Episode 53: Alee Anderson & Alice Sullivan, Ghostwriters
Alee Anderson and Alice Sullivan are here to celebrate the release of their new book, The Definitive Guide to Ghostwriting! This highly intensive process often requires 300-500 hours of work per book, including extensive interviews and research. Learn the secrets to building a ghostwriting career, marketing to develop a strong client base, and translating a client’s unique voice and story to the page.
transcript for episode 53 with Alee ANDERSON & ALICE SULLIVAN
Mary Kole (00:23):
Hello everybody. My name is Mary Kole. Welcome to the Thriving Writers Podcast. With me I have Alee Anderson and Alice Sullivan. And today we are going to talk about ghostwriting, the business and craft of, to celebrate the release of their forthcoming book, The Definitive Guide to Ghostwriting. Welcome. Why don't you lovely people introduce yourself? Maybe Alee, you go first.
Alee Anderson (00:50):
Yeah, I'm Alee Anderson. I have been working in publishing in some capacity for 20 years. I started out in traditional publishing and then slowly made my way into freelance work and specifically began focusing on ghostwriting about 10 years ago. I've niched down to mostly working with clients who are processing trauma and journeying through grief, and my business has just exploded with that niche. And so currently I'm working on some business rebranding and some other exciting things that kind of come along with work in the trauma space.
Mary Kole (01:29):
Amazing. And Alice?
Alice Sullivan (01:31):
So I'm Alice Sullivan. I've been in book publishing for about 25 years now. Started again in traditional and have been a freelancer, I believe for 17 years now, focused on ghostwriting. I specialize in memoir, business leadership, and self-help. So really anything with a narrative that is aimed at helping the reader grow in some capacity, overcome obstacles in some way. And I absolutely love it having this. We love talking about writing, all things writing.
Mary Kole (02:08):
Well, perfect. We're all aligned then. So one of the things that I personally know about ghostwriting is that it can be really powerful, and you both just alluded to that, whether it is a trauma narrative, memoir, self-help, thought leadership, there are a lot of people out there who have ideas or who have something that they want to communicate, whether that's a business framework or whether it's I survived this and these are my reflections, but they don't necessarily have all of the tools that would help them package that into a narrative. So this is where ghosts come in. Who are the type of people that tend to seek ghostwriters out and at what point in their lives might this start to appear on their horizon?
Alice Sullivan (03:06):
Gosh, I'll say primarily the people who find me will say, people have been telling me for years, my story is just so unique. I need to write it. And I've been feeling that way, but I don't have the time, I don't have the knowledge, I don't have the experience, and I need a writing partner. But often it's people who have, as you said, have overcome something, have lived through something, have been carrying their story with them for a number of years and have finally reached, I guess a breaking point of like, I have to do it now or I'm never going to do it.
Alee Anderson (03:43):
For me, with the trauma niche, a lot of times people are coming to me with things that feel too big, if that makes sense, because stories that include such big themes of overcoming are sometimes really hard to approach if you've lived it. So having that outside perspective, having somebody to shepherd them through the process and having somebody else actually put pen to paper allows them to better access the truths because it's, we're cutting through all of the fat to really get to what the story is about. And so they're looking for somebody who can really help them pull those lessons from the narrative that they almost can't even see anymore.
Mary Kole (04:34):
And especially with memoir, especially with self-help—so both of you can maybe speak to this, there's really kind of a two process in my understanding. First the person metabolizing what the story is for themselves, especially if they want to reach some of those reflections to do some of their own healing. And Alee, I was lucky enough to just chat with you last week and you were saying just the night and day difference from the beginning of a process on one of your projects and the end just in the client's own journey. But then you pivot to wanting to share because everybody has a life story. Everybody has millions of lived experiences that they can pull from, but it takes a special kind of person and a special kind of writing partner to then package those insights. Because especially for memoir, I may not have gone through what that person has gone through, but there's a real interest in connecting the specific things they went through, their realizations, to maybe that self-help piece of this person survived X, but I'm going through Y and what's in it for me as a reader? So kind of pivoting it to an outside audience for the first time.
Alee Anderson (05:59):
Yeah, and I mean some of that as a writer is challenging to make sure that we're tying the experiences of the author to current cultural conversations, things that are happening in society now that we can all relate to. So that's the thing is that finding those universal truths that are buried sometimes pretty deep, that will actually land with readers whose trauma might not be a big T, might be a little T. And so that's definitely a unique challenge that comes with this type of ghostwriting.
