Ready to hire a ghostwriter? You might wonder about the ghostwriter contract and the fees. Here is what you should find in a ghostwriter contract.

(Updated for 2023)

So, your search for a ghostwriter is complete. Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work. What comes first? The contract, of course. Make sure that the agreement covers everything important. Better than reading a sample ghostwriting contract template, here is a quick guide of what to watch for in a ghostwriting contract.

In a hurry? Skip straight to the highlights video below:

• Ghostwriter contracts 101: most important things to include in a ghostwriter agreement

What should be included in a ghostwriter contract?

Here are the seven most important items to include in a ghostwriter contract.

• Author rights
• Price of ghostwriting
• Length of manuscript
• Timeline
• Research
• Confidentiality and non-disclosure
• Collaboration with the ghostwriter

Author rights

The most important item to cover in a ghostwriting contract is your rights.

(NOTE: Nothing about ghostwriter contracts that appears in this article is intended to serve as legal advice; for that you should contact a duly accredited attorney.)

According to international copyright practices, supported by the Universal Copyright Convention (PDF), the writer is always owner of his or her words. In this case, the writer is a hired gun, so you don’t want copyright for your project to be owned by the writer. It is critical to make sure that any contract you sign with a ghostwriter assigns all rights to you, the author. That includes film rights, audio rights, foreign rights, and any other rights.

Just how important are rights? It is mostly for this reason that we work with contracts when writing books for clients rather than just invoicing. There are many reasons people hire ghostwriters; for most small projects, we quote a price by email and complete the project if the client agrees.  But for major works, like books and screenplays, it is essential to specify the copyright.

Price of ghostwriting

How much does ghostwriting cost? As important as rights are, I have found that pricing is the most obvious item clients look for in a ghostwriter contract.  In fact, people often ask about the ghostwriter contract and fees together.

You want to know how much you will be paying and when each installment is due.  The contract should be very clear on this point.

• READ MORE: How to save on ghostwriting fees

Payment can be arranged in a number of ways, including a portion up front and a portion upon completion.  Or it can be all up front.  Part of the payment might be in the form of royalties, although you will find that option as rare as a penguin sipping margaritas on the Playa Del Carmen. As Laura Sherman puts it:

“Never ask a professional ghostwriter to work solely for a percentage of the back end (royalties). It’s not something a reputable writer would do. However, a student, who wishes to gain experience, might jump at such an offer.”

Some ghostwriters will demand scheduled payments, others prefer to use milestones.

Our ghostwriter contracts use milestones. We typically divide payment in thirds, but we are flexible on that.  The idea is to work at the writer’s and the client’s pace, making sure the writer can eat along the way, protecting the client from having to dump the world’s largest piggy bank on the table all at once, while still keeping our administrative work to a minimum.

Length of manuscript

The second most obvious item in the contract is the length of the document. When you hire a ghostwriter, you’ll be paying x amount of money; you’ll want to get y amount of writing.  The length of the document can be expressed in a number of ways:

• chapters
• pages
• words
• characters (meaning characters like A or B, not characters like Harry Potter or Anne Shirley)
• minutes, in the case of screenplays (which are typically measured by pages)

We like to count by words, as it is the most accurate (or least inaccurate) way to count the amount of writing we will deliver to a client.  Chapters could mean almost anything.  Comparing the length of a Michael Crichton chapter with a Gregory MaGuire chapter is like comparing the height of Mother Teresa with the height of Nelson Mandela.

Even pages are hard to quantify as the same text can vary by as much as two dozen pages, depending on page size, font size, font face, kerning, white space, margins, line spacing, average paragraph length (lots of dialogue will probably mean many short paragraphs that don’t fill complete lines) and even indentation.

As for characters, that’s just silly (not Harry Potter or Anne Shirley, of course – they are not silly).

Words are the best way to establish the length of the manuscript.  Although the average word in the English language is 5.1 – 7.9 characters long, the average length of words used is 4.5 – 5.0 characters long (depending on which source you turn to); remember how often we use short words like “to”, “a” and “of”, and how rarely we use longer words like “defenestration” and “hyperpigmentation”. For those who are hopping on the edge of their seats with excitement over these numbers, you’ll really get a kick out of this data.

Just for fun, I put three of my blog posts to the test for the length of their words using this tool.

• This humorous post, really more a string of jokes, has 5.2 characters per word.
• This article about “point of view“, has 5.4 characters per word.
• This glossary of writing terms has 5.9 characters per word.

What you can learn from this is that I use too many big words or not enough small words.  I tested each of these posts for readability using this readability tool, and fortunately, it likes my work anyway.

Phew. Big words, but clear English.

While word count is my preferred means of identifying the length of the manuscript, I am careful not to get too restrictive.  If the contract was to specify that a manuscript is to have 60,000 words, what happens if it comes in just beautifully at 60,178?  Or at 58,251?  Should the ghostwriter add in a couple hundred words just to meet an arbitrary and rounded word count?  That’s not serving the client well, and all it does is stress out the writer. Nobody wins.

