the main tools and get familiar with them, and not simply because they can get you known and talked about quickly and widely (even globally!) in literally a matter of moments.

Social media affects us whether we take part or not, because those who do take part in it discuss and praise and criticize even those who don’t. Anyone with any involvement with others at all now has a social media presence, like it or not, deliberate or not; and the effects can reach back in ways positive and negative, major and minor.

Should someone wishing to advance themselves take part in those conversations, or let others discuss them without knowing it? Clearly, it’s better to take part. And there’s no better way than to begin with the three current leaders: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Use Old School PR

I know, I know. Print is dead. Even TV is dead. Everyone keeps saying that. And everyone keeps picking up the paper at the newsstand, reading the magazine in the doctor’s office, opening up that junk mail, and tuning into Reality TV.

Print is not dead. Nor is TV. When a newspaper writes you up, you get attention – not least because, these days, whatever appears first in print appears next online. When you appear on TV, tens of thousands if not millions of people see you. And then see you over and over again on YouTube. Radio interviews become podcasts, and podcasts are available everywhere forever.  The line between the media is no longer a line:  it’s an increasingly invisible blur.

So get into print. Get on TV. Talk to radio interviewers too, while you’re at it. Is using such pre-internet media Old School? So what? Old School works, and when you use it it’s augmented by New School digitization, video, and podcasting almost at once. Do it.

And get out among people, too. Yes, you can become world-famous without ever making a personal appearance.  If you’re Max Headroom, you can become world-famous without being a person at all. That’s the exception, not the rule. Talks still work. Seminars still work. Workshops still work. Reality can get you some pretty good web traffic too.

Write The Book

If TV and radio are Old School, books are straight out of the Paleozoic. But Old School or not, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can get you recognized as an expert or  a leader in your field than writing a good book.

Why the mystique of authorship is so strong in an time so awash in Google, tweets and hashtagspeak is a mystery. But you don’t have to understand a mystery to acknowledge its power. Whether you’re George Soros or Bill Gates, Arnold Schwartzeneggar or Seth Godin, Barack Obama or David Ogilvy, if you are a person of influence you are the author of a book. Masterful articulation has nothing to do with it.  Trump had a dozen boghosted prior to shaking the world.  Nothing sets the seal of expertise on a person more strongly.

Unfortunately few things are more time-consuming to produce or difficult to carry through. The actual text has to be researched and written and revised, publishers and distributors need to be involved, the physical book layouts has to be created and the book cover designed, and post-publication promotion can make or break the reception of the book.  A manuscript alone is not enough. If a book is not part of an overall marketing effort, its creation may well be wasted.

But that’s all the more reason to think of a book project in marketing terms right from the start.
In a world without deadlines, taking the time to write a book might well be considered a pleasure. But if someone is a busy professional with a full To-Do list, writing assistance is mandatory. Should you have your book ghostwritten? Increasingly, many businessmen, professionals and experts do. Trump had a dozen books ghosted prior to shaking the world.

In many cases it’s not a question of lack of skill but lack of time. An expert who takes six months to a year off to write a book may not be as competitive an expert at the end of that time, and his or her other marketing efforts and business may well have taken a back seat too. Using a ghostwriter can be the fastest way to the single strongest thing you can do to establish expertise. It’s definitely an option to consider.

But solo or with assistance, the book is a must.

Get Help

Don’t have time to write a book? Haven’t got all day and night to wade through all the cutting-edge social media? Not sure how to reach, pitch, and get the attention of journalists? No idea how to design a web site, set up a blog, arrange for a series of talks and lectures, assemble and distribute a Press Kit?

Welcome to the human race.

People who rise to the top of the profession have a well-known secret: they practice their profession. Promotion they leave to referrals, or to hired help. Yes, you can concentrate only at working at your profession, and being the best you can. Word of mouth marketing gets clients too. But competitors who are not necessarily less able will get the same word of mouth marketing, and amplify it many many times over through all varieties of print and digital media, and all without taking away from their regular tasks, if professional assistance is brought in.

Of course, if you have multiple promotional talents at the professional level across several areas, and can cram 48 hours into a 24-hour day, you can get known all by yourself. You deserve to be!

But if you’re human, you’ll probably need professional help.

Where can you find it?

A good starting place would be more of www.davidpascal.com. Humility aside, such promotion is my profession, and this site ranges social media, writing for the web, book design, ghostwriting, search engine optimization, and, not least, an extremely wide-ranging section of informational links and resources, and not a few areas (like this one) addressing the personal marketing geared at advancing one’s career. Poke about. And if you would look further into the subject, Google.

All World-Famous All Of The Time

Whether you go it alone, or get help, or decide to try out only one or two of the above recommended steps, definitely realize that things have changed.

