United Ghostwriters

The secrets to selling your book idea to publishers

October 6, 2020October 6, 2020
by Teena Lyons

‘I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others….I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.’ Thomas Edison The quest for a publisher should begin before you even put pen to paper, or more likely finger to keyboard. In fact, ‘What are your thoughts on publishing?’ is one of the first questions I ask all prospective authors I speak with. My purpose is to steer the conversation around to the commercial aspects of the exercise. While creating a book is one of the most satisfying

September 28, 2020September 29, 2020
by ShannonKyle

Before I began writing for a living, I always imagined by some miracle the journey would be simple. All I needed to do was write well and someone, somewhere, would offer a book deal, whether I was ghosting or writing under my own name. But as John Lennon once said: ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’ And when it comes to writing, especially if you have the goal of finding a publisher, lots of ‘life’ is likely to ‘happen’ while you’re trying to create a bestseller. Dammit. Turns out it ISN’T just talent and

September 20, 2020September 21, 2020
by Susan Feldstein

I’ve always been a fan of a good problem page – aren’t we all? (OK, probably not, but I think there are more of us than might care to admit it!) For this reason, one of the many things I look forward to on my regular trips (pre-lockdown, that is) with my American husband to see my mother-in-law in New York is the New York Times Sunday Magazine, with its regular column, The Ethicist, compiled and written by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Every week, the NYU Professor of Philosophy and Law selects one or two ethical dilemmas from a plethora of

September 7, 2020September 7, 2020
by Ian Shircore

Funny how things rub you up the wrong way, isn’t it? There it is again. “Writing’s not that easy,” says the smugly irritating ad-girl’s voice that gets in the way and sends me lunging for the “Skip ads” button every time I want to watch a YouTube clip. Not that easy, indeed! No one ever said it was, did they? I remember Clive James quoting Thomas Mann’s opinion – “A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people” – and adding that the whole point was to make it look easy, like a conjuror

August 31, 2020August 31, 2020
by CaroHandley

You’re excited. You have a great idea for a book; you know what you want to say, you can picture the cover, you ran the idea past your friend/colleague/partner and they loved it. You can almost smell that scent of newly-printed pages and see the cover on the table in the bookshop… And that’s where the fantasy ends. Because to get to that glorious moment when you hold your published book in your hand, you’ve got to write it. And that takes a lot of time, thought, effort and creativity, when actually, your life is already overfilled and you really

Our Blog

The secrets to selling your book idea to publishers

The Importance of Being Persistent

The Ethics of Ghostwriting: What would Professor Appiah do…

Writing’s not that easy…

Working with a Ghostwriter