User:NeilN/sandbox

Remuneration and credit

The ghostwriter for Hillary Clinton's memoirs received a $500,000 fee for collaborating with her.

Ghostwriters will often spend from several months to a full year researching, writing, and editing nonfiction works for a client, and they are paid either per page, with a flat fee, or a percentage of the royalties of the sales, or some combination thereof. Some ghostwriters charge for articles "$4 per word and more depending on the complexity" of the article. Literary agent Madeleine Morel states that the average ghostwriter's advance for work for major publishers is "between $40,000 and $70,000". These benchmark prices are mirrored approximately in the film industry by the Writer's Guild, where a Minimum Basic Agreement gives a starting price for the screenplay writer of $37,073 (non-original screenplay, no treatment).

However, the recent shift into the digital age (15-20% world market share of books by 2015) has brought some changes, by opening newer markets that bring their own opportunities for authors and writers -- especially on the more affordable side of the ghostwriting business. One such market is the shorter book, best represented at the moment by Amazon's Kindle Singles imprint: texts of 30,000 words and under. Such a length would have been much harder to sell before digital reader-technologies became widely available, but is now quite acceptable. As a consequence, the shorter format makes a project potentially more affordable for the client/author. Manhattan Literary, a ghostwriting company, states that "book projects on the shorter side, tailored to new markets like the Kindle Singles imprint and others (30,000-42,000 words) start at a cost of $15,000." And this shorter book appears to be here to stay. It was once financially impractical for publishers to produce such novella-length texts (they would have to charge too much); but this new market is, by 2015, already substantial and has been projected to be a solid part of the future of book publishing. So, with its appearance the starting price for the professional book writer has come down by about half, but only if this shorter format makes sense for the client.

On the upper end of the spectrum, with celebrities that can all but guarantee a publisher large sales, the fees can be much higher. In 2001, the New York Times stated that the fee that the ghostwriter for Hillary Clinton's memoirs will receive is probably about $500,000 of her book's $8 million advance, which "is near the top of flat fees paid to collaborators." There is also the consideration of different benchmarks in different countries. In Canada, The Writers' Union has established a minimum fee schedule for ghostwriting. The total minimum fee for a 200-300 page book is $40,000, paid at various stages of the drafting of the book. Research fees are an extra charge on top of this minimum fee. In Germany, the average fee for a confidential ghostwriting service is about $100 per page. The Editorial Freelancers Association also suggests rates of 26 cents to 50 cents per word, which would be about $15,000 to $30,000 for a 250 page book.

A recent trend also exists of outsourcing many kinds of jobs, including ghostwriting, to offshore locations like India, China and the Philippines, where the customer can save money. . Outsourced ghostwriters, whose quality levels vary widely, complete 200-page books for fees ranging between $3000 and $5000, or $12–$18 per page. when that writer comes from another culture entirely. The true test of credibility becomes even more important in these instances, when the writer comes from a culture and first- language that are entirely different from the author/client's: the writer's track record, and samples of his or her craft.

Sometimes the ghostwriter will receive partial credit on a book, signified by the phrase "with..." or "as told to..." on the cover. Credit for the ghostwriter may also be provided as a "thanks" in a foreword or introduction. For nonfiction books, the ghostwriter may be credited as a "contributor" or a "research assistant". In other cases, the ghostwriter receives no official credit for writing a book or article; in cases where the credited author or the publisher or both wish to conceal the ghostwriter's role, the ghostwriter may be asked to sign a nondisclosure contract that legally forbids any mention of the writer's role in a project.

(THIS IS A SEPARATE POINT, BELOW, AND PROBABLY SHOULD GET A SEPARATE PARAGRAPH. MADELEINE MOREL (SHE IS PROBABLY THE PREMIER GHOSTWRITERS' AGENT), CITED IN THE FIRST FOOTNOTE IN THIS SECTION, USES THE TERMS REGULARLY -- THE AUTHOR VS. THE WRITER -- EVERYONE MAKES THIS SIMPLE DISTINCTION IN THE GHOSTWRITING BUSINESS, BECAUSE THE TWO NEED TO BE DISTINGUISHED. WHEREAS KEVIN ANDERSON IN THE CITED ARTICLE SAID HE HAS NO MORAL QUALMS ABOUT A PERSON TAKING CREDIT FOR A BOOK THEY DID NOT WRITE. THIS IS A BIT DIFFERENT -- IT GETS INTO THE MORALITY -- AND WHOEVER ADDED THIS PT. SHOULD DEVELOP IT ACCORDINGLY, THEN. >>) Some have made the distinction between 'author' and 'writer,' as ghostwriter Kevin Anderson explains in a Washington Post interview: "A ghostwriter is an interpreter and a translator, not an author, which is why our clients deserve full credit for authoring their books.”

In some cases, ghostwriters are allowed to share credit with the clients who hire their ghostwriting or editing services. For example, a common method is to put the client author's name on a book cover as the main byline (By Author's Name) and then to put the ghostwriter's name underneath it, like this (As told to: Ghostwriter's Name). Sometimes this is done in lieu of pay or in order to decrease the amount of payment to the book ghostwriter. Also, the ghostwriter can be cited as a coauthor of a book, or listed in the movie or film credits when having ghostwritten the script or screenplay for a film production.

Mariwiki77 (talk) 05:53, 9 May 2015 (UTC)