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Questions about selling ghostwritten books on Amazon Kindle

by Celandine
13 replies
I have a few questions about selling ghostwritten books on Amazon Kindle.


Firstly, what is the very cheapest website to have a book ghostwritten? So far, Fiverr is the cheapest I've found, with one person selling 8,000 words for $5, but the book I need written is rather large in scale, so if anything is even cheaper than that, please let me know. It doesn't have to be native English speakers or professional writers either, as long as the whole thing is coherent.


Secondly, how does Amazon's new payment system affect authors? I read that Amazon now pays per page read rather than on the basis of purchase price - is that true still?


Lastly, is the fact that the ghostwriter agrees in writing (for example, in an email) to ghostwrite and not later try to take credit for the writing, enough to stop them from doing so legally at a later date?


Thank you.
#amazon #books #ghostwritten #kindle #questions #selling
  • Profile picture of the author DABK
    Cheaper than $5 for 8,000 words?

    Sure, I'll charge you $4 for 10,000... I'll copy the first 10000 words from the phone book.

    I am confused, though: how do you expect to make money with lousy content?

    If you have a contract that stipulates that the content created belongs to you and only you, and the writer signs it, you're covered... As long as your ghost writer doesn't care about doing illegal things... If he/she goes illegal, you can sue... And the fun begins... People who sell 8,000 for $5, I think, do so because they get to 'repurpose' the 8,000...

    I can't imagine selling 8000 words for $5 if I couldn't copy huge chunks from some other 'original work' and change a couple of words and call it a new original.

    Originally Posted by Celandine View Post

    I have a few questions about selling ghostwritten books on Amazon Kindle.


    Firstly, what is the very cheapest website to have a book ghostwritten? So far, Fiverr is the cheapest I've found, with one person selling 8,000 words for $5, but the book I need written is rather large in scale, so if anything is even cheaper than that, please let me know. It doesn't have to be native English speakers or professional writers either, as long as the whole thing is coherent.


    Secondly, how does Amazon's new payment system affect authors? I read that Amazon now pays per page read rather than on the basis of purchase price - is that true still?


    Lastly, is the fact that the ghostwriter agrees in writing (for example, in an email) to ghostwrite and not later try to take credit for the writing, enough to stop them from doing so legally at a later date?


    Thank you.
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    • Profile picture of the author AnniePot
      No-one, absolutely no-one is going to write unique content of 8,000 words for $5.00. That's not even working for peanuts, more akin to working for a pile of dust.

      All you will get for your $5 is copied content which could and probably will land you in no end of trouble, both with Amazon and the original author(s).

      In situations such as this, you need to use your brain.
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    • Profile picture of the author Celandine
      Originally Posted by DABK View Post

      Cheaper than $5 for 8,000 words?

      Sure, I'll charge you $4 for 10,000... I'll copy the first 10000 words from the phone book.

      I am confused, though: how do you expect to make money with lousy content?

      If you have a contract that stipulates that the content created belongs to you and only you, and the writer signs it, you're covered... As long as your ghost writer doesn't care about doing illegal things... If he/she goes illegal, you can sue... And the fun begins... People who sell 8,000 for $5, I think, do so because they get to 'repurpose' the 8,000...

      I can't imagine selling 8000 words for $5 if I couldn't copy huge chunks from some other 'original work' and change a couple of words and call it a new original.


      My plan was to give the ghostwriter a very specific original plot, thereby making it impossible to just copy and paste, at least not without great difficulty.


      I was also going to take the mediocre quality writing, read through it, and edit it into better quality writing.
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      • Profile picture of the author kilgore
        Originally Posted by Celandine View Post

        Firstly, what is the very cheapest website to have a book ghostwritten? So far, Fiverr is the cheapest I've found, with one person selling 8,000 words for $5, but the book I need written is rather large in scale, so if anything is even cheaper than that, please let me know. It doesn't have to be native English speakers or professional writers either, as long as the whole thing is coherent.
        Originally Posted by Celandine View Post

        My plan was to give the ghostwriter a very specific original plot, thereby making it impossible to just copy and paste, at least not without great difficulty.

        I was also going to take the mediocre quality writing, read through it, and edit it into better quality writing.
        This has to be one of the most harebrained ideas I've ever seen on the WF, and that's saying a lot.

        Thanks for the chuckle.
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        • Profile picture of the author Celandine
          Originally Posted by kilgore View Post

          This has to be one of the most harebrained ideas I've ever seen on the WF, and that's saying a lot.

          Thanks for the chuckle.


          Ad hominem attacks simply mean that you have zero legitimate information to contribute.
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          • Profile picture of the author Kay King
            The question is so ludicrous no one can believe someone thinks it is logical. How many hours do you expect someone to work for $5...or less? Have you ever written 8000 words yourself? I can't believe you are serious.

            You have unrealistic expectations of what even bad writers will charge - and of the quality Amazon will accept. Would be smarter to write the book yourself and have at least a chance of something that might sell.
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          • Profile picture of the author kilgore
            Originally Posted by Celandine View Post

            Ad hominem attacks simply mean that you have zero legitimate information to contribute.
            No. It just means that your plan has so many holes in it, I didn't think it was worth my time to give it much serious thought. But here are just three issues I have with your plan:
            1. While "cheap" doesn't always mean bad, $5 for 8,000 words cheap certainly does. In fact, what it really means is awful. A good rule of thumb is that professional writers write about 1,000 words an hour. So what you're talking about is paying someone $5 for 8 hours worth of work or $0.63/hour. In other words you're either going to have (1) very, very, very, very, very bad writers working for you or (2) merely very, very, very bad writers doing even worse work than they normally do in order to write as fast as they can. Even if the writer could finish your work in an hour, anybody willing to write for $5/hour would have to be a pretty bad writer. That said, I think it's more likely that nobody takes the job -- even that Fiverr seller will likely bow out once