Mary Kole (06:37):
Memoir, self-help and business-thought leadership are pretty crowded categories in the traditional space, memoir especially, in part because everybody does have a life story. It's known in the industry as a tough sell. So what are some of the skills and maybe approaches that you both bring to bear to help make these life stories as potentially competitive as possible?
Alice Sullivan (07:07):
I would say a good portion of the work we do is providing education. That's industry education. We will take into account the person's of course, their life story, their personal and professional goals with the book, and then also their social media presence. If they are someone who's an influencer and has 300,000 followers, that makes them a good contender for a traditional deal possibly. But the majority of writers don't have that big of a platform, and it doesn't mean their story doesn't deserve to be told. It certainly does. It just means there are different avenues that they need to look into to get it out there and actually make the impact they want to make. And so education is a large part of that, just sort of steering people toward what we think is going to be the best avenue for them to get the return they desire.
Alee Anderson (08:04):
Yeah. And for me, I have watched, because Alice and I have been in this industry for so long, we've watched it change over time. And truthfully, sometimes I feel like I don't even recognize traditional publishing anymore. It's totally different than it was when we entered this world. And for me, I have kind of come to the conclusion that as Alice said, unless my client has three, four, 500, a million following, I'm not going to send them out to pitch traditional. There's no point in it. And honestly, the more traumatized my clients are, the worse their experience is. I've had people just come through my process and then head out into the pitching process and just totally lose their minds because for me, traumatized people, many of whom have been abused throughout their lives, being told they're not good enough, being told that they're never going to measure up, and then getting into a process where that's all you hear, sometimes for years, it was just really too much from my clients. So for me, my solution was to develop my own publishing arm where I provide self and hybrid publishing solutions for my clients, for Alice's clients, for anybody who's kind of come through this area of ghostwriting. I provide those services. And truthfully, it's been a pivot point for me because I've seen my clients exit really happy and feeling a sense of completion.
Mary Kole (09:42):
And I think intention goals have a lot to do with what is a successful ghostwriting experience or a successful publishing experience. And I think this goes for all writers because not every project is destined to have the same life cycle is destined to have the same outcome. And it does seem like, especially in the ghostwriting space, it's already a pay for play type of experience. You're bringing on a writing partner, you're bringing on somebody to educate you, as Alice you were saying, in the system, the publishing ecosystem. So you're finding Alee, especially that a lot of these writers and collaborators are looking for maybe a smaller scale type of impact or maybe just something to hold and say, I made this. What are kind of outcomes that you've seen that people have been either intending to pursue or happy with?
Alee Anderson (10:47):
I mean, it really runs the gambit, and it kind of depends on what type of content we're building for them. I do with my trauma survivors, a lot of personal development. Those personal development clients tend to go off and build programs around their books. They end up commanding a lot higher fees for speaking engagements and things like that. And so the book ends up becoming really a cornerstone of their career as opposed to coming out as this smash like New York Times bestseller, this is what it is. It might not have that traditional label on it, but it is a part of a big machine that's making the author meaningful income. So that's a big one. Seeing them develop those programs around the book that we've created together.
Alice Sullivan (11:44):
And there's also times where people want to write a memoir really just for their friends and family. There's actually a book I've written ghostwritten that Alee's company is publishing in a couple weeks. And it is that it's someone who went through just some awful life circumstances, and he wrote the book really to make sense of everything. He wanted to find the through lines and look back over his life to see how far he'd come and that he was resilient and deserved this good life that he'd made for himself. He had never been in therapy before. But we have many people who tell us, wow, this is probably a lot like therapy. And we say, yes, it is. Unlicensed, but absolutely—
Alee Anderson (12:37):
We are not qualified, how you say.
Alice Sullivan (12:40):
It's talk therapy. It really is talk therapy. And so often in the process, people will have these a-ha moments because they're telling the story out loud to somebody who's neutral and they can sort of point out, Hey, did you realize that this happened when you were 12? And this also happened when you were 30. It's the same thing. And it doesn't matter that that book is not going to be published for a wide audience. Their goal was to get it done. It was very cathartic, and that's just as meaningful as someone whose goal is to hit a bestseller list.
Mary Kole (13:14):
And tying it back to what Alee was saying about the big machine for your business clients, a book is something if they already have a speaking program, they can sell it at the back of the room or it can tie into a mastermind or whatever. But it is for a lot of people in many different industries or many different pursuits, it is this sort of cornerstone object that has a legitimizing effect for whatever else they're doing, regardless of whether it's Thomas Nelson on the spine or something else. For these applications and use cases, it almost doesn't matter as long as the product is good, right?
