While I interact on this board under my YA/Adult Thriller pen name, I'm also a Romance Ghostwriter (both for packagers and the Big 5) and I also self-publish Romance as well. I have some questions, because this is throwing up all sorts of red flags for me as a Romance writer and as someone who works as a ghost:
Are you providing outlines for these books? Or are you expecting the writers to come up with the concepts and outlines themselves? If so, the writer should be paid for the concept development and outline as well.
They are indeed paid for this. The ghost writer is paid 60% of gross revenue. Very curious what the standard royalty rate is for the work you do. To put it in perspective, selling $20K/month would generate you $12,000 in take-home royalties. There are no expenses recovered from that amount. It is coming from gross revenues.
What Romance sub-genres are these pen names in? Romantic Suspense is a lot different than Contemporary Romance and Sweet Romance is a whole other world than Dark Romance. All require very different writers.
Yes. This is true. The erotic romance pen name is contemporary new adult erotic romance. There are no paranormal elements. Pure contemporary. I apologize for not being more specific. It is broadly defined, by the way. You could conceivably move in a biker gang or billionaire romance direction, and the romance genre certainly has examples of authors who navigate that way.
You say the ghosts will own the copyright. What about subsidiary rights? Audio? Translation? Film?
Yes, the writer retains all rights. To be clearer, this is more like a traditional publishing contract than a ghost-writing contract. The thing you don't own is the name, and the associated support things that go with it: Facebook page, mailing list, etc. Of course, we can discuss ownership of before/after. For example, if the mailing list sits at 2,500, then every person that joins after could be "owned" by the writer. My goal here is win-win.
I'm not sure why you say "You're 100% earned out from day one." when you don't pay advances. A writer can't be "earned out" when there as been no advance on the table in the first place, unless you think it's standard for publishers to charge their ghosts for things?
You can perhaps educate me here. As a ghostwriter, when do you start earning royalties? In month 1? If not, how long is the delay and what triggers you getting royalties? Part of the disconnect here is that this isn't really a ghost writing contract. This is a straight high royalty/no advance contract with a kicker that the pen name does not belong to the writer. To put it in perspective, if at contract end the writer wanted to take the work and publish it under a separate pen name, they could 100% do that.
From a ghosting perspective: In my experience, when working for a publisher or packager in a ghostwriting capacity, you are provided a detailed outline from the packager or publisher (my last one for a 110K novel was 16,000 words, complete with character profiles) and you write from that outline. If the ghost comes up with the concept and outline themselves FOR the publisher or packager, they are paid extra for these services. While royalty shares can be negotiated in a ghosting situation, there is almost always a lump sum in addition (or instead) of a royalty share.
Most ghost-writing situations have minuscule (or no) royalties, no? So the trade-off is this: You get a lump sum, but if the book is a huge success you don't share any of that upside. This is more like a publishing contract than a ghost-writing contract. If you are paid $20,000 for a a 50K book, and it earns $20K/month, you would do WAY better with me after two months. So it's a risk-reward for the writer. That doesn't make it bad. It just makes it different.
I would be immediately cautious of a ghosting job that is all royalty promises (with no actual sales figures for the pen name) and no outright payment for the job. Ghosting is difficult, often very harried work under a time constraint. Getting paid half upfront has been standard in every ghosting contract I've ever personally signed.
Happy to share data with those interested. In fact one of the pen names has a release on Monday. Interested parties can track its Amazon rank to their heart's content.
I'm confused by your offer to to sell the pen names to the ghost. Do you mean the backlists as well? What kind of contracts do you have with the authors who wrote those books? Do you have all the rights to them? What kind of pricing would you put on this, especially considering many of your erotica author's backlist on your site's books rank in the millions? Is this a reflection of the pen names you're planning on selling rankings? Because that kind of backlist would be more of a hinderance than an asset.
The backlist grows in value (to a lesser extent in romance, but it still grows) as new books are released. This is simply an offer to the new writer that if they want to own the pen name 100%, I'd be happy to sell them everything. The current backlist is in flux, as within the past two weeks, I've unpublished all of them and moved them to Pronoun for wide distribution. This was a strategic decision, and it is what it is. Happy to share all the sales figures with interested parties.
