Nicolas Cole explains why ghostwriting is booming: CEOs have valuable knowledge but lack time and writing skill to share it. A ghostwriter acts as a knowledge extractor, turning their expertise into polished content without requiring their direct involvement.
It's like the Michael Jordan effect. You have a lot of really talented Michael Jordans who know how to dominate a game but don't know how to explain it or don't know how to teach it or aren't taking the time to teach it. He's like the greatest basketball player of all time and one of the worst owners of all time. The same is true with CEOs is all of these people are really, really smart and they need help extracting the knowledge. If you're a CEO that is used to a CEO salary, you can't rationalize spending 500 hours writing a book. You just can't because the return on your time is so low compared to your business. But that doesn't mean that the knowledge that you have isn't valuable. So what do they do? Most people then go hire a ghostwriter. And what gets misunderstood is the ghostwriter isn't putting words in the person's mouth. The ghostwriter literally is extracting the knowledge and going, "I'm gonna do all the manual labor of removing the tangents, removing the unnecessary stories, and just whittling it down." And that's the pairing: smart person who has knowledge, who doesn't have the skill set for writing and doesn't have the time to write, and then you have the ghostwriter who doesn't have 30 years of knowledge but has the skill set of writing and has the time to write. And so you have this interesting problem that gets easily solved when you just pair those two types of people together.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
