I keep seeing the same question pop up on message boards and writers’ groups around the web in various forms:

Should I look for a ghostwriter or a collaborator?

Should I work with my clients as a ghostwriter or collaborator?

Is there really any difference between ghostwriting and collaborating?

Oh, my, yes.

Collaborators tend to be accomplished writers and authors. They know how to make nonfiction prose sparkle. They know how to infuse life into characters and drama into a storyline. They know how to make a book saleable.

What they don’t know is how to keep all that out of their clients’ books.

It’s all a matter of investment.

Think about it for a moment. When a writer puts their name on a piece of work, they automatically become invested in that work. It’s unavoidable: no writer willingly attaches their name to something they’re not proud of. To make sure they’re proud of the work, then, a collaborator or co-author must make sure the work meets their personal standards. It has to say what it “should” say the way it “should” be said—especially if the collaborator has worked or written in the given nonfiction field or published their own novel(s).

How then, can a collaborator not become emotionally, psychologically, and, in so many co-author situations, financially invested in the project?

Ah, but it’s the author’s book: the author’s story, the author’s nonfiction research, the author’s concept or political spin or inspirational memoir or biographical exposé. It’s the author’s time to shine, the author’s moment to stand in the spotlight. In many cases, it’s the author’s one and only chance for that fifteen minutes of fame Andy Warhol promised us all.

Authors want their book to be them. All them. They’re entitled, after all, to their own pride of authorship.

And collaborators, experienced or not, want their bylines and the piece of the action they feel they’ve rightfully earned.

Hmmm—do you sense a potential for conflict?

Comparatively, ghostwriting is clean, quarrel-free, and invisible. Regardless of their own personal style, previous knowledge , or perspective on the book, ghostwriters work only with the author’s material. They don’t slant research toward their own agenda. They don’t insist on the book going one way if the author wants it to go another. They remain professionally separate  even while providing the emotional/psychological support aspiring authors need.

Ghostwriters make sure the book says what the author wants it to say, in the author’s voice and style, with the author’s intent and perspective. They are professionals, not partners. They provide editorial services for a negotiated fee on an agreed deadline.

When they don’t put their name on a book, it’s because it isn’t their book.

Ghostwriters invest only their time and expertise in a project no matter how much they like (or dislike) it, not their digestive tracts, their emotional stability, or their financial well being. Ghostwriters accept that their authors are experts in their nonfiction fields just as they are experts in the book business.

They understand that authors want to write the novel that’s been running in the back of their head for years or decades, not a “better” one based on their concept, setting, characters, or circumstances.

But what about all those ghostwriters who do put their names on their clients’ books and do take a percentage of their authors’ advance and royalties?

I cannot speak for them. The thought of taking credit for someone else’s ideas, research, or story is anathema to me. My business is based on fulfilling other people’s literary dreams.

I’m a professional ghostwriter.

Claudia Suzanne is a consummate ghostwriter/teacher, understanding what authors need in order to successfully complete their book dream, and she has a finely honed talent for communicating what she knows to her students and clients. Popularly dubbed “The Einstein of Ghostwriting,” Claudia has entertained and informed tens of thousands of writers, editors, journalists, and aspiring authors at countless writer and professional meetings, conferences, radio and BlogTalk radio broadcasts, webinars, and podcasts. Claudia was an invited expert on Penguin’s Author Solutions Expert Video series and a featured entrepreneur in Orange County Business Journal and Norwegian Business Daily. Her signature title, This Business of Books: A Complete Overview of the Industry from Concept through Sales, earned her a 2018 Author of Influence Award from Connected Women of Influence.

There you are, a man trying to write female characters or a woman trying to write men. How do you make them believable?

You can fall back on stereotypes. You can lift from your favorite book, TV, or movie characters. Or you can connect to the “other” in your own spirit.

Now, don’t get discouraged; I’m not going “airy-fairy” on you. I’m talking about reaching into the depths of your writer’s psyche and recognizing that you can, if you allow yourself to, get in touch with the opposite gender that resides in us all.

Very few people are all male or all female. Except for those few creatures who live on the extreme ends of the male-female spectrum that ranges from Sweet Young Thing to Manly Man, all women have at least some male sensibilities, just as all men have at least some female sensibilities. It’s only our fear of acknowledging and accepting those attributes that prevent us from having full access to our internal opposites.

Try it! Change your protagonist’s gender. See where it takes you. Don’t default to how you think the opposite gender would view the circumstances. Give yourself permission–as an artist, as a right-brained creator–to be the other gender, to experience the situation as someone with different sexual organs, thought processes, agendas, perspectives, and motivations, someone devoid of your own gender’s stereotypes, prejudices, and preconceptions.