To be clear, there is no requirement or even need for someone to buy that stuff. I just thought it would be nice to include it because let's look at the best case scenario:
New ghost writer is committed to the pen name, and it explodes, making $30K/month in revenue. The writer loves the money but is nervous over this important part of their now substantial income being under the control of someone else. Now he or she can say, "Well, I have rights to that if I use the contracted terms to do it." Of course he or she would have negotiated that in advance of doing any work, so they know that they are protected.
I'm also deeply concerned by your desire to have your ghosts run all the social media accounts of the pen names for you. This is NOT standard in my experience. Even on the pen names I have originated for packagers or publishers, I have no dealings with the social media of those pen names. My job is to write the books, edit them with my editor and answer little technical questions for the cover designer, etc. My job is not to do unpaid social media work for the packager or publisher or promote a book I ghosted.
It's very clear to me now that "ghost writer" is the wrong term to use. I'm simply looking to sign a regular publishing contract with someone who is interested in using an established pen name that can give them a small but significant head start. The upside is orders of magnitude more than you would get via ghost writing, and the risk/work is higher. As I noted in the post above, if someone doesn't want to ghost write but would rather use their own name, I'd be happy to sign them. The difference is a 70% royalty instead of a 60%, and they obviously use their own name.
From the self published Romance author perspective: Look, I don't mean to be rude, but I have to be realistic here: a 2,000+ subscriber newsletter is not a big selling point. When I launched a new pen name, I had that within 6 weeks, without releasing a book yet. Many Romance writers in the self-pub world have 30-40,000 subscribers on their list.
Well, you can get large lists fast via Instafreebie and Facebook ads and shared giveaways of Kindle Fires. Yeah. I get it. You can do that without even having a book released. Then you're welcome to 15% click through rates. I mean I've done the research. Instafreebie lists with "free" in the subject line have 60% or higher open rates. That plummets when you are doing a new release email. Anyway, this list is primarily from backmatter and a joint venture with Written Word Media.
But all of that doesn't really matter. This isn't an opportunity for someone who has the knowledge, resources, and drive to self-publish. I recommend people self-publish. I don't
want to publish people, really. I'd prefer they do it on their own. But there are many writers who just want to write and that's it. They'll answer reader email and comment on Facebook posts, but that's it. Paying for cover art, or organizing a newsletter swap or figuring out whether to use Bookfunnel or Instafreebie just isn't what they want. All I want to do is give them an opportunity to fulfill their dream.
And unless those twitter and facebook accounts have tens of thousands of followers, it's not going to make a huge difference.
Twitter and Facebook even with tens of thousands of followers don't make a difference. I'd be just as happy if the prospective writer said, "I don't have time for that, can we chuck it?" I'd be like. Sure! I have them available if you want them.
Paid ads, like Facebook Ads or AMS ads or newsletter promos, are what is currently driving the self-pub Romance world and are the affective devices that lead to visibility and loyal fanbases.
AMS ads are becoming more difficult for a number of reasons (dammit, Amazon, why'd you open them up to non-Select books?) since I beta-tested them a year ago, but they still have a nice ROI if you know what you're doing. Facebook ads are better if you have a series or a bundle, which is one of the reasons I'm looking for a writer... that's currently lacking.
While backlist can be helpful when you lock in that loyal reader who will read your entire backlist after discovering your new release, it's not like the ghost will be earning money off those titles, the publisher will if there's sell through but in the self-pub Romance world, releasing on a 4-6 week cycle is more important to visibility and steady sales than backlist. Remember: backlist sales only help you, the writer, if you OWN the backlist. AND if the backlist actually sells.
Of course.
So, I realize that some of your titles, especially if they're ghost pen names, might not be on your site. But looking at your site, there seems to be only 2 books by the same author under your erotic imprint and only 1 in your Romance. I see on Amazon there are a few more by your Erotica writer. Looking at them, some of your erotica covers are off-market, especially the billionaire title and they look, as a whole, a little cheap. Beautiful covers are a must in Romantic Erotica. Your Roxy Callahan books are all in the six or seven figures, rank-wise (with the exception of the free book) which means very few (or no) sales in a given day. They also have very few reviews and quite a low star rating. It's not that difficult to build a small but loyal fanbase with Romance if you release consistently and utilize ARC's, a review team and Romance-centric newsletter promos, but it doesn't seem like this author has done that. Is this one of the pen names you plan on selling to your ghostwriters? The Romance title, meanwhile, has a better cover, but the blurb is not formatted correctly on Amazon and it's only available as a paperback and it's 12.99 and in the 4 million range, ranking-wise, which means it is not selling.
