In today’s episode, I’m joined by Kevin Anderson, an accomplished ghostwriter and author, and an editor of more than 50 national bestsellers. We dig into what it means to work with a ghostwriter—a very different experience than working with AI. Unlike AI, a ghostwriter polishes your ideas, preserves your voice, and collaborates with you using in-depth interviews and iterative feedback.
We discuss what defines author-ghostwriter success, as well as red flags to look for when choosing a ghostwriter (such as sites run by AI instead of humans), and AI limitations that can create big roadblocks to publishing.
If you’ve ever wondered what ghostwriting involves, and whether it’s the right fit for your book, this episode is a must-listen!
Kevin Anderson is a #1 New York Times bestselling editor, a #1 national bestselling author, and an entrepreneur and founder of multiple seven- and eight-figure editorial service businesses. His flagship company, Kevin Anderson & Associates (KAA) has worked with numerous bestselling and award-winning authors, prominent literary agents, Big 5 publishers, and a long list of public figures, successful professionals, and aspiring authors.
Book recommendation:
- Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, by Will Guidara
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What it really takes to ghostwrite a bestseller | Episode 268 Transcript
These transcripts were generated by robots, not writers.
Stacy: Welcome. Welcome. This week we are going to talk about a topic that I haven’t covered in a ghost writing. And I happen to have one of the most respected individuals in the field here with us to talk shop, including what ghostwriting is, some misconceptions about it, what makes a wildly successful book, and how AI is shaping the industry. So it’s sure to be a very good conversation. I met our guest in person at the London Book Fair earlier this year and knew that I needed to bring him on the podcast to share his expertise with you. So let me introduce you to this week’s guest.
Stacy: Kevin Anderson is a number one New York Times bestselling editor, a number one national best selling author and an entrepreneur and founder of multiple 7 and 8 films, figure editorial service businesses and other businesses as well. His flagship company, Kevin Anderson and Associates, which you’ll hear us refer to as KAA throughout this conversation, has worked with numerous best selling and award winning authors, prominent literary agents, Big five publishers and a long list of public figures, successful professionals and aspiring authors. Kevin, welcome.
Kevin: Thank you, thank you. Happy to be here, stacy.
Stacy: Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this. I want to start with your background because all of us in this industry have some unique path that brought us into this work, into this publishing industry. And I would love to know what your journey was and how you ended up founding kaa.
Kevin:Yeah, great question. So my background was literary theory and criticism. I was going, I was in grad school, I thought I was going to be a professor in an English or a philosophy department. And I really love teaching, I really loved critical thinking. And as a side gig to support myself, I started tutoring. At first it was just individual tutoring and then I, I got so busy that I started hiring my friends for the overflow and that kind of turned into a whole business that were doing English, you know, tutoring and, and some editing. But then, you know, I never really thought it was going to turn into books until a, it just so happened that a, a vanity press reached out and they were really having a hard time finding good copy editing services. And they really liked that.
Kevin: All of our, how we had kind of how we positioned ourselves in the industry is I, I hired all Harvard, all my Harvard colleagues and graduates and such. So we, so we had that as kind of our calling card, I guess something that kind of separated us from everybody else. And, and so they, that caught their eye that there was all these PhDs on the company with the Ivy League pedigree. And so they, they reached out for copy editing services. Well, it wasn’t too long before they sent us a manuscript and many of their manuscripts were in rough shape. And they sent one that was in such rough shape we could not even come close to editing it. And they said, they actually suggested it to us. They said, well, can you just like rewrite it or write it from scratch?
Kevin: You know, like, we don’t really care. We just, you know, we want this. We gotta have something that we can work with. So that was actually the first moment where we transitioned. So it was first book editing and then that’s the transition into ghostwriting. And that really changed our whole business model. Cause we really loved working with books so much more than, I mean, tutoring was fun, but it was, it was just two or three hours at a time. It was really hard to manage. The logistics were really a nightmare in terms of like running a business. Editing and working with books was great because we, it was longer form. You could get really invested in the projects, less turnover. And then also it was just a lot more fun working with books.
Kevin: You know, you really can, you really learn a lot and you can really get. Dig deep into a subject matter. It’s one of the wonderful things about long form is that you can really tackle the depths of the subject rather than just hit the surface level. So we. All those reasons I totally changed the business. I, I carved out different businesses to handle the other services that we used to do and had a CEO hired a CEO to run those. And then I stuck with the book business and that became kaa and we just focused on editing, tutoring, not tutoring, editing, coaching, and then ghostwriting. But yeah, that’s how I got into the book world. Our first, I got our first big success, right?
