Kindle Publishing: How to hire a ghostwriter that will write you a bestseller

The reason why Kindle publishing can be a passive income business, is all thanks to outsourced talent. And the biggest part of this outsourced talent is the writer. The writer will make or break your book after the initial launch, which is why it’s important to hire a good writer. The only problem is, many publishers hire bad ones, and some hire the downright ugly ones.

Have you heard of the usual complaints from Amazon customers:

“The grammar in this book is horrible…”

“The author must have hired someone who doesn’t speak english…”

“The book was full of repeated facts. It’s like they just copied and pasted from the internet…”

These are the most common reviews you find on badly produced books. It’s always the same old thing, grammar, spelling, fluidity of language and organisation. or the lack of.

It only makes sense that no publisher would purposely publish a crap book, so why does it happen so often?

The simple answer is, they don’t know how to hire a good writer and they’re too lazy to check the quality of work before publishing it. I’m going to assume you’re not too lazy to proofread or at least hire someone reliable to proofread your book before publishing. That’s why this post will focus on finding and hiring a good ghostwriter.

Step 1: Research

The first thing you want to do is to know what you want your book to be about. You do this by doing your own research and creating a book outline. You’ll want to do this chapter by chapter, the more detail the better. This shouldn’t take you more than an hour max. (depending on how much or little you know about the topic) and it shouldn’t be longer than two pages.

I provide an example book outline in my video lesson here. I also provide a step-by-step hiring process to follow, which makes finding a great writer painless and fail proof.

Step 2: Creating your Job posting

Once you have a book outline, you’re ready to start finding a writer. I like to hire my writers personally through freelancer because I get the best value for money. That doesn’t mean the cheapest writer, it means I get great quality work for a great price. You could use ghostwriting services, but I have tried a few and they always come back with mix results.

The reason for this is due to having no control over who actually writes your book and there’s no opportunity for you to communicate with the writer directly. It’s the lazy way to go about it and it’s the way that will get you bad reviews.

I don’t recommend it.

Instead go on a freelancing website to hire the writer directly. I use freelancer.com because there’s lots of great writers that write well at a cheaper price compared to upwork.

When you make your job post, you’ll want to include a few things:

job title that reads “ghostwriter needed for (insert your book topic)
Job description needs to include the following
- estimated deadline
- number of words
- the rate you’re willing to pay
- a brief overview on what the book is about
- a short question that they need to answer when they apply

Everything should make sense all the way up to the last bullet point, yeah? Ok, let me explain. A lot of these freelancers will apply to any job without even reading the ad, which makes your job of finding a good writer a lot harder.

So just add a simple question like “what’s the capital of India?” and ask them to provide you an answer when applying.

You can then proceed to skim through all the applications and discard all the ones that fail to answer the question. What you’re left with are the ones that have at the very least understood and read your job post.

Step 3: Interviewing

Once your post is live on the site, you should be getting a lot of applications flooding in within hours. I start filtering the applications as they come in to make the task more manageable. If you choose to use freelancer then this is how I narrow down the applications.

I delete all the ones with zero reviews
I delete all the ones with less than a 4 in their overall rating
I delete all the ones that haven’t answered my small question at the bottom of the post

Once you do this, you should have deleted the bulk of all applications and are left with experienced freelancers that know what they are doing. You need to message each one and start going over the details with each. Provide your outline to them and ask them to write you a 500 word sample on the topic to test their knowledge.

Some may want a fee for the sample, but I never agree to paying for a sample unless the topic is extremely technical in nature.

Step 4: Hiring

Once you’ve gone through all the samples, you should be able to confidently know which writer is the best one for the job. By this point all the details should have been made clear and you can proceed to provide the non-disclosure agreement as well as the payment arrangement with them.

I like to split the payment into 2 parts for new writers I work with, and only one payment for writers I trust.

NEVER pay upfront. DO pay when you are satisfied only.

Happy publishing!

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