If you search the internet for ghostwriters’ fees, you won’t find even ballpark ranges. Whether that’s coyness, professional caution, or a reluctance to give away trade secrets, I think it’s counterproductive both for ghostwriters and for clients.

Think about job adverts. The ones that include a salary help everyone – candidates know whether the role is worth applying for, employers don’t waste time interviewing people who’d never take the offer, and nobody gets to the end of a long process feeling misled. The ones that say ‘competitive salary’ or ‘salary on application’ look evasive even when they aren’t, and they put the burden of the awkward conversation on the wrong people.

Ghostwriting fees are no different. If a prospective client has a budget of £10,000 and my starting fee is £40,000, we are unlikely to find a middle ground. It’s far better and fairer to be clear upfront and allow the client to find a ghostwriter at the right level for them. And if the figure is roughly what they were expecting, we’ve already cleared what is probably the most awkward part of the whole conversation, and can move on to the part that matters: whether we’re the right fit and whether the project is right.

For a book ghostwritten from scratch (which is mostly what I do), fees start at £40,000. Most of my projects fall in the £40,000–£70,000 range, with longer or more complex books going beyond that. The fee covers everything from the first scoping conversation to the final manuscript: the interviews, the outline, the writing, all rounds of revision. It’s paid in instalments tied to agreed milestones rather than upfront. Travel outside London is paid by the client; otherwise there are no additional costs.

If you already have material to work with — a draft, notes, recordings — the scope and the fee will be different, and we’d need a conversation to work out what you actually need. But you should have a sense now about the ballpark figures you’d be facing.

I do hope that this saves you some time. To my mind, transparency is so important to establish a healthy working relationship and is imperative for a successful collaboration.

Do drop me a line if that sounds about right for your book idea.