Kevin:It was our first New York Times bestseller, which is crazy for the Storm from Norman Olstead that hit the New York Times bestseller in 2009. And that book, which is a beautiful book by the way, was the book that really started our trajectory into working with agents, publishers and really elite Authors to bring their books up to publishing standards.
Stacy: What a unique path. That’s not always one that I hear. It’s the business into the industry. And also, as a fun fact, my husband and I met in a lit theory class.
Kevin: Oh, really?
Stacy: Yes, we have that in common.
Kevin:Love over Derrida.
Stacy: Yes, actually, yes, we did Reha in that class. So one of the things I really want to dive into today is ghostwriting. And as somebody who spent a lot of her career ghostwriting earlier, part of my career editing. I know that there’s a lot of misconceptions about ghostwriting. First of all, people don’t really know it exists, or they kind of know a little bit about it, but they. They think of it a little bit as, you know, maybe somebody is not actually working on their book. They kind of just have somebody go out and write it for them, and they’re not really involved in it.
Kevin: Right.
Stacy: And so I’d love for you. Let’s just start with a basic 101 of what Ghost writing is. Can we start there for our listeners?
Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s like, everything else in the world, there’s always, like, a wrong, a right and a wrong way to do things, and there’s always abuses of things that are perfectly great. And, you know, ghost writing. The right way to do ghost riding is that it’s. It’s. It’s really. It’s. It’s working with an author. An author is anyone who has an idea, a story, some kind of wisdom to share. Anyone. Everyone is an author. Everyone has some kind of ideas or story that they’re the author of. But the ghostwriter is taking that story or that idea or that wisdom and putting it into writing, putting it into a book. That’s where the writing comes in. The word ghost can kind of be a misnomer because sometimes ghosts are accredited, sometimes they’re not. But it stems from the ghost.
Kevin: Stems from the fact that they might not. You might not know at all that there was anyone involved in the writing. And so where people can get. Where people can see that there’s maybe an issue here is that they feel like a book has the author’s name on it. That means that they’re. They’re. They’re attesting that they’re the writer of the book. But the way that we see it is that, no, you’re the author of the book. This is your ideas. This is your story. This is your wisdom. All of the words, all the ideas, everything’s coming from you. But you’ve Hired a professional writer to ensure that the writing is really well done and that the writing captures your message and captures your idea. Because so many people have really great oral skills.
Kevin: They can, they can speak in front of a crowd really well, but when it goes to writing, they just really have a hard time articulating it. And just like you don’t do your own taxes or you don’t do your own mechanic work on your car, you know, you people who aren’t professional writers look to professional writers to help articulate their ideas and their stories and their wisdom into a. Into a flow form that can resonate with readers. So that’s essentially what a ghostwriter is doing to us. They’re a sophisticated pen, not the author of the book. So the author’s integrity and the integrity of them as being the author of the work is still intact, even when working with the ghostwriter.
Stacy: I like the way that you broke that down. And I would often explain to my friends that were curious about work that I’m doing that I have, I had. I’ll just take one of my clients, for example, who spent 40 years studying a single molecule for which he won the Nobel Prize. I’ve spent my life studying this craft since I was a child. You know, everything that I could do up through my masters studying this craft. And so it doesn’t necessarily make sense for this research scientist or whatever other expertise or whatever other, you know, wherever people are coming from to then put in all of the time and years and, you know, all that skill. It’s a marriage of skills from two people that are true experts at what they do.
Stacy: And I think when you think about it like that, you can see that this is one of those things where the, you know, it’s greater than the sum of its parts. You really create something bigger together than either of you could have created on your own.
Kevin: Definitely. And, you know, and anyone who’s worked in publishing or writing knows that no book is an island. No book is written just by itself. Ernest Hemingway had a very vicious editor. You know, everyone is working with an editor. Even, even like any professional author, they’re all work. Their work has been heavily edited and curated. And there’s that relationship with, with professionals that happens, that collaboration happens with all books. But ghostwriting is just one where it’s just the term that we’re using, where it’s, it leans much more towards to active writing. And really the author is not putting too much of actual physical pen to paper, but it’s Still a collaboration very similar to any other collaboration and making sure that we have a better product. And it’s always.
Kevin: Books in general are always better when you’re working in collaboration, because when you’re just like anything else, when you’re just stuck in your own echo chamber, you sometimes are not seeing the forest through the trees. So it’s always good to have a collaborator, someone that can, can push you and can really, you know, sharpen the work to make it the best as it can be.
Stacy: Okay, so we have a good definition and understanding the basics of what ghostwriting is. Let’s talk about a little bit more about some of the misconceptions. I think we touched on this already, but I think this idea somehow that authors have cheated through this process by working with a ghostwriter. I feel like we’ve debunked that a little bit. But could you talk about that a bit for anybody that’s considering working with a ghostwriter?