Andy Warhol once said famously that in the future we would all be famous for fifteen minutes. He was wrong. The future is here, and we are all world-famous twenty-four hours a day. What we are and what we do leaves light or heavy traces on the internet every moment.  We can use this to our advantage to advance our careers and values and beliefs, or we can ignore it and let things happen to us as they will.

Intelligent professionals and entrepreneurs will respond actively, not passively, and shape their futures the best way they can. History has given us these extraordinary new tools, and with a little thoughtfulness, we can use them to shape our own history, and shape it for the better.

Do it!

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Be it noted: attendance is open only to members of the Osher Institute (and select individuals from RIT) and not to the general public.

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More information is available on this website at davidpascal.com/cryptoclass.

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He meant, of course, the Roman Polanski film based on Robert Harris’ fine suspense novel, The Ghost. I hadn’t yet seen the film (which I may review as well one of these days). But I couldn’t resist saying a few words the book, for in Harris’ hands, the suspense genre bled perceptibly — how’s that for a thriller simile –onto the dress of literary fiction. So here’s one ghostwriter’s take on a novel about another. Enjoy.

Robert Harris’ The Ghost, one of the best political thrillers ever written, has had the mixed blessing of being turned into one of the best political thrillers ever filmed: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. I’m told the movie was so well done that it’s changed how we experience the book. We can’t help now but superimpose Pierce Brosnan’s face over Adam Lang, the ex-British Prime Minister in the novel, whose features before the film already carried undertones of Tony Blair’s. New editions of the book are being issued under the film title, The Ghost Writer. This is not a minus: scene after scene will read with an extra layer of ambiguity and resonance now, which rarely harms a thriller. Graham Greene’s The Third Man certainly isn’t any less of a classic because we can’t think of Harry Lime without thinking of Orson Welles’ portrayal.

But it does distract from the book considered purely in terms of its writing, and that is a shame; for Harris’ is a beautifully written book, and as valuable a book about writing and the writer’s life as any recently published. Written in the first person, each page glows with coolly memorable asides by its ghostwriter protagonist –

“…The bruise where I had been punched on Friday ripened, turned black and purple, and was fringed with yellow, like some exploding supernova beamed back by the Hubble Telescope…”

“…the folksier an institution’s name, the more Stalinist its function…”

“…Heathrow the next morning looked like one of those bad science fiction movies set in the near future’ after the security forces have taken over the state…”

– and my favorite, the ghost writer’s comment as he reviews the manuscript draft of the former Prime Minister:

“…and when I laid down the manuscript I pressed my hands to my cheeks and opened my mouth and eyes wide, in a reasonable imitation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.”

What ghostwriter (like myself) has not gone through that? God, one mutters, how true!

The pacing, the dialogue, the moody Atlantic shore atmosphere, the dry wit – everything a thriller needs is there, and done so well that Harris, again like Greene, transcends the genre: this is literature, not pop fiction, the sort of literature that every reasonable intelligent adult should and must read if he or she wants to better understand the modern world.

But for newcomers to, and veterans of, the writing life, the book is a double joy. I’ve can’t recall reading any recent thriller more rich in insights into writing and the writer’s life. The ghostwriter hero of The Ghost is a sharp, funny, gifted, extremely professional practitioner of the writer’s life and the writer’s craft. Whether it’s arranging the book deal, digging through research, groaning over draft material, or learning that the truths one uncovers can sometimes be deadly if expressed, this is a book that every writer should read. A book in which a gifted colleague eloquently describes the burden of our common cross: “I had to produce thirty-four hundred words a day, every day. I had a chart on the wall and marked it up each morning. I was like Captain Scott returning from the South Pole: I had to make those daily distances or I’d fall irrevocably behind and perish in a white wilderness of blank pages.” Yes.

This is not merely a riveting thriller to open between flights, but an education in politics and in writing — an accomplished novel to buy, read, and re-read. Dare I call it haunting? In any case, a masterly performance.

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You can read about my ghostwriting services and experiences in detail at https://davidpascal.com/ghostwriter/, there are several examples of my work in various mediums at https://davidpascal.com/samples/, and you can have a look at the book covers, new and old, that I’ve designed at https://davidpascal.com/book-covers-book-design/.

Click on over and enjoy!

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In passing — I did a book cover for an earlier publication by R-Spec Press called 2034 (also available at Amazon) in which I was told that crass exploitation was certainly not this publishing house’s goal and under no circumstances was I to put a woman, much less a sexy woman, on the cover.  I complied; the client’s word is law.  But I couldn’t help coming up with an alternative cover for this new publication, here made public below for the first time.  Need I say that it did not make the cut?

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