Ghostwriting is unregulated, which means the same job is quoted anywhere between £600 and £40,000 depending on who you ask. That spread is not negotiating room — it reflects genuinely different products. Here is what each price band actually buys.
The 2026 rate card
| Tier | Per word | 60,000-word book | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content mill | £0.01–£0.05 | £600–£3,000 | Offshore writing or AI drafting, minimal interviews, no revision structure |
| Entry professional | £0.08–£0.12 | £4,800–£7,200 | A competent writer, often early career, limited genre specialism |
| Established | £0.12–£0.22 | £7,200–£13,200 | Published credits in your genre, structured interviews, two revision rounds |
| Senior / celebrity | £0.25–£0.60 | £15,000–£36,000 | Named writers with bestseller credits, agent relationships, publisher contacts |
Why the professional tier costs what it does
A 60,000-word ghostwritten book represents roughly 250 to 400 hours of skilled work. That is not typing time. It breaks down approximately as:
- Interviews and transcription review — 40–60 hours. Eight to twelve hours of recorded conversation, then the writer works through the transcripts pulling out structure, anecdotes and voice patterns.
- Research and structural planning — 30–50 hours. Building a chapter plan that actually holds an argument together, and filling gaps the interviews left.
- Drafting — 120–200 hours. At a realistic sustainable pace of 400–700 usable words per hour for book-quality prose.
- Revision — 50–90 hours. Two full passes, one structural and one at sentence level.
At £12,000 for a 400-hour project, the writer is earning £30 an hour before tax, overheads and the unpaid time spent on projects that never signed. That is a professional rate, not a premium one.
What changes the price
Genre
Memoir and biography cost more than business non-fiction, because the material arrives as unstructured life rather than an existing framework, and because the interview load is two to three times higher. Academic and technical writing costs more again, because the writer needs subject competence, not just craft.
How much you already have
A client arriving with a detailed outline, existing articles and a clear argument can reduce the price by 15–25%. A client arriving with an idea and a strong opinion that the book "basically writes itself" will not.
Length
Per-word rates fall slightly on longer books because the fixed costs — discovery, structural planning, voice calibration — are spread further. A 100,000-word book rarely costs twice a 50,000-word one.
What the cheap end actually is
Quotes under about £0.06 per word are real, and they are usually one of three things:
- Offshore content writing, where the writer is paid £3–£8 per hour and has no publishing background. The prose is grammatical and completely flat.
- AI drafting with a light human pass. Increasingly common, rarely disclosed. Ask directly and get the answer in writing.
- A loss leader, where the low headline price is followed by charges for revisions, formatting, cover and publishing that were presented as included.
The single most useful question to ask any ghostwriting service: "Will you write 1,000 words of my actual book, from a short interview, before I commit?" Everything you need to know is in the answer, and then in the sample.
How payment should be structured
Milestone billing protects both sides. A normal structure is 25% on signing, then tranches released as chapter batches are delivered and approved, with the final 15–25% due on handover of the completed manuscript and the copyright assignment.
Be cautious of full payment upfront — it removes your only leverage if the work disappoints. Be equally cautious of a company that wants a percentage of your future royalties on top of the fee: that is charging twice for one job, and over a book's commercial life it usually costs far more than the fee itself.
The figure nobody quotes
The real cost of a ghostwritten book includes your own time. Expect to spend 20 to 40 hours on interviews, reading drafts and giving feedback. Clients who treat the project as fully outsourced and skip the review windows get books that sound like nobody in particular — which is the one outcome ghostwriting is supposed to prevent.