Kevin: Yeah. So, you know, like I said, there are wrong ways to do it. So if you ask me, you know, has it ever been done where someone didn’t even think about the book or topic and they just hired someone to write a book and they put their name on it and stamped their name on it and were not materially involved with it at all? Yeah, I’m sure that, I’m sure that has happened, but that is not the typical way that a ghostwriter works. And in fact, most ghostwriters really reject this way because a ghostwriter, all of their, all of the material is coming from the client. They’re not bringing, they’re bringing a critical analysis to the product project and they’re bringing their experience as a writer.
Kevin: But, you know, all of the content, everything that matters, all of the vision, the details, all of that is coming from the client. Now sometimes the collaboration might be a little bit more involved where the ghostwriter is doing research to kind of help support and figure out what, you know, what can be included in the book to really, to bring it all together. But again, you know, it’s a collaboration. And when. And you’ll see this a lot too, especially more recently, is you’ll see a lot like with credits are very common where, where you have the author that’s crediting the writer. You know, most readers really don’t care, no offense, ghostwriters, but most readers really don’t care who the. With credit is. I mean, it’s all about the author.
Kevin: I mean, that’s what they’re there for is to read, you know, what the author has to say or understand their story. But the. With credit is a nice way of just acknowledging that there was a writer that helped with this project and also just gives some cover time to the writer. It’s something that our firm really, you know, it’s not something that we demand of our clients, but it’s something we strongly encourage. And we, in fact, in all of our contracts, we have that, you know, the base, the default contract is that the ghostwriter will get credited as some kind of collaborative in the project, whether it’s on the COVID or in the acknowledgments. It’s not something we force. We can always take that out. But that is our baseline expectation.
Stacy: I like that a lot. I think that’s really nice. And, you know, I also think that the way an author feels going into it about that collaboration matters because if they look at the value of that collaboration and see that as a bonus to the process, rather than, oh, I’m not actually writing the book, then that kind of reframes it also. And it doesn’t make it something that they need to hide. It’s more something that was such a benefit to this book, it never would have become the book it is without this collaboration.
Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You will see that more and more. I mean, we have a lot of clients that. Some of our clients, some of our ghostwriters, you know, well, some of our clients are so bullish about getting the writer credit and having. They want them like, right next to them on the COVID like, because they value that collaboration so much that they feel like it is, you know, something that they kind of done together and they’re so proud of the work that they’ve done together that they want the, you know, and some, as you may know, some ghostwriters that. Not. That’s not necessarily in, you know, what they want. Not every ghostwriter wants their name on the credit on the book, depending on the kind of list that they’re trying to kind of curate or, or the book.
Kevin: Let’s face it, sometimes the books aren’t, you know, you might not want to be associated with this or that book, but you’re okay to be a part of the collaboration and putting it together.
Stacy: Yeah, it’s nice that you default to that, though, because it also sets a kind of standard for the industry because you do have such a big and respected firm. It’s Other smaller agencies, then look to your agency for how they run things. So I love that you’re setting the standard there. Let’s talk about what makes a great book because you’ve had an incredible track record over the course of your work. Many, many bestsellers, many on major lists that we all know. If you could break down a formula for us. I’m not asking you to give us like an exact formula, but maybe a few of the ingredients for any listener that’s working on a book, aspires to become an author, maybe wants to work with a ghostwriter. What. What would that be? What are those, like, qualities of a great book, Bestselling book.
Kevin: Yeah, so. And obviously that could change a lot between like, you know, on genre, but in, in nonfiction, like a prescriptive nonfiction, one of the things that separates one book from another is a really great voice. You know, really hearing that author’s voice having that unique edge to the book where we can really feel their personality coming through their idiot, their idiosyncrasies, the, you know, bringing in their stories, you know, bringing in stories from their experience that kind of show you why they think the way they think or have come to these realizations that they have really helps crystallize that with. Within the reader. Most, most compelling New York Times bestselling books are going to have a really unique author voice. They’re going to have stories that, that inform the points that they’re making. And of course it’s going to ask.
Kevin: It has to solve some sort of need. You know, there has to be a reason for this book. It’s one thing to have a lot of. It’s. It’s one thing to have had a great career and you’ve learned all this wisdom that you want to share. But what problem are you really solving for readers if. If the things that you’ve learned don’t necessarily solve a problem that, that real people are having in their life or in their business or in their relationships, whatever it is, the book is going to have a hard time finding a home and it’s going to have a hard time finding sales. This is why, this is why something like a business book can be in some ways can be easier or at least a little more straightforward to sell because you know exactly who your audience is. And.
