Stop the Presses! Ghostwriting May Be a Journalist’s Best Alternative Career Path

By Denise Dorman

I shuddered this morning, reading the headline from The Daily Mirror: Robot journalists to start writing news and sports stories for Britain and Ireland’s national news agency. When I earned my journalism degree in the late ‘80s, the idea of job obsolescence wasn’t even a neutrino blip on my radar.

I’ve done my time on both sides of the desk—as a writer and a publicist. This will be no news flash for all of you grizzled journalists out there tired of being the target of public distrust, or mentally exhausted by the demands of editors. The time has come for us to reinvent ourselves. Again.

While I can lament the days of yore when it was customary to

charge $650 for writing press releases (and no keyword research was required) or

create content for clients without being required to know Adobe Creative Suite and Google Analytics (because hey, a writer should be a numbers person and love analytics, right? And in this same fantasyland, accountants are stellar at sales and love after-hours networking functions, too.) Or

read a fact-based creative brief instead of a wild-assed, guesstimated buyer persona

…those days are gone, baby, gone.

Like you, I get dozens of email offers for webinars, but this past August, I saw one that actually grabbed my attention by the lapels and shook me out of my writer’s funk. It was a cursory review for how to get certified in ghostwriting by longtime expert and author Claudia Suzanne. Mind you, I’ve done magazine article ghostwriting for years. And then there was the time I wrote 340 pages of my husband’s 358-page autobiography in one insane, five-day sprint for IDW Publishing. I knew I had the writing chops, but this nagging feeling persisted that I was missing key pieces of information on how to create a more profitable ghostwriting career. That became especially clear when one ghostwriter friend confided she was getting $30,000 for merely writing book proposals that took her eight weeks, cradle to grave. Claudia Suzanne underscored the earnings potential, stating that newbie ghostwriters were earning a minimum $35,000 for writing business books and memoirs. That got my attention. My mid-list fiction author friends weren’t earning that!

At the end of the webinar, Claudia Suzanne mentioned that she had 12 slots open in her ghostwriting certification course, offered through Cal State University, Long Beach. Her master class course would start in September and run through May 2017.

And so my odyssey began.

Since early September, I’ve been online for three hours every Wednesday night – and swimming in several hours of weekly homework — learning the many missing pieces to my education. Claudia Suzanne is granting us a backstage pass to the side of ghostwriting unfamiliar to most career ghostwriters. (I say this with certainty, because many in my class are already earning their livings as ghostwriters, and they are hungry for the information we’re discovering together). I’m learning how to assign BISAC codes, the proper way to format and code manuscripts, how to apply the right templates to manuscripts, how to craft substantive edits, and the many hidden nuances of the publishing industry. It’s already made me a better book publicist, and it’s definitely informed the fiction novel I’m writing.

Perhaps you’re one of the lucky journalists out there for whom chasing down client payments and auditioning for freelance gigs is a non-issue. But if you’re looking to stabilize your income, I recommend you start networking with your ghostwriter colleagues and explore your options. I’m glad I did.

Denise Dorman Denise McDonald Dorman is an award-winning TV and video producer, writer, creative director, and publicist. She owns WriteBrain Media, a Chicago-based marketing, video production, and public relations agency. Denise dreams of one day owning a card-playing parlour called Nice Aces, or perhaps, All Hands on Deck.