Alice Sullivan (13:59):
Yeah. You can have been in the same industry for 30 years, but you write a book and now you're seen as a different level of expert. So it really is. I mean, I sort of jokingly say a business book is a fancy business card, but it is true that the public's perception is, oh, you wrote a book, you really know what you're doing. And that leads to all different types of new opportunities.
Mary Kole (14:27):
So I could talk to you about what you all do and the process of ghostwriting, but one of the things that you're doing now with your new book is empowering writers to consider ghostwriting as a career. So tell me a little bit more about that.
Alee Anderson (14:49):
Alice and I are very lucky that our careers took off in a really astronomical way fairly quickly. I mean, it took a lot of work, but we're talking about a period of a couple years before we were seeing really unbelievable income from the work that we were doing. And for us, some of that feels empty if we're not encouraging others to look at this as a viable career path. For me, I own a mentorship program, which is how I met you, Mary, called Hey! Young Writer. And I do that because I am so passionate about being the person who will tell a young writer, this is a viable career path. Pursue it, work on it, hone your craft, because not everybody has somebody at home who does that. And The Definitive Guide to Ghostwriting is us taking that to the next level and really meeting writers where they are, whether it's just coming out of college, whether it's I'm in a dead end job and I hate it, whatever it is. And they have this skill, which by the way is extremely rare. And we are looking to give them not only that hope, but the guidance, the how, and really show them from beginning, from, I don't know what I'm doing, just graduated all the way to finishing your first project and building that business. We had a reader, an early reader, that was so exciting. She landed her first client by the time she got to chapter four, which is really, really, really exciting.
Alice Sullivan (16:38):
Incredible. It's incredible. And I'm actually speaking at my university this week and then in a few more weeks. And the thing with college is, at least back when I graduated 20 something years ago, a long time ago, once you graduated, it's like, bye, see you. So there was not any sort of job placement that occurred. So when I graduated with an English degree, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I mean, I was very good at writing, and I thankfully got hired by my professor immediately, but I hadn't thought of it as a legitimate career. And so I'm glad I fell into it. But really this book takes the reader through all the things that we stumbled through in our first 5, 10, 8, 12 years, so that hopefully their path might be a little smoother and they might be able to avoid some of the pitfalls, know how to address certain situations in an easier manner than we did. And that's often, we both mentor other writers, beginning writers, and I love it so much, and so does Alee. And so this is sort of our way to share that mentorship with a wider audience.
Mary Kole (17:51):
Yeah, because well, I was an English major, MFA, all of that, but you're right. No, if I graduated with an engineering degree, then there is a path forward, but a lot of people who end up getting English majors or MFAs or thinking about writing as a hobby or maybe even a career, even though it is not sort of held in that light by society, they know that they love to write, they love to storytell. Maybe they have read a lot of literature and learned craft and theory and structure, but usually you think, okay, I could work for a publisher, maybe a literary agency. That's what I did after my MFA. I can edit, write my own stuff, or teach. But ghostwriting doesn't always kind of factor into the thought process, and it's actually a niche where you could make it a full-time job as both of you have, because ghostwriting does tend to be a higher cost service where these skills come into play, but a lot of people don't think about that. Can you speak to that a little bit more?
Alee Anderson (19:21):
Yeah, I think that there's a couple things that go into that. I think first of all, people don't know what ghostwriting is. I think we hear that phrase, and I think there's almost some misconception that I felt like I had to fight through at the beginning that it was kind of seedy, like a seedy profession. You're just cheating. You're like a liar. And so that at the beginning is what it is. But I think that, yeah, people don't really realize that it's out there as an option. I think that people also deal with a lot of imposter syndrome. They get nervous about whether or not they could potentially tackle something like this. But also I think that we as a society have been taught, it's been beaten into us that creative careers aren't going to make you any money. And so that's the narrative that we're kind of working with and working to shift culturally because it's simply not true. And I think there's also a lot of fear with AI and all that stuff. But really what I believe and what seems to be true to what's happening is that it actually, the fact that AI and that kind of writing is becoming kind of ubiquitous is that our writing, the human becomes so much more valuable.
And I think that is what is kind of making this exciting in terms of a career to enter, because that skill that you have that people tell you have, or that you kind of know that you have is the thing that is going to make you a meaningful income, and that's only going to be able to increase over time as human writing becomes more valuable.