Kevin: But even then, you still have to find what is the problem that these, that business owners are coming up to that they need solved, that this book can then address. A big problem that a lot of authors make is that they try to. A book for everyone is a book for no one is. Is a common phrase. You really want to narrow down a niche on exactly what it is that the book, what is the promise to the reader of what this book is really going to do and if you can solve that. And it’s a, and it’s a real need within readers. And of course, you have a great voice and you got great stories to support it. All these things kind of come together to be a bestseller.
Kevin: And of course there’s a whole bunch of stuff with marketing and getting your out. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of other things, but in terms of the book itself, you know, those are key components.
Stacy: Yeah, I love that you emphasize story because a lot of the clients that I work with, I sometimes have to convince them that story matters. In nonfiction, it feels like it’s fluffy or unnecessary or, you know, but then there’s a lot of actually good psychology around storytelling, remembering things, being moved by things being transformed. So I love that you brought that up. When you have somebody approach your firm that wants to work with you. We talked about what makes a good book. But what are some of the things that you’re looking for that you’re like, we know that we can be successful with this person.
Kevin: So if the author’s passion is really about, is really related to the book and what the book can do and promoting the book and putting the book really first. So what I mean by that is if the book is just a side thing and it’s not really going to be something they’re going to be promoting, going, they’re not going to be doing keynotes around the book. It’s not something that they’re going to be promoting heavily within their newsletters or, or social media. That’s, that’s going to be a recipe for, you know, for a book that’s not going to sell or an author that’s going to be hard to work with. You know, when an author comes in and they know exactly. They don’t have to know exactly what the book is going to be about.
Kevin: But they, but they have a, but they know that, but they’re passionate about the general message that they have to share. And they want this book to be like, they want this book to be their number one priority over the next couple of years. That’s, that’s typically an author that we’re going to have a lot of success with. The other thing that, the other thing that you come across a lot is an author that is willing to. Is willing to learn and understand that they don’t know that they’re working with professionals and to trust a professional. If an author comes in bullheaded and they think they already know what’s going to make the book perfect, and they have their own ideas and they’re not willing to hear any professional advice to that would actually improve the book or help them achieve their goals.
Kevin: That could be a big, you know, a big recipe for disaster. But, yeah, authors are passionate. They’re going to put the book first over the next couple years, and they’re willing to. They’re willing to listen to a professional opinion, to what could make the book even better, and learn through the whole process. That’s an author that we can. That we can definitely work with and we’ll have a successful collaboration with.
Stacy: Typically, I like that you brought in that essentially coachability coming in with a recognition that this is something that they don’t know about yet. I often liken the publishing industry learning about it to, like, learning a new language. You get in and you’re like, wow, I know nothing. There’s just so much to learn, and every layer that you learn, then there’s a deeper place to go. Even me being in this for 17 years, there’s always another area that I find I’m learning about or diving into. So I think that’s such an important quality that. That coachability. I know on my side, when I have, you know, potential authors, future authors come in and they give me this long message about all the specific ways that they want to be supported with, like, very minutia. You know, I’m like, okay, let’s see on a call.
Stacy: But a lot of times when they come in and try to control everything, even before you have the first call, that’s a little bit of a flag for me, because when you don’t know. So coming in and finding really trustworthy places and people is important. The nice thing with your agency is that you have a track record and people can go and see what you’ve done. Same with me. So they can have that trust coming in. Right. That might be actually a point to discuss, too, is the trustworthiness. I’ve had a lot of people, especially when I was in a portion of my career, I was only ghostwriting for about seven or eight years. I now do it alongside other things, but that was my sole work.
Stacy: And I had a number of people that would come to me and then they would go with a less expensive option. And then like a year later, they would come back. So let’s talk about that. For somebody that’s, you know, trying, wants to do this and they’re shopping around, they’re trying to find the best solution. What are some things that they should look for and maybe what are some. Some, you know, red flags that they might want to watch out for?
Kevin: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. You know, we get that all the time. And what we get a lot of, too, is people that start collaborations and then essentially get scammed. You know, the writer completely disappears or they find out they’re not really who they said they were, or they turn.
Stacy: In just like, not a real book. It’s like just a bunch of notes and, you know.
Kevin: Yeah, yeah, it happens all the time. And we. We get a lot of. Yeah, we get a lot of clients that way that came to us first and then went and chose a cheaper option. And then they come back a year later and. And wanting to, you know, realizing that with nothing almost done. So. So there’s a lot that you can do is. Number one, you know, you get what you pay for. Just like anything else, there’s a re. If someone’s selling their services for 10,000 bucks to write a whole book, there’s a, you know, you start doing the hourly math on that and what they actually are getting paid per hour to do that work, it’s going to be something, you know, that they’re making about what Pam Handlers are in, you know, in Times Square. So, you know, you.