Our ghostwriter contracts all commit to a range of words, such as 55,000 – 65,000, or an approximation of “about 60,000 words.  That way the client has a good sense of what they are paying for, the writer doesn’t have to stress too much about word count, and the manuscript will be as good as it can be.

QUESTION: What if the client complains that the 58,251-word manuscript isn’t “about 60,000”?

ANSWER: It’s never happened to us in a decade-and-a-half. If it did, we would offer to add a few words, but we would caution against it. Adding water to your cream of asparagus soup might fill the bowl, but it won’t make it tastier or more nutritious. Adding words just to hit a number won’t make the manuscript any better.

Timeline

It’s not just the length of the manuscript that is important to clients; the length of time it takes to complete is also often an issue.  This is understandable.  You want a timeline specified, so that the ghostwriter you hire does not drag their feet too long. You are eager to see your book in print.

In the real world, the writer is a professional (Our writers certainly are!) who pretty much sticks to a as rigorous a schedule as the client will let her.

The client, on the other hand, is living his life, with all the complications, schedule changes and unexpected events that come with living life. Sometimes the client does not have time to review each chapter as it comes back from the writer. I have seen busy people take a month to get back to the writer with an “OK” or a list of changes required. I have seen clients disappear for three months or five months.

In one case, the client disappeared for nine months without any way to reach him by phone or email, then return full of pep and verve and motivation and vim and energy and all sorts of other words from his Thesaurus.

A six-month job can easily take 12 months.  Our contracts all specify an “expected” end date – much like an “expected” end date to a pregnancy – at the end of which, a book is born.

With the timeline as with manuscript length, mutual expectations are important. But nobody benefits from rushing either the writer or the client. We do not want to force clients to meet a contractual deadline while trying to juggle a change of jobs, a cross-country move or an unexpected hospital stay of one of their parents. That does not serve the client well, and the quality of the input and feedback would really suck.

Ironically, those few times that clients have stomped their feet and insisted on specific dates, they have inevitably failed to provide timely information required for the project. Not even close.

Research

Do you expect the writer to do research for you?  If so, take the time to outline exactly what is expected. Asking “How much work does it take to do research?” is like asking, “How deep is a hole?” or “How long is time?” or “How far is away?”

The default in our contract templates specifies that no research will be done. Our writers usually do some research anyway, such as checking small details about a location or an event, but if there is specific information you need included in your manuscript, either provide it yourself or detail exactly what needs to be gathered by the writer.

CAVEAT: If you are dealing with a hoity-toity, gold-plated writing agency, one that charges $30,000 or more for a 75,000 word book, you should expect unlimited research.  That’s just my opinion, of course; don’t try telling them that I said so. Just make sure if you need research to be done, the contract lays down the rules.

Confidentiality and non-disclosure

If this is ghostwriting, you might not want it known that you had help.  Some of our clients are very particular about this.  Others don’t mind their collaboration with a ghostwriter being known. If this is important to you, make sure it is included in any agreement you sign.

You might also want to be very specific about non-disclosure. This usually is not necessary, but I have found some clients feel this is very important. This could be part of the ghostwriter contract. Or it could form a separate non-disclosure agreement, especially if the you need to share information before signing a contract.

Collaboration with the ghostwriter

You might want the contract to include details about the type of contact you will have with the ghostwriter. On a rare occasion, a client will demand face-to-face meetings with the writer, although that obviously leads to higher costs. Some clients want frequent contact with the writer; others want to let the writer run with the topic.

The default in our ghostwriting contract template specifies that it is the client’s responsibility to make sure they are satisfied with the content as it is being produced, so we build a chapter-by-chapter contact into our process. The default in our contract template also offers a default price for face-to-face meetings, should the client wish to make use of that option after signing the contract.

Ghostwriting contracts in summary

This short video summarizes the priorities that should be included in any ghostwriter contract.

The bottom line is that you want a contract to address any legal matters, such as rights, and to set basic parameters so that you know how much you are paying and what you can expect for that money.

At the same time, it is important to remember that writing is a creative task; it has to be a collaborative process between you and the writer, built on trust and a mutual drive to make the manuscript amazing.  Setting parameters is a good thing; making them restrictive is a bad thing.

And it’s OK to ask to see a sample ghostwriting contract in advance. We work from a template, and I have shared it with potential clients on a number of occasions.

• READ ALSO: How to get the most from your ghostwriter.

No contract will ensure a successful ghostwriting project. Success depends on the you and the writer.  You need to decide if the ghostwriter you have chosen is easy to work with and knows their craft, and whether the writer and the agency are accommodating in their approach, with their focus on delivering the most powerful manuscript possible.

Now you know what to watch for in a ghostwriting contract. So, all that’s left is your signature on the agreement.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, this article has 5.6 characters per word.