Alice Sullivan (21:17):
I've started to see even in the last few months where companies that once laid off writers and editors to use more AI are now having to rehire those people to fix the AI writing because it's soulless. So I don't know where that industry is going to end up. I have no idea, but I do know there will always be people who want the human connection, and I'll say until the day I die. But even if one day AI is able to replicate personality in a way that seems legitimate, there are still going to be people who distrust it, and there's still going to be people who want this connection. There's never going to be, I don't think, a time where ghostwriting isn't a creative art that's desperately needed, especially with memoir. Especially with memoir.
Mary Kole (22:14):
That's exactly the thing to me because you haven't met my Chat GPT, but I've basically uploaded my consciousness to it, and it has personality, and it can turn out serviceable, prose and logical arguments, and it can bring its understanding of humanity, but you need to prompt it. First of all, it can't do anything on its own yet. Fingers crossed that we never cross that bridge. But also that human connection that you talk about, Alice, when you said, oh, there's this connection point and I am pulling on this thread and I'm able to see things that you can't, when somebody is working with a ghostwriter, writer for hire, whatever, they are collaborating. And that is something that AI can't do because, and Alice, I don't know your process as well as I think I know Alee’s, but Alee, you go in person more often than not to connect with your clients to interview them. It's a very sort of emotional labor intensive process, and that's something you can dump everything into Chat GPT till the cows come home, but it'll reflect it back to you rather than applying a creative sort of overview and kind of creative thinking and connection-making that only a human can.
Alice Sullivan (23:50):
Yeah, and I'll say with in person, whether that's Zoom or actually in person, there's the art of reading the body language, what they say, there's what they don't say, and I don't think an AI program yet is going to be able to understand those nuances. You're interviewing somebody and we ask them a question, they're talking about something that's uncomfortable. Their body language changes. Their voice changes, they may look away. And all of those things are cues for us to dig a little bit deeper, reframe the question, whatever it may be. And that's part of it that I think is necessary to create a really transparent story that gets to the bottom of the emotion and draws the reader in.
Mary Kole (24:42):
So the narrative piece is something that a creative writer might feel like they have in their back pocket, imposter syndrome aside, self confidence issues aside, but ghostwriting, one of the things that is unique to it is this interview almost journalistic approach to getting at a story, which is a skill that some writers may not have. Did you have to develop it? How did you sort of hone that piece of it?
Alee Anderson (25:15):
Yeah, that part of it. I remember being really scared about at the very beginning because I kept feeling like this is my only chance to get all this information, and how the hell do I get this all out of this one person? But the more I relaxed into it, the better it became. I sit down and my outline is prepared. So I kind of have that as a conversation guide, and that's really the way that I now approach it. I go into it like I'm a friend, I'm a new friend, and I am asking you to tell me a really hard story before I go into these meetings. I have them fill out a questionnaire that tells me how to react when they start crying, what to do if they get overly emotional, when to give them space, when to give them reassurance. So that takes out that scary moment of when somebody starts to cry or when I've had people, we've been in hotel rooms and they've started crying so much, they've gotten into bed and I've had to figure out what to do. But really over time, my feeling is the more natural I let it be, the better the stuff I get out of it. So my interview process is really dynamic and probably looks a little weird, but for me and for the project, it seems to really work to be prepared, but also let it flow.
Alice Sullivan (26:54):
Yep, yep. I was a terrible, terrible interviewer to start because you just don't know what you don't know. And then you get a little bit better every interview. And I also have a process, but I would say now it's better the less I say, I just allow them to speak and I'll open, I'll ask open-ended questions and I'll prompt them, and I may sometimes interrupt just to ask a clarifying question, but I'm largely allowing them to just dump everything. And I'm being an active listener, and that is producing really great results.
Alee Anderson (27:38):
Being quiet is a really great tactic that is weirdly hard to discover because I'm the same way. When somebody gets quiet in a room, I'm like, okay, so to clarify, and I start, but that's filling space that could otherwise be filled by these emotional pieces that they have to have the space to process out loud.
Mary Kole (28:05):
Well, they always say in a negotiation, silence is the most powerful tactic. I clearly struggle with this just endlessly. Hence, I have a podcast just like every other asshole. So this is really interesting. We're on the interview piece, but clearly there's a lot of work that happens before. Because Alee, you said, I have an outline. Interesting question for me would be, well, how do you find what the story is? What is the pre-work like before you even get in that space with that person?