Kevin: You gotta do the math and think if this person is really that great at what they’re doing, they’re gonna. They’re gonna have demand. They’re gonna. They’re gonna have other people that are gonna want to hire them. They’re gonna have a price point that’s gonna reflect that. So there is still a wide range, right, in terms of ghostwriting, what it’s gonna cost. But, you know, if. If it’s a real bargain, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. So really watch a big red flag. Any kind of. Any discount, 30, 40, 50, 80% discount happening, you know, run away from that. That’s definitely a scam from. And a lot of these scams are being run from. From other countries.
Stacy: What do you mean discount, Kevin? What do you mean by that?
Kevin: So you’ll. You’ll go onto their website, and usually the website will be something like ghostwriters llc.com or something, or bestghostwriting.com or something like that. There’s a whole bunch of these websites, people running into them all the time. There’s been a couple articles on this that we’ve contributed to and there’s. It’s pretty rampant, but a lot of perspective. A lot of client of our clients have been running into these things. And you’ll get to the website and it’ll have a bunch of covers that are, you know, like Michelle Obama’s cover will be on there, you know, and you’ll be like, this is interesting that Best Ghostwriters llc, you know, had anything to do with Michelle Obama’s book. And then there’ll be some kind of promo, like 80% off our typical pricing or something like that.
Kevin: These are all big red flags if you’re going to a company. So if you’re looking at a company, the first thing you want to do is of course make sure that there’s some kind of track record for this company. You can do this a number of ways. Don’t trust what you see on the website. Right. Go go and find the book. Is there is that name of that service or that writer in some of the books that they’re putting on their website? Look in the acknowledgments and you can find, you’ll, you should be able to find that the name of the Ghost rider or the company in the credits of the book if they’re putting it up on their website or at least. Yeah. So check on this. Another red flag other than price.
Kevin: If you’re going to an individual Ghost Rider, don’t fall for the, oh, I’m a ghostwriter, so I don’t have any credits because everything’s confidential. That’s, that’s, that might have been true in 1992, but now like every, it’s a different industry. Every single ghostwriter that has any sort of credentials, any legitimate ghostwriter is going to have some kind of credits. You know, they might, maybe it’s something they collaborated on that they can’t say that the ghost wrote it or it’s something that they edited. But there’s going to be some notable person, some author that’s going to have a public facing credit for that person. You got to have at least one. If there isn’t even just one and it’s someone that you can verify, then I would definitely not go forward with that, with that individual.
Kevin: There should be a pretty, you know, study the, look at the contract there should be a very good, sensible contract, you know, with any, with any writer. If they’re, if they’re willing to work with you just on a handshake. I would really be cautious of that. It’s, you know, the contract doesn’t need to be overly, you know, overly complicated. But, but you should have some kind of contract. They should have some kind of contract that they’re typically using with their, with their clients. Yeah, some credit. What, what am. I feel like I’m missing a big one. Oh, well, the other thing is with ghostwriting, there’s two things you want to look at primarily. One is track record, which is what we’ve already talked about. Do they have credits? Have they been in the industry?
Kevin: Have they actually done the work that they’re purporting to do? So there’s the track record, but then there’s also the synergy between you and the writer. One mistake that some clients make, that some others make is that they think that personality, like, it’s not your friend. This is a working partner. Right. So just because you get along really well with them and they’re from, you know, they have the same, you know, they have the same kind of dog breed as you have and all these things, those are really fun for like having coffee with and, you know, and whatnot. But that doesn’t necessarily make them the best collaborator.
Kevin: You want someone that’s going to actually sharpen you and that’s going to be a, it’s going to challenge you and it’s going to make your, make you better and not just be a yes person that’s just going to like, do everything that you want them to. So when you’re in that initial interview, look, obviously if it’s something you just can’t stand, you can’t get along with at all, then you know, that’s not probably going to work.
Kevin: But don’t necessarily just go with the, with, you know, if you spent most of your time, know, kind of talking about surface level stuff that was really fun to talk about but had nothing to do with the book or in terms of what’s actually going to make for, make your book better, what they’re going to do with the book and beyond, then, you know, I would just, I mean, just be aware of that. You know, you’re not looking for a friend. You’re looking for a really good collaborative partner that’s going to be professional. And, and also if they’re spending the whole interview talking about niceties and, you know, hobbies, it might reflect a little bit on what they’re going to be spending their time doing.
Kevin: When you’re in the professional collaboration, if do you want to be spending all this money on someone who’s spending a lot of time just chatting, like, I mean, you could do a lot better just, you know, paying for a therapist to just chat about anything you want to chat about. Right? Ghostwriters are expensive. If they’re spending their time, you know, on small talk, then that, that’s gonna, that’s a little hint into how they’re going to be spending their time during the, the, the rest of the relationship. So, yeah, all the, all those things I’d look into carefully. I would look at writing samples. Ghostwriters hate giving writing samples. They, they. I would say that if you really want the. A couple of thoughts, they. Every project is unique. Every book is very unique.