As note above, this past week I moved all of the books to Pronoun rather than direct. (Well, I'm not done yet, but you get the idea). There are reasons for that which I'm happy to share with prospective authors, but suffice to say that it was done for very good reasons. Of course, the downside of moving distribution is that you lose your ASIN and the accompanying sales rank. I'll be contacting Amazon about getting the reviews moved over this week, but, effectively, they are all starting from scratch. Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two forward, as is the case here.
So I guess my question is: what exactly are you offering to these ghosts that they can't do themselves? Unless I'm misunderstanding, you want to the ghosts to:
1) Come up with the concepts for the books
2) Write the books on a speedy schedule
3) Apparently edit the books, because your site says you don't do developmental editing, just copy-editing
4) Do all the social media for the pen names
5) Do all this work for several months without ANY payment since KDP releases royalties every 60 days. And do all this work for only 60% of the royalties (does the ghost get to set the price, or is that you? What about the choice to go wide vs enrolling in KU?)
6) Do all this work with no actual promise of true compensation, because who knows how many books will actually sell.
7) Pay you either a lump sum or out of their royalties to obtain the pen name that they will have put all the work in to develop
So essentially, you're asking them to do everything that a self-pubbed Romance writer does, but they don't own the pen name and they have to buy it from you if they want it or make it a success, and they don't get an advance and they don't have as much control.
This is exactly right, and if you stop using the term ghost-writing it suddenly makes sense. Let me paraphrase:
So essentially, you're asking them to do everything that a self-pubbed Romance writer does, but they don't have to pay for the cover, Bookbubs, editing, ebook, and print layout, and they don't have to pay for AMS or Facebook ads or other marketing? You would normally do this as an indie publisher for 70% royalties, but if the author prefers to have a small head start, they can use the pen name you already have for 60% royalties?
Yes. That is exactly right. The author has to determine whether the existing fan base and mailing list is worth 10% of gross revenues. If not, then no harm no foul, they can have me publish them directly or they can self-publish themselves and pay for the covers, editing, etc.
Hell, I'd even consider just
giving the writer the pen name, but I'd probably want some kind of longer term deal. Say 7 years or something. I'm really really not trying to do anything here other than provide a small head start for a young author without the resources to do it themselves. If there are none that fit the bill, then that would actually make me happy.
As I tell everyone: I recommend you self-publish. It's the bigger win, but it requires work and investment. If you don't have the money and simply don't want to learn Adobe Indesign or Photoshop, then I'm a resource for you.
Realistically, writers: if you want to pursue the Romance world via self-publishing, I would highly recommend doing it yourself. This is being presented as an "easy" way to jump in, but it's full of red flags and seems like a ton of work for not as much pay-off as you could have doing it yourself (or pursuing trade publication if that's your goal). You can get a lovely cover for a decent price, find a good editor, format a beautiful book through Vellum if you have a Mac, and join some self-publishing groups to figure out tips and tricks. Or you can whip that query letter into shape, take the plunge, and look for an awesome agent instead! But as a ghostwriter, know that you should be paid well for your time, your ability to write fast and well and clean (not everyone can do this!) and if you're doing concept development, you should be paid for that as well.
See, this is the kind of advice that sends writers into depression. You are saying all the things that I say, but you are positioning it as kind of easy. "Just get Vellum, and you're good to go." Well, Vellum is $200. Did you ever consider that some writers can't afford that? Getting a decent pre-made cover will still cost you $50 or so. You then need to sit down and learn all that stuff. "And oh my god, Facebook ads are costing me $20/day and I can't afford that!" What you don't seem to get is that there are not two categories of writers: Those that send query letters and those that self-publish. There is a large third group: Those that are too afraid or unable to self-publish and have exhausted every agent and publishing house that they can think of.
I'm here to give them a place to publish if they want it. My royalty rates are very generous, and the writer doesn't ever pay a dime.
As noted above, I clearly confused things by calling this ghost-writing. It's a publishing contract with a pen name attached. It has some value, I do know that, and part of negotiation is assessing that value. I pegged it at $1 out of every $10 earned. If that's too much, then I'll figure something else out. It's about win-win.