Alee Anderson (29:02):
But we're going to make a list and we're going to look at your life as a document that just has bullet points on it, and we're going to kind of go through and see what we're seeing in black and white. Where are these lessons? At what point do you think you learned this? And then we can start to see how things connect. And that building of the very skeletal outline is the place that helps clarify questions in my mind that I can use to get to the root. The first thing that I do with a client is I spend one to two sessions writing an overview, so that overview reads as that cover copy. It's very exciting and gets them kind of stoked about the writing. And then we kind of go through and do that bulleted list of what's going to be in the book. But that exercise is just so helpful because it also gets their wheels spinning on, okay, here are the stories that I'm going to need to tell, et cetera. And sometimes it is hard to keep them into the high level state of mind, but that's really the key for me to being able to have those really good robust interviews that stay on topic is doing that pre-work.
Alice Sullivan (30:20):
Mine is pretty similar. I also have an initial document, I call it homework, and I hate that because a lot of people don't like doing homework, but it's maybe four pages of a lot of fill in the blanks and foundational questions like, why are you writing this book and why now? What are your personal and professional goals? If it's memoir, I will ask them to give me a bulleted list of what are the big turning points and a-ha moments in your story? Who else is involved? Tell me a little bit about your parents, your siblings, work, whatever it is. And that helps me at least have some guidelines on those initial interviews. So I know some of the story because sometimes people will write to me and they'll just give me one sentence, I want to write a memoir of X, Y, Z. And if I can't find them online, I always try and do a Google search. I try and look up their email addresses, but if I can't find them online, I'm going to have to rely on them to provide some of that initial content until we're in conversation and I can pull a little bit more out of them.
Mary Kole (31:29):
One of my publishing adjacent jobs is I am a book packager, an IP developer for fiction with Bittersweet Books. And there we come up with a concept. It's just pulling it out of thin air, what we think is going to be the most compelling idea for a novel. Here you are coming into a story or a business framework or a philosophy or whatever that already exists, and you are sort of reverse engineering what the story is, what the theme is, what the encapsulation of that life is, and you are trying to shape it into what you believe is the most compelling narrative. So it's kind of the opposite, right? With me, I'm just pulling stuff from the ether and I can do whatever I want. Here you are functioning within the parameters of what actually happened, what the person wants to focus on, what you believe the market will be most compelled by. So how do you develop that kind of taste or that eye for what the story within the story or the nugget within the person's life experience is?
Alice Sullivan (32:49):
We got a big little shrug here. Well, I think for me, having just heard so many different stories, it's easy for me to spot pretty early on, is this a hero's journey story? Is this a Cinderella story? Is this an underdog story? There's probably 10 to 15 different story arcs that a story could fall into, and it could be a combination of those things. But generally after I've heard somebody speak for a few hours, I have a pretty good idea of which direction the story is going to go, and then you can work with them to create an outline that feels true to them and is also compelling to the reader.
Alee Anderson (33:33):
Yeah, I'm the same way, but I also pay heavy attention to something I mentioned earlier, which is cultural conversation and things that are top of mind currently. So when I'm looking at those books, I'm not necessarily pushing those themes, but knowing that people are talking about these things, knowing that there is current cultural concern about the workplace, and people are getting called back to the workplace, and so they are looking for viable solutions to leave corporate America. So we have this book about ghostwriting and oh my gosh, it speaks to that cultural conversation. It's that kind of stuff that I look at. In addition to what Alice was saying, looking at the more traditional narrative structures, what are those seams that we know speak directly to something that's happening right now?
Mary Kole (34:29):
So like a timeliness hook, which a lot of nonfiction is, that's the bread and butter there. One thing that I've heard a lot of people worried about at the surface level with ghostwriting is I just don't know if they'll capture my voice, my voice, my voice, my voice. So narrative is one thing. The pieces, the order, the whatever, that's fine and good. How much do you try to, if you try to capture or imitate, and this is kind of a leading question, but I really want to hear your take on the voice piece.
Alee Anderson (35:15):
So this runs the gamut. You have some people you'll work with whose voices are actually quite similar to yours. So your natural writing style just works, but then you have other people whose voices are so unique that it's almost like—I have somebody who I'm working with right now whose voice is so unique and so specific, and he has a cadence to the way that he talks. And I find that with clients like that, I have to fail a couple times to get it right in order to really nail it. And I find that when I build out those voices, I'm literally writing it like it's a cartoon, I'm just like, my writing is very—and I have to go through it a couple times to add signature phrases that that person uses, or this guy curses a lot and calls people baby. And there are different things that I can read it after I've written it and go through and add his little -isms throughout.
But those projects are sometimes easier than you think because their voice is so—it never falters. So every time you talk to them, you're picking up more and more and more of it. So by the end of the project, you're just able to fly through writing like them. It's the people that are in between that are tricky, that don't have necessarily a distinct voice, but feel that they do and you are not hitting what they want you to hit. Those are the ones that are tricky. And I've had a few of those where I have to rewrite my early material five or six times to really nail it. And then when I do, I'm like, well, I don't even know what the fuck I did to nail this. I dunno if I answered that question.