Kevin: And a ghostwriter’s skill is to really capture the voice of their author. So when you’re looking at samples, you can’t really think, you can’t see it and say, oh, that’s not my voice. This must not be the best ghostwriter for me because they are writing that for a specific author. So you can’t, you don’t want to judge them on the voice necessarily, but it should be quality work. You should be able to look at their work and see quality writing. So I would at least ask for samples of their work just to read it and just say, is this good writing or am I seeing, like, is every sentence starting with. And, you know, and, you know, just look at the, look at some kind of writing sample so that you’re doing some due diligence. No, you’re not a professional writer editor.
Kevin: And so you might, but you can still, you should still look at it to see if it’s something the, you know, that’s of a high caliber, at least in your eyes. If you’re going to ask for a writing sample, like an original writing sample, this is something I would. This is something that happens a lot that I would just. This is something that you, if you’re going to do it, pay for it. You know, this is like a lot of their time that they’re not that a writing sample takes a ton of time because you have to get enough understanding of the project to be able to produce a writing sample that is going to match the voice and everything. And that takes a lot of time to understand that and to get to that point even.
Kevin: And the other part is with a writing sample, you have such a limited idea so far of the projects. It’s such. You’ve only just met. And the writer is really being put in an unfair position to try to come up with a writing sample over this project that’s so big and with someone that they’ve just met. So I would say that a writing sample is not needed. But if you really do need it, if that’s something that’s important to you, then understand that you should pay for it. It should be something that you come up and you have a very limited, you know, very clear scope of what it’s going to be. And understand that also that the first drafts are never going to nail it. It, you know, gross. Writing is a process.
Kevin: First drafts are very commonly rewritten 3, 4, 5, maybe even 10 times the very first draft to make sure that you’re really capturing the voice and, and, and what the author really wants is intending for the book. So anyway, that might be too long of answer for a simple question, but yeah, and, you know, another little thing is, you know, go look, look on LinkedIn. Look, any writer is going to have, they’re going to be well connected. They’re going to have connections that you’re going to be able to trust. They’re going to, there’s going to be places that you’re going to see them pop up. That’s going to help, you know, instill trust. If that, if those things aren’t happening, then there’s no. I would, I would run away from that writer.
Stacy: You probably just saved a bunch of people a lot of stress and money and time. So that was so wonderful. A couple other things that came up for me. One is that if you are working with a solo ghostwriter without, you know, a company backing them, you need to make sure that person understands book positioning, not just how to write.
Kevin: That’s right.
Stacy: That’s an important skill and not something that everybody has. You don’t always need to have formal education, but if you don’t have formal education, there needs to be like, some kind of training or background that got you into that space. Space. And then the other one that came up for me, and actually I thought of one of the ghostwriters that works with you is a dear friend of mine, Tim Vandehay. And I thought of him because he’s like, so opinionated. And I think that’s part of what he’s opinionated from expertise. And so I Think if you get on a call with a potential ghostwriter and they’re just like, yeah, we can do that. Great idea, Wonderful. Yeah. And they’re just agreeing with everything you say. That’s probably a yellow or red flag too, because they should bring something to that conversation.
Stacy: To your point, that sharpens it. Such a great list. You’re welcome to anybody that’s. That’s in this process of hiring. Okay, so I’m going to take a little bit of a step to the right. And I’m really sorry, but I’m going to bring up AI because we cannot escape this conversation. Probably every conversation you’re having right now has AI in it. Because, Kevin, can’t we just not hire ghostwriters and just use AI? You know, isn’t. Isn’t that a solution? What, what do you say to that?
Kevin: Well, you can. If you want a really generic book that. That isn’t even going to be accepted by a publisher because publishers aren’t accepting books that have clear AI generated content in them. So AI, I mean, so much to say about AI I think it’s a powerful tool. I think we should use it every way we can. And not everyone agrees with me on that, but I do think we should use it as much as we can for the right, you know, for the right reasons and for the right outcomes, in so much as that they make the outcomes better and that they. And that it makes sense. So the reason why AI makes sense for things like supporting business processes or coding or whatever, you know, these are. These are things that you can dictate and have them do. And it.