Let me know what happens. Bet it nudges your creativity in ways you never thought possible…

Claudia Suzanne is a consummate ghostwriter/teacher, understanding what authors need in order to successfully complete their book dream, and she has a finely honed talent for communicating what she knows to her students and clients. Popularly dubbed “The Einstein of Ghostwriting,” Claudia has entertained and informed tens of thousands of writers, editors, journalists, and aspiring authors at countless writer and professional meetings, conferences, radio and BlogTalk radio broadcasts, webinars, and podcasts. Claudia was an invited expert on Penguin’s Author Solutions Expert Video series and a featured entrepreneur in Orange County Business Journal and Norwegian Business Daily. Her signature title, This Business of Books: A Complete Overview of the Industry from Concept through Sales, earned her a 2018 Author of Influence Award from Connected Women of Influence.

“Too wordy.”

“Paragraphs too long.”

“Sentences too long.”

These are the kinds of things I hear from agents and publishers at writers conferences and behind authors’ backs.

“Can’t figure out what it says.”

“Style/tone is too flat.”

“Booorrrrring.”

No, you don’t need to rewrite or go back to school for more creative-writing or composition techniques.

You need to line edit.

Line editing is the vital but often overlooked pass that adds music, drive, energy, and rhythm to a finished manuscript.

It’s an intermediate edit, between your last rewrite and sending the manuscript to a copy editor. Line editing is all about internal-paragraph Slinky Flow.

• It challenges every passive-voice line for power, invisibility, and convertibility.
• It revises static and awkward phrasings.
• It punches up the drives, smoothes out the pacing, and adds impact to the words already on the page.
• It brings out the hidden rhythm and music in your writing.

Psst! Don’t Tell Anyone, but-

…you already have the editing skills you need to make this happen —  you just never thought to apply them! So here’s a fast tutorial for doing this essential tweak:

1. Convert passive voice to active prose unless it’s powerful, invisible, or unavoidable.
2. Eliminate static phrasings and extraneous articles whenever possible.
3. Use one set of descriptors per incident. This may mean having to choose which is the most vibrant or effective modifer, but good writing is, after all, about making decisions.
4. Break up long paragraph blocks for easier reading and visual esthetics.
5. Brighten or “punch” important points with the judicious use of stand-alone non-sentences. I can’t emphasize this enough. Avoid diluting the impact of your ideas by burying it in excessive verbiage–like I just did!
6. Let every speaker have their own paragraph.
7. Reduce extraneous editorial wherever possible by “showing” or demonstrating what you want to say–but not so much that it obscures your point, confuses the reader, or disrupts the pacing.

Try it. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’ll boost your book’s appeal to both the industry and your reading audience.

Line editing can flip a “Nice Read” into “Wow! What a page turner!”

Happy editing!

Claudia Suzanne is a consummate ghostwriter/teacher, understanding what authors need in order to successfully complete their book dream, and she has a finely honed talent for communicating what she knows to her students and clients. Popularly dubbed “The Einstein of Ghostwriting,” Claudia has entertained and informed tens of thousands of writers, editors, journalists, and aspiring authors at countless writer and professional meetings, conferences, radio and BlogTalk radio broadcasts, webinars, and podcasts. Claudia was an invited expert on Penguin’s Author Solutions Expert Video series and a featured entrepreneur in Orange County Business Journal and Norwegian Business Daily. Her signature title, This Business of Books: A Complete Overview of the Industry from Concept through Sales, earned her a 2018 Author of Influence Award from Connected Women of Influence.

I can add and subtract, multiply and divide. I can balance a checkbook. I can keep track of income and expenses on a spreadsheet. I can determine sales tax and apply seller discounts. I can figure out what percentage of my gasoline costs is deductible. I can even fill out my own partnership tax forms if I have enough time.

Lots of time.

I’m talking serious clumps of uninterrupted hours.

And M&Ms.

Basic bookkeeping. Profit and loss. Cash flow. Retained earnings. All the accounting doo-dads and business jargon those QuickBooks magicians need to make business financials run smoothly. Accounting, as someone once explained, is a specialty profession; one that’s essential for all manner of banking, business, investments, and taxes. People go to college to learn its myriad aspects and intricacies. No business can expect to be successful without proper accounting.

Just as no book can expect to be successful without proper writerly skills.

An accountant’s math skills are to my abilities to write, edit, and comprehend intricate prose. Those spreadsheets and percentages? Outlining, character studies, and basic plot architecture. An accountant’s Schedule K is on the same level of concentrated effort as applying APA style guides to a 425-page master’s thesis.

