How To Share Ghostwriting Samples With Clients
There Are Many Approaches. Which Is Best?
For most freelance writers, a strong portfolio is just about the best asset we have — minus our writing website.
But what happens if you ghostwrite? After all, ghostwriting — by definition — involves not getting credit for your work in the form of a byline.
Although I have no empirical evidence with which to back up this claim, I also think it’s fair to assume that ghostwriting is on the rise.
What was once a writing relationship almost exclusively undertaken for book authors has morphed into a gargantuan industry manned by freelance writers, PR firms, and communications consultants.
These days, the end product of a ghostwriting relationship is as likely to be an article in a trade media website as it is to be an item on the bestsellers lest.
Because there is so much being written, and so many hands writing it, I would argue that more writers than ever before are finding themselves in the unenviable position of being experienced writers without much to show for it in the form of attributed work.
This — the quandary of the modern ghostwriter — is a repeat fixture of discussion in freelance writing groups.
Having ghostwritten for five years, and spoken to many other ghostwriters, here are the ‘fixes’ I have seen.
The Tell-All Approach
On the liberal end of the scale, we have the ghosts of the internet who throw caution to the wind and post all their ghostwriting on online portfolios for the world and sundry to see.
All I can see when I see this is: I hope their clients don’t mind!
Purists, like the author, would argue that such a practice defeats the point of ghostwriting.
If you’re going to be hiring a ghostwriter to discreetly write a delightful article for you, would you be pleased to discover that he or she was proudly raising the curtain on the putative writing relationship on a website?
The argument in favor of this practice is that (corporate) ghostwriting has become endemic, everybody knows it goes on, so there’s not much point in hiding the obvious.
Sometimes the ghostwriting relationship is entirely transparent.
I have written several articles over the years for non native English speakers — articulate in their native tongues but bumbling in this one.
Perusing a five minute video of them speaking at a conference on YouTube would make it obvious to anybody that they were unlikely to have actually written the texts attributed to them. The magic of fiction might be preserved; but it’s a thin and incredible one.
Private Sharing: The Middle Ground
For ghostwritten articles and blogs (I refer to these together as “small projects”), the approach I favor is to share select samples — where requested — through private means.
I implemented this by adding a password-protected part of my website. If you’re using Wordpress, the Password Protected plugin should do the trick:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/password-protected
A more elegant technological solution is to use a solution like Cloudflare Access which works through email one time password (OTP) 2FA and can provide a detailed access log of who’s seen what, from where, and when. You can also manually revoke access at any time.
See below for how to set that up:
Using this, you can grant access to anybody with an email at a domain and receive a granular log of exactly who has seen what.
But this level of access control is probably overkill for most writers.
Other methodologies which I have seen and employed include:
- Sharing individual samples by email. This has the advantage that no samples touch the internet (well … the public-facing part of it to be accurate). On the downside, it’s a manual process. And it means that your prospective clients will need to download attachments — something which few people enjoy doing in this day and age and which is increasingly recommended against.
- Adding samples to a Google Drive share. This works well. But if your recipients aren’t on GSuite / Gmail you could run into difficulties. Sharing folders with “anybody with the link” isn’t advisable if you’re sharing the output of private writing relationships.
Not Sharing At All
On the far conservative end of the spectrum, we have ghostwriters who won’t share details of their projects with clients at all — or who will only provide the name of their author.
I have one professional acquaintance ghostwriter who is a serial book ghostwriter and who works primarily through agents. This is the approach which she favors.
If you’re ghostwriting articles, then being this cagey about sharing work is likely to meet resistance. In general, the more transparent you can be about your work, the easier it’s going to be for somebody to trust you.
In the book ghostwriting world, by contrast, not being able to disclose authors — or only providing authors as referees — is more commonplace.
Final Pieces of Advice
Finally, some general best practices about sharing ghostwriting:
- You need to (carefully) read NDAs, contracts, and client instructions. Some clients will forbid you from sharing samples at all. Through any means.
- I believe that it’s worth asserting the right to share your writing in your boilerplate contract and providing clients with the ability to opt out. Speaking from experience, it can be incredibly difficult to build your writing business if most of your ghostwriting clips can’t be shared. If a client forbids me this right, the project is less attractive. Offer your clients an opt out mechanism but assert your right to share by default (although I advise through private means).
- I periodically track down my ghostwriting by searching for it. You can find out useful information by doing this.
- Back up your writing.
You just read another exciting post from the Book Mechanic: the source for writers and creators who want to make more work that sells and sell more work they make.
If you’d like to read more stories just like this one tap here to visit