Kevin: And it doesn’t really matter what you know. Well, there, let me take a step back and focus really on writing. When it comes to writing, just to be clear, we don’t do any AI generated writing into our books. So any books that we write, it’s not going to have any AI generated content. There’s a couple reasons for this, like I alluded to before. One is the publishing industry. There’s AI detection software. It’s actually remarkably good. It is a cat and mouse game. So it’s going to be a continual, you know, AI is going to improve, and then the software to detect is going to improve. But regardless, publishers are not going to take a manuscript or an agent. I mean, it’s going to ruin your chances if you have AI generated content.
Kevin: But from a quality standpoint, you have to understand that AI, you know, AI is echo chamber. So if you’re just if you’re just working with AI and you’re just putting your prompts in and you’re building your book, it’s still just you and the AI feels like it’s. It’s this, you know, opposing and professional voice. And it can be in some contexts, but in the. But in the. But in writing a book, you’re really going down the rabbit hole. And it’s in itself and it’s very much an echo chamber of material. And it’s not going to have your original edge, it’s not going to have your voice, it’s not going to challenge you. And most of all, the. One of the big problems with AI and the ghostwriter and versus a ghostwriter is that AI it’s not. It’s not, it’s not. It doesn’t have empathy.
Kevin: It lacks empathy. So. And it lacks. It’s not a professional interviewer in so much as. Like a journalist. When a journalist is looking at, like a ghostwriter is very much like a journalist. And when they’re looking in the eyes of. Of the author, you know, they can recognize when the author’s holding something back. And they can also decide whether it’s. Now is the time to really jump on that and try to tease that out or whether this is something they just take a note of and bring up the next time that they kind of see that come up again. And then that’s the moment they jump on it and really go for it and try to pull out whatever that kernel is underneath that. That the author might not even know is there.
Kevin: You know, with AI it’s whatever the author comes up with is what’s going to come out of the AI Whereas with ghostwriting, ghostwriters are trying to find what’s underneath. What the author doesn’t even know is there. You know, a lot of times themes that tie everything together in a book are completely. The author is completely unaware of what this all is. They’re passionate, they have all these ideas. But. But it’s really a ghostwriter’s job is to figure out, okay, what holds us together and what’s the real nuggets that make this a really powerful story or idea for readers. And, and you can’t do that in an echo chamber with AI when you’re the one dictating the prompts.
Kevin: And whereas a ghostwriter can really can read the facial expressions, can time their questions appropriately based on the mood of the conversation, and they can challenge and push the author in ways that AI Just Doesn’t. Not to mention, the AI is also just like, you know, again, you know, in terms of quality standpoint, the stuff that AI generates, it’s not good. It is generic, it’s repetitive. Even if you say be less repetitive, you know, is the next prompt, it’s still coming out very. There’s no edges, there’s no personality, and a lot of times it’s wrong. It hallucinates. There’s a lot of, like, you know, even in the best case scenario, you’re having to really edit carefully with a human. Even just, you know, even in AI’s best, there’s still a lot of work to do to the manuscript.
Kevin: Not to mention all these other factors. But. Yeah, and also AI, you know, by definition, it only draws on what’s already in the soup. Right. So, like, if you’re wanting to get something truly original like this, like, think about a memoir, like all the stories, all of the, like, AI doesn’t have access to any of that. All of the unique things that make a person them. You know, AI doesn’t have the. It doesn’t have any of that in. In. In. In itself. So that ought to be drawn out. And to draw that out in a way that’s authentic and is really getting the edge. You really need a human being to do that or do it, you know, or. Or if you’re, you know, you can get a lot of that out yourself, but having a.
Kevin: Having a professional ghost rider really helps to bring out what you didn’t even know was there.
Stacy: I think, I mean, all of what you said, and I was just reflecting on some of my experiences with clients, and I. I can’t think of one client that did not shed tears at some point during our conversations. And sometimes it was, you know, as a ghostwriter, you have to be so good at guiding people and also letting them go when it’s appropriate. Yeah, and reading body language and seeing when they need a break. And, you know, I would sit with people for like 40 hours in a week and, you know, have lunch with them, have dinner, meet their family, go meet their friends. And a conversation with a dad, their dad might give me a whole new angle on something that I never even would have thought of.
Stacy: And so I think, you know, to your point, you know, at a purely artistic sense and kind of like the purity of the art of books, I really believe that books are one of the purest expressions of humanity. And so I think we have a duty to protect that. And I think that by the nature of them being one of the Purest expressions of humanity. Humanity has to be central to the creation and all of the. Really the creation of it, whether you’re writing it yourself or you’re working with a ghostwriter, you’re working with a coach. And then, yeah, even on the purely practical side, like, it’s not good. It’s really not good. And even editing something that’s not good is still going to be not good, because you’re missing. We talked about book positioning briefly.
Stacy: You know, some of those key themes, the stories, all of those things. It’s. Yeah. When you’re right. Oh, go ahead, Kevin.
