Ghostwriting Clients Editing and Proofreading Services

You have hired someone to write your book, and the fear underneath the arrangement is always the same: that what comes back will be competent, fluent and not you. It will use words you do not use. It will make you sound thoughtful in a way you are not, or plain in a way you are not. And you will not be able to say what is wrong with it, only that you would never say that.

We work with people who are having a book written for them — draft chapters and full manuscripts from a ghostwriter, briefing documents and voice guidance for the writer, interview transcripts and the material you have supplied, sample passages used to agree the voice, chapter outlines and structural plans, correspondence with the writer about revisions, material where you need to check what is safe to say about other people, and the finished manuscript before it goes anywhere. Our editors work between you and the draft.

The voice brief is the document that determines whether the book sounds like you, and almost nobody produces one because it feels like something the writer should work out. It is far easier to supply than to reverse-engineer. We help you build one so it contains actual samples of you speaking and writing — an unedited email, a transcript of you telling a story you have told many times, something you wrote when annoyed — since a ghostwriter can imitate a sample and cannot imitate a description; so the specific things you never say are listed, because prohibitions are more useful than preferences and a writer given six banned phrases will avoid a hundred; so your defaults are recorded, covering whether you swear, whether you use jargon and which, how long your sentences run, whether you tell jokes and what kind; so the difference between how you speak and how you want to sound in print is named deliberately, given that this is a real choice and leaving it unmade produces a draft that is neither; so the people and episodes you will not discuss are stated in advance rather than removed at draft three; and so one chapter is agreed in full before the rest is written. Briefs like this save months, and they save the relationship.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including drafts, transcripts, private material and the fact of the arrangement itself. We are editors rather than ghostwriters, agents or legal advisers, and we offer no view on your contract, your writer or what is safe to publish. What we can do is help you say why a draft is not yet you.