Alice Sullivan (37:19):
Yeah, I try and use as much of the transcript content as I can in the writing to make sure that I am capturing their voice. And like Alee said, I've got a client right now who's in London and sounds different than I do, different vocabulary than I have. And so I'm going to be relying really heavily on those transcripts to write the content. And also I will say once you've interviewed somebody for between 12 and 20 hours, you can hear their voice in your head. I can very easily drop into his voice and his personality in writing. And so if I need to create a segue between paragraphs or between scenes, it really just takes me a moment to go, how would he say that? Oh, he would probably say it this way. And then of course they have the opportunity to edit it multiple times. So if I don't get it right the first time or the second time, we're going to work on it until I do get it right. But using transcripts from the interviews has made it easier for me to capture voice.
Mary Kole (38:36):
My sneaking suspicion is with some people, it's not about voice. They're looking for trust. They're looking for relationships. So when they say, but can you capture my voice? It's not—it's about so many other things.
Alice Sullivan (38:56):
And there are also people who come to us and say, I want to write a memoir and I want to sound exactly like Brené Brown. And we have to tell them that's actually not the best idea, she has her unique voice, be yourself. Everyone else is already taken, and if you get on stage and you're talking about your book and it's not in your own voice, there's going to be an instant disconnect with your audience, and that loses trust immediately. So we try to dissuade people from writing in the tone of X, Y, Z famous person because it's not authentic to you.
Mary Kole (39:38):
That's a really good point. We've mentioned the cost of ghostwriting, not any facts or figures, and you all are welcome to share, but it's starting to emerge that this is a really intensive process you are doing. I mean, Alice, you just said 12 to 20 hours of interviews, tapes, all the pre-work revisions. Take me through the scope of a project and how much actual time and energy investment you find yourself giving to one book.
Alice Sullivan (40:17):
The initial research and development, the R&D process for me varies based on how much online presence they have and what they've sent me in advance. But usually the interview process alone lasts for between four to six weeks. I talk to people two to three times a week, 90 minutes a piece that creates probably a hundred thousand words of just raw transcript content. Then I'm going to create an outline with them, and that might take me another eight, 10 hours to go through all of that content, figure out in which order should the story be told, how do I flesh out the chapters and then they revise it with me and make sure that they agree this is the best way to tell the story. And then I get into the actual writing of the content. And depending on how long your chapters are, it could take me four hours to write a chapter. It could take me eight, it could take me even longer if I have to do with a self-help. Sometimes in the self-help space, I will add scientific research, a citation. And so if I have to do research that's going to add more time, I wish that I could give an exact number of how many hours does it take to write a typical book.
But I would imagine between everything that we do and the revisions, it's going to be solidly between 300 and 500 hours if not a little bit more.
Alee Anderson (41:48):
And I'm in the same boat as Alice. That's about accurate to my timeline too. But I will say over time, I've gotten really good about having people help with the pieces of the work that aren't necessarily pivotal to the writing. So for me, I have transcripts and I know that I need to pull certain things from it. I will have my assistant go through and pull things with very specific instructions for me. So that saves me five hours. I do a lot of work with transcripts, and it is much easier for me to have her go and pull the relevant pieces of the transcripts and put them together. So for me, it's been about over this last period of 10 years where I've been solely ghostwriting, finding those parts in my process where it's better to spend a little money than to spend all of my time doing that. And to that point, a lot of people will say to me, well, I'm not going to hire an assistant until I'm more successful. But the reality is hiring that person is what's going to many times make you more successful, open the doors for you to be able to maybe take on an extra project or something like that. So for me, just looking at those little areas that is okay to pull somebody else in on and have them kind of help.
Alice Sullivan (43:19):
Two years ago was my biggest year ever, and I had a project manager that year. I was able to take on more work and she was able to help me manage the entire schedule for the project and the editing and the proofreading. It was really helpful. And then she went on maternity leave and I miss her every day, but I at some point rehired a project manager because it was nice to have just somebody else to help in the process so that it wasn't all in my head or on my day planner or on a Google account. I have somebody else to brainstorm within the process.
Alee Anderson (44:00):
Yeah, that's so helpful for me. I mean, I meet with my editorial assistant almost every morning and when things are really overwhelming, she'll just give me three tasks for the day and I'm like, okay, I'm not going to die. I'm going to live live another day.