Just like accounting is a specialty profession, so, too, is ghostwriting.

Sure, any aspiring author can open whatever word processor strikes their fancy and clickity-clack type out enough words to rival War and Peace, but it likely won’t have the same finesse as it would if they had access to my kind of expertise. Just like a CEO absolutely can open QuickBooks and navigate the truly brain-folding double-entry system but come tax time there likely will be some missed deductions.

Luckily for those aspiring authors, ghostwriters like me love creative analysis and musical line editing. We relish literary intricacies as much as the math-heads who take delight in their accounting tasks. Not only are ghostwriting’s myriad tasks more fun than trying to figure out QuickBooks, they’re far less mind-bending, that’s for sure.

More power to those accountants. Hats off to them! I’ll just be over here with my manuscript structure and plot/character integration.

And M&Ms. Can’t forget the M&Ms.

Claudia Suzanne is a consummate ghostwriter/teacher, understanding what authors need in order to successfully complete their book dream, and she has a finely honed talent for communicating what she knows to her students and clients. Popularly dubbed “The Einstein of Ghostwriting,” Claudia has entertained and informed tens of thousands of writers, editors, journalists, and aspiring authors at countless writer and professional meetings, conferences, radio and BlogTalk radio broadcasts, webinars, and podcasts. Claudia was an invited expert on Penguin’s Author Solutions Expert Video series and a featured entrepreneur in Orange County Business Journal and Norwegian Business Daily. Her signature title, This Business of Books: A Complete Overview of the Industry from Concept through Sales, earned her a 2018 Author of Influence Award from Connected Women of Influence.

I know, I know–I keep answering questions instead of posting about stuff. But since people want to know why I ghostwrite, here’s my answer:

Why I Ghostwrite

Ghostwriting is a lucrative business for those who know the difference between putting someone else’s name on a manuscript they’ve written and actually ghostwriting another person’s book. I’ve ghosted more than 200 titles and mentored/coached countless writers over the last thirty-plus years to support the people in my life. It’s been a good run.

But I don’t do it for the money.

Ghostwriting is also an educational pursuit. I’ve acquired more knowledge about history, business, healthcare, psychology, addiction, neurodivergence, gender, marketing, religion, science, and just plain human nature from the books I’ve ghosted than I ever learned—our could have learned—in college.

But I don’t do it for the learning.

Ghostwriting is an intimate endeavor. I’ve been privy to the confidences of people along every spectrum: economic, political, gender, sexual-orientation, race, creed, religion, mental health, career, job, disability. Sharing slivers of so many people’s lives has been an extraordinary privilege and a remarkable journey.

But I don’t do it for the human connection.

I do it for the book.

I love books. How they smell when they’re new. How they open my eyes to ideas I never considered before. How they make me laugh, cry, cringe, gasp, or have to walk away. Books, even more than film or music, chronicle the slice of what the author was experiencing right then—a slice already gone, never to return. They preserve those miniscule, already past but cherished, rewarding, and instructional dots in the human experience we call life.

That’s why I ghostwrite. Because ghostwriting is, above all else, about the book.

Claudia Suzanne is a consummate ghostwriter/teacher, understanding what authors need in order to successfully complete their book dream, and she has a finely honed talent for communicating what she knows to her students and clients. Popularly dubbed “The Einstein of Ghostwriting,” Claudia has entertained and informed tens of thousands of writers, editors, journalists, and aspiring authors at countless writer and professional meetings, conferences, radio and BlogTalk radio broadcasts, webinars, and podcasts. Claudia was an invited expert on Penguin’s Author Solutions Expert Video series and a featured entrepreneur in Orange County Business Journal and Norwegian Business Daily. Her signature title, This Business of Books: A Complete Overview of the Industry from Concept through Sales, earned her a 2018 Author of Influence Award from Connected Women of Influence.

I mentioned “Editorial Accountability” in a previous post, so I figured I oughta explain what that actually means. These days, digital publishers use algorithms to detect many of these issues and either reject or downgrade work accordingly.

So Just What is Editorial Accountability?

One of the most frequent complaints I’ve fielded from literary agents, acquisition editors, and general-trade reviewers over the thirty-plus years I’ve been in the book industry is that authors don’t know anything about the book business. And being mono-focused on their book, they’re don’t have the time or wherewithal to figure it out.

Let’s rectify that right now.