Kevin: Sorry, it’s not. Sorry to interrupt, but. But, yeah, what you said there is so important, and it’s partly why we really emphasize in person interviews, at least for part of the process. You know, a lot of times we’re sending people into people’s homes or places of business, interviewing not just them, but interviewing their family and friends. And so, I mean, it’s not even every single book. Every single book we write, so many of the nuggets come from something we never even saw coming. It’s like a conversation that didn’t even have to do with, you know, maybe what were talking about. And it’s like, oh, wait, that’s an interesting idea that relates to this thing over here that we talked about a week ago. And, you know, those aha. Moments, none of them are dictated through prompts.
Kevin: You know, these aha Moments are coming often from completely disconnected things that didn’t seem to have a connection at first that we then realize and recognize in the moment. And so that’s just something that. It’s just something that you’re not getting from typing in chat prompts. You know, it’s just a totally different process. And, and having that in person, in their place, in their home, in their. With. With their. With people that are their loved ones or their. Or their colleagues. I mean, it’s. It’s those conversations that. That are so important to really finding out what. What. What the book really is and what the story really is. So. Yeah, no, it’s.
Kevin: It’s. It’s. Yeah, I. I definitely align with what you said.
Stacy: Yeah. Well, I feel like we could keep going on and on. There’s so much to say. And then we could really have, like, podcast episodes about almost every topic we’ve touched on today. But my hope is that this conversation has been hugely beneficial for somebody that’s on their journey or maybe considering their next book. Kevin, let me ask you the question that I ask all of the guests. And that is, if you could, I know it’s going to be hard, but if you could recommend one book to listeners. So it’s a book that profoundly impacted your life. What would it be and why?
Kevin: All right, that is.
Stacy: Sorry. I’m sorry.
Kevin: It’s a difficult question. And, you know, so I. So many books have had such a big impact and so many of them have been, you know, from so many different genres. But so I’m going to pick a recent one that impacted our business, which would be Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Gurdara. Incredible book, really, just about the passion of service, about the passion of what we bring to. What we bring to work every day and what we do and how we do it and just making people’s lives better, making surprising people with delight, ensuring that every, you know, all my companies are in the service industry, in the real estate as well as in the, in writing. And, and it’s such an honor to be in a industry where you can help people. Right. You know, and you.
Kevin: Where you can actually where people’s lives are being changed for the better. Not just the author in the process of writing the book, but also all the people that the book is affecting. And that’s true whether it’s memoir or prescriptive nonfiction. I mean, books really have an impact on people and it can really change lives in a real exponential way. You know, a book, can you transform even small changes with one person, one member of the family that affects the rest of their family, which, you know, so it’s like an exponential impact that books have. And Unreasonable Hospitality talks a lot about just how to really, you know, what you bring to the sir, what you bring when you know, to service and just the honor of being able to make someone’s life better and make their day special.
Kevin: And I won’t give away all the, the details of the book, but it’s a great book and I definitely highly recommend it to anybody. Not just somebody who’s in the service industry, but anyone who’s just going to work every day and thinking about how they can make the people make the people. How they can make. How they can make the lives of the people around them better by little things in terms and just anticipating what would make them feel special that day. So anyway, it’s a great book. Highly recommend it.
Stacy: I have heard of that, but I haven’t read it, so I’m going to add it to my list and thank you for that recommendation. Kevin, where can people learn more about KAA and reach out if they’re interested in working with you?
Kevin: Yeah, our website is the best place. It’s ka writing.com so k a writing.com and yeah, we’re really easy to connect with, you know, by call, email, whatever. We’re happy to talk and you know, our, just so you know, we’re happy to talk with anybody and help them figure out, you know, like their publishing plan without there’s not, you know, there’s not upfront fee or anything like that. Just, just call us and we’ll have a half hour, 40 minute conversation with you to help figure out what’s going to be the best way forward for you. The biggest thing that I find, the biggest mistake most people make is that they don’t, they wait too long to get professional advice. Yes.
Kevin: It doesn’t mean you need to hire someone right away, but just, you know, getting some professional advice early on can save you a ton of time and frustration in the future. So yeah, give us a call and we’re happy to have a conversation with you and give you a really honest answers about where you’re at and what’s going to be the best potential path for you in publishing.
Stacy: Wonderful. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed our conversation. Kevin:Yeah, likewise. Thank you so much.
Stacy: And thank you to you, our listeners, our viewers for joining us. As I’ve said multiple times, I know this will be hugely valuable for you on your author journey. I want to thank as always Rita Domingues for her production of this podcast. She is the reason that you are watching this on YouTube or listening to it in your podcast app. App. Because without her it would never make it out into the world. So I am grateful and I will be back with you before you know it.
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