Mary Kole (44:18):
The horrors persist. So I definitely have as we kind of near the end of our time together, questions about the business part, but my one kind of remaining client question is that it is a work for hire service and they do feel the client feels ownership over the project. They are paying you to execute a service. How do you manage their feedback? And Alice, you said, oh, sometimes I've had to rewrite it once, twice. Revisions are a much bigger part of this process because you have the primary stakeholder in the project giving you feedback. What is it like learning how to navigate that relationship?
Alice Sullivan (45:10):
It depends on the person. I mean, it depends on their personality. Most people I've worked with have been fantastic and they have been able to give actionable feedback instead of, I don't like it. Like let's change this, or let's make this scene more emotional. Also, I will say when I give them permission to give me feedback, sometimes people are polite and they don't want to give feedback because they think it might hurt my feelings, but I remind them like, this is your book, so I want it to sound exactly like you, so please give me feedback. Most people are really great about providing that. There always will be one or two people who are just assholes. No matter how many times you revise it, they're going to say it's crap. And half the time it's because they actually just don't want to pay you. They want to take your work and then use it for free or for discounted rate. But it is also true that I can't capture everybody's voice. And so yes, there are going to be times where I'm just not the right fit and if I can't get it after a couple of tries, I've got a no fault contract. So we just go, you know what? We tried, it didn't work, let's walk away. And that's it.
Alee Anderson (46:33):
At the very beginning of the project, I produce 2,500 words, and that's just the very beginning to get us on the same page about voice and tone and all that stuff. And I use that 2,500 words as a training ground where I train them how to give the right feedback. My assistant trains them how to use Microsoft Word to make sure that they're inputting changes correctly and things like that. So I find that usually after that first little bit, it goes pretty smooth. But like Alice was saying, there are a lot of people, not a lot, but there are some people that you will encounter who have an idea in their head of what exactly they want it to be, but they're not able to communicate it with you. So that's where you're in a really hard spot. But in my experience, the more I've stayed positive and the more I've said, this is your book, we can do this a thousand times, the more patience I've maintained, the more successful I've been at resolving it. But I can't deny that there are some parts in those types of projects that feel totally helpless. I've cried to Alice in the last year about that.
Alice Sullivan (47:55):
I've even had somebody who once they were presented their initial chapters and they read it, they're like, this doesn't sound anything like me. I would've never said this. And I'm like, I pulled this exactly from the transcript. You said exactly this phrase. And so it is true that every once in a while you'll meet somebody who doesn't even know what their own voice sounds like. And that's a disconnect that I can't, that's on their side. I can't just make that happen, but it's a possibility.
Mary Kole (48:26):
Alright, so I am a writer and this sounds great to me. Maybe I've been casting around for my next career pivot. I'm going to read The Definitive Guide to Ghostwriting. Do people have to be a little bit naturally entrepreneurial to take this career on?
Alee Anderson (48:49):
I would say so. I would say so. But that doesn't mean that you have to have an MBA. You have to know exactly what you're doing with the—people exist like CPAs and lawyers and things like that who know what they're doing. And so I think offering yourself a really healthy reminder that being entrepreneurial doesn't mean that you have to have a degree in business, that you have to have successfully launched companies before. You don't. You're stepping into life as a freelancer, and that is actually more straightforward than you think. When we talk about this in the book, setting up your team from the beginning, it doesn't have to be an expensive team, but you've got to have somebody who knows what they're doing with finances and knows what they're doing with creating your contracts. And those are the two areas where you could really screw yourself over, but you're covering your ass. So once you're able to liaise with those two professionals, the rest of it is actually pretty straightforward.
Alice Sullivan (49:54):
And you get to make it into whatever you want it to be. For a period of time, I had a co-working space, or I worked at a co-working space and I very quickly realized that is not for me. You don't have to purchase a brick and mortar. You can work in your home. This is the upstairs of my house. You don't have to purchase pants. No, I'm wearing yoga pants right now. I almost didn't wear any. But you can work on your kitchen countertop for months if you needed to until you make a space for yourself in your home. So yeah, you can baby step it all the way. You don't have to feel like, shoot, I'm not going to be a professional writer unless I have X, Y, Z. Really, you just start calling yourself a writer. That's one of the biggest things when you introduce yourself, especially at networking events. I'm a ghostwriter, that acceptance is one of the parts of it. And then you act as if you are already successful in that path.