Editorial Accountability is an umbrella term that essentially refers to the objective quality of a book’s content, writing, editing, and presentation. Realize, that has nothing to do with the subjective take on whether a title is a “good book” or not. Rather, it’s all about whether a manuscript — or even published book — conforms to industry standards of professional work, both creatively and mechanically.

Does editorial accountability matter if you’re looking for a literary agent or traditional publisher? Yes, absatively. It demonstrates that you understand the difference between an author-vision first draft and a reader-satisfying second draft. Going by my experiences with and observations about hundreds of successful and missed-potential titles, I have to say that difference is one of, if not the most, important elements of a top-selling title.

Does editorial accountability matter if you’re going to self-publish? Once again, absatively yes. Amazon’s database contains literally billions — billions! — of titles. Why do some get read and most don’t? Editorial accountability.

Creative Accountability

1. The first part of creative accountability is about full development, whether the book is nonfiction, a memoir, or a novel. The information, personal recollections, or story not only needs to be dynamic, it needs to have purpose. Every chapter, section, scene, paragraph, and sentence must be there for a reason.
2. Part two is about Slinky® flow, i.e., “the sequence of information or story in which one idea logically and smoothly follows another throughout a paragraph, section, chapter, and manuscript.” Slinky flow encourages auto-read, “the brain’s ability to understand quickly and effortlessly and absorb easily.”
3. Part three refers to content disruptions (“issues that make a cold reader hesitate or say, “Huh?”) and deal breakers (“issues that make a cold reader stop reading and thus reduce or ruin a manuscript or book’s chances of success”).
4. The final piece of creative accountability has to do with the work’s prose. Describing how awful or wonderful or surprising or inspiring something/someone/some situation or circumstance is/was/will be comes across as emotionally laden Demonstrating how awful or wonderful or surprising or inspiring something/someone/some situation or circumstance is/was/will be is emotionally provoking prose.

If that sounds an awful lot like the difference between “Show” and “Tell,” that’s only because it’s exactly the same thing. But those terms are so trite at this point, they’ve become meaningless to most aspiring writers.

Mechanical Accountability

Mechanical accountability comes down to making sure the manuscript is:

1. Clean of extraneous coding and styled correctly in Microsoft Word, which is still the standard of the industry,
2. Gramatically aligned with Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) guidelines, another standard of the industry,
3. Copy edited and proofread by at least two different cold eyes, and
4. Formatted with standard margins, font type and size, and section breaks. Oh, and it doesn’t SHOUT AT THE READER. That gets old real fast.

Acquire Editorial Accountability

This part is simple: work with a pro or two. Or three.

Third-party oversight is key to transforming an author-vision first draft into a reader-satisfying second draft. In my firm, we start with thesis/premise, structure, and market placement. If you’re willing to put in the time and can sufficiently distance yourself from your work, you can learn to do that on your own. It ain’t easy, but it’s doable.

A developmental editor can help develop that all-important first draft. Look for someone who understands nonfiction/memoir templates, fiction architecture, and BISAC spread, and who knows how to keep their eye on the content and structure of the manuscript rather than get sidetracked by copy editing/proofing issues.

Once the first draft is finished to your complete satisfaction, find a musical line editor. MLEditors differentiate between narration and editorial, know how to manipulate mechanical and content impact, recognize flavor changes, and can both spot and rectify liability issues. They’ll review the manuscript with you line by line to ensure it has drive, punch, Slinky flow, and auto read.

Once you’re happy with the MLE, pay for a cold-eye copy editor, i.e., “someone sufficiently unfamiliar with the author that they do not ‘hear’ the author’s voice, cadence, accent, or flavor in the back of their head as they read.” Make sure they edit to CMS, not APA, MLA, BlueBook, or AP. Review their corrections carefully — you have the option to reject or discuss anything you don’t agree with or are unsure of.

Finally, pay for a cold-eye proofreader. At that point, your manuscript will have Editorial Accountability.

Claudia Suzanne is a consummate ghostwriter/teacher, understanding what authors need in order to successfully complete their book dream, and she has a finely honed talent for communicating what she knows to her students and clients. Popularly dubbed “The Einstein of Ghostwriting,” Claudia has entertained and informed tens of thousands of writers, editors, journalists, and aspiring authors at countless writer and professional meetings, conferences, radio and BlogTalk radio broadcasts, webinars, and podcasts. Claudia was an invited expert on Penguin’s Author Solutions Expert Video series and a featured entrepreneur in Orange County Business Journal and Norwegian Business Daily. Her signature title, This Business of Books: A Complete Overview of the Industry from Concept through Sales, earned her a 2018 Author of Influence Award from Connected Women of Influence.