How I Learned To Be A Ghost Writer

Well, it’s a short story of a longer career. I started out writing in college back in the late seventies, and I had this English teacher who said that women make better copy editors than writers. His argument is that women tend to spot mistakes and pay more attention to copy than men do, so the men should bang it out and the women should edit them, in other words. I paid attention to him at the time, thinking his argument was somehow sound; but I found out over time in my own career that both men and women make equally adept editors or writers, and that if you are an editor, you need to also be a great writer as well.
Editing does not separate itself all that easily from the writing profession. I entered it around 1980, writing some articles for our college newspaper. One was accepted by the AP wire service, and another one for a local magazine. So I seemed to be doing well enough as a writer, albeit a female one. Next, I spent several years pursuing the nursing occupation, becoming a nurse aide and home health care aide for the disabled. This gave me plenty to write about, and I submitted some more articles and interviews to various publications, occasionally getting published, and put out my own magazine for a couple of issues too.
When I took to the Internet, I gained experience as an Internet marketer, selling search engine optimization services; then I finally put myself out as a freelance book editor, starting my own website. I soon found that all my clients needed far more than just editing services. I had to do substantial rewriting most of the time, so I became a ghost writer very swiftly. I worked on people’s “baby” projects, polishing up their prose and generally making it much more suitable for publication. Soon I found so much work coming in that I couldn’t handle it all, so I began sending it out to people – if their writing and editing work was excellent. I carefully went over all their applications, which I had sent out for, and only set out to hire excellent people.
Years later, I had a team of over 100 writers, editors, marketers and promoters of books, scripts, screenplays, music and lyrics, among other works. Now I mainly send work out to my team, being semi-retired, and collect a small referral fee for each incoming job that pans out for my writers, etc. I only take on incoming projects that fascinate me or promise a lucrative payment, or that I think will really sell, so that I can collect on the speculation fees. It’s been interesting, thinking that I was meant to be only an editor and finding out that I absolutely had to also become a ghost writer in order to serve all my clients. I would advise those freelance writers who think that sex is a major determinant of what career a person should undertake to reconsider this, and to not let other people determine their lives for them either.