Alee Anderson (50:59):
And I will say that one of the things that sets freelancers apart is tenacity and hustle, because Alice and I have plenty of friends who have gotten into editorial and haven't really seen the needle move, but we notice that they take a really long time to respond to emails and they say more nos than they say yes. And there's always an excuse for why they can't take on one more thing. And for us, we have, this is part of the reason that we get along so well. We are yes people and we're and people, and that has been a big part of what's helped us grow our businesses so quickly and seeing them skyrocket is the fact that we've been willing to hustle. That doesn't mean I've been sacrificing it. I mean, I have three kids, I have a husband, I have a house, I have a lot going on, and I'm not sacrificing time with my family in order to do this, I'm just strategically using the time that I have and not letting up. I have my foot on the gas. And that has brought a lot of meaningful opportunity my way.
Alice Sullivan (52:17):
And I'll say this too, if for whatever reason somebody decides to make a go being a ghostwriter and you try it for a year or two or you try it for five years and it just isn't what you thought it was going to be, I wouldn't even chalk that up as a failure. I'd be like, that's amazing. You tried that. You went off on your own, and then you can find something else that meets the needs that you have at that time. Not everybody's going to be a professional ghost writer for the rest of their careers. I personally would love to win the lottery and never have to work again. I would just travel the world eating food, but this is a great career. We get to manage our time, our freedom, the types of projects we choose to work on. It has been incredibly fulfilling in a way that corporate publishing was not for me.
Alee Anderson (53:13):
And it's been lucrative enough that we get to live lives that allow us to do amazing things and provide amazing things for our families. That's just been so cool to grow into.
Mary Kole (53:31):
Yeah. I'm going to end our conversation on perhaps the most nerve wracking and difficult question. When I transitioned from being a literary agent in 2013 to freelance editing, because I left New York, I wanted more, whatever I wanted to actually be paid for the editing that I was doing rather than betting on a book deal in five years, kind of recouping that investment. But I had a pipeline of people who'd been following me when I was an agent, and I have never had to worry about clients in my career, which I know is not the norm, but a person without their reputation preceding them like you two have after so long in the business. And these are very specific clients who are prepared to invest a lot of money. So you can't kind of start ghostwriting for a hundred books. Well, you could, but 300 hours, 500 hours. The ROI on that is not great. How do you get that first ghostwriting client? Well, maybe, you read The Definitive Guide to Ghostwriting.
Alee Anderson (54:40):
Yes, I found a lot of success early on with agencies. It's not something that I've kept doing since I've kind of built my own streams, but I really at the very beginning, used mostly agencies to get the work that I had that was accepting lower pay. And the process can be a little messy, but it is kind of nice at the very beginning to have a team that's at least there supporting you. And they have their own standard operating procedures and things like that. So it takes a lot of the guesswork out of those early projects.
Alice Sullivan (55:28):
And I did a ridiculous amount of the equivalent of cold calling. So when I graduated with my English degree and I finally decided I want to pursue this, I literally sent out 100 resumes to every newspaper, magazine, publishing company, anything publishing adjacent. There were even some blogs online at that time, way back in the day. Out of 100, I had seven responses, but that gave me somewhere to start. And so I have done in my career a lot of networking, and I used to do just throw the network wide and exhaust myself on networking opportunities that didn't necessarily align with what I wanted to do. I just thought I needed to meet a whole bunch of people. Now I'm very strategic, but the very direct answer to your question is, especially if you want to work with a certain type of clientele, you have to go where they are. So that is networking events where high net worth people attend. You need to figure out how to get into those spaces. Whatever type of client you want to work with, you need to figure out where are they online, where are they in person, what do they purchase? Where do they vacation? Start thinking about how can I get around, how can I get into that atmosphere?
Mary Kole (56:55):
So set up at the Four Seasons in Bali and just have your little laptop. No, I'm just kidding.
Alice Sullivan (57:03):
I did work in Bali for two months. It was fantastic.
Mary Kole (57:05):
Okay, well, maybe not so farfetched.
Alice Sullivan (57:09):
Then I wrote two books while I was there. All you need is a laptop and wifi.
Mary Kole (57:21):
Ghostwriting retreat there next year. I'll see you there.
Alice Sullivan (57:24):
I've worked in Scotland, I've worked in Bali, I've worked in London. You can work anywhere as long as you have laptop and wifi.
Mary Kole (57:31):
Well, if this sounds good to you, that sounds good to me. Pick up a copy of The Definitive Guide to Ghostwriting by Alice Sullivan and Alee Anderson. And thank you so much for guesting and ghosting with me today. This was a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much.
Alee Anderson (57:51):
Loved it.
Mary Kole (57:53):
This has been Mary Kole with The Thriving Writers Podcast, and here's to a good story. Yours or someone else's.
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