Talking about the work of a ghostwriter, I can’t avoid talking about the people who commission books. You may recognize yourself here — or you may realize that you do need a book written, because you have something to say.
Professionals
One example is specialists who want to sum up their professional path and write a book about their field. They share what their potential audience is interested in, and in the process gain a certain kind of recognition.
It’s an excellent way to position yourself as a high-level professional. There’s a particular reaction that tends to follow: “this person knows their field so well they actually wrote a book about it.”
A Conversation With the Younger Generation
Another category is people who want to pass on their wisdom and personal experience to their descendants — to leave a memory of themselves. This is family literature, and the result of writing it is something you can never fully predict.
First, we don’t know how the generation that comes after us will think — what they’ll emphasize, how they’ll relate to the world.
Second, as practice shows, intelligent grown-up thoughts only become understandable to a child once that child has become an intelligent grown-up. That’s exactly when they’ll be able to appreciate everything that was written for them.
That’s why I always tell clients: we have to write a grown-up book for grown-ups, without expecting that their children, here and now in their young years, will give due praise to everything wise that’s been created for them.
Modern Philosophers and Responsibility
People who carry some kind of worldview, some conceptual framework. Incredibly difficult and incredibly interesting work. Any new way of looking at life and the world can turn it upside down, break it, strengthen it, or destroy it. Or, just as easily, the opposite: calm it and stabilize it.
Almost every powerful figure in history — both the positive ones and the negative ones — carried with them texts of their own thoughts and concepts. Books, journals, recordings. And much of it was written before the concept was put into action, building the foundation for both very good and very bad enterprises.
That’s why, perhaps, the heaviest level of responsibility rests precisely on those who write books that can change minds and the world. It can happen that those changes do come — and the new world turns out to be considerably less ideal than its author had imagined.
A Conversation With Yourself
People who write about the path they themselves have walked. Most often this is an attempt to draw certain conclusions and deepen the understanding of what actually happened. The most unpredictable kind of literature, even for the person remembering their own life. You’d think everything ought to be clear — but a book has this remarkable property: while it’s being written, much of what’s in it begins to be seen and understood quite differently. Even if what’s being remembered seems, on the surface, completely simple and predictable.
Business
Very similar to expert literature, where the expert is promoting themselves. The same thing happens with business books — except here you’re declaring not just personal experience and knowledge, but the whole package: the team, the level, the achievements.
And then comes the same kind of reaction: “these people are so good at what they do, they’ve even started writing books about it.”
Let’s Talk
There’s a great deal more, and a great deal of it is unpredictable. Fiction, for example, is essentially limitless in its forms. And so the people who come specifically with fiction always bring something new. No two projects are alike. But there is something that holds true for any book — and it unites every author. Everyone who intends to write a book wants to convey something, to say something to other people.
It can be anything you like. What a high-level specialist this person is, what a remarkable project they’re running, how wise the older generation is, how deep this worldview is and how ready it is to overturn the lives of those willing to let it in.
All of this is the desire to bring one’s own thought to a particular audience — and that, in fact, is what defines who really needs a writer’s services.
People who want to say something, and to be heard while saying it.
That’s why, in dividing commissioners of writing services into rough categories for you, I always build a completely different picture for myself — a professional one. After a brief look at the topic of the book, I immediately start working out, in detail, who exactly the author is planning to talk to. Only after that do we return to a deeper study of the book’s subject — and, accordingly, the question of how to deliver it.
As you can see, on the surface these are experts, businesses, modern philosophers, and people drawn to creative work. Internally, more professionally, they are people who want to talk to the broad public, to a narrow niche of professionals, to their family, or to some other part of an audience I haven’t named here.
Why do I look at it this way? Because it has to be written so that the dialogue actually happens. So that the author is heard. Without that, any book simply turns into letters arranged into a text — perhaps a good one, but still an unheard one. So the author isn’t simply writing about something. They’re having a conversation, and they want to be understood in the importance of what they have to say.
And Sometimes — This
One last thing. The audience of a book can also be the author themselves. Autobiographical works are, first and foremost, a conversation with oneself. A deep and difficult exchange with the one person you can’t lie to. Often on subjects you’ve spent long years carefully avoiding, trying to dodge the difficult questions or their equally difficult answers.
Does an inner book like that need a professional writer? Exactly to the degree that the person needs support in such a difficult conversation. Sometimes there’s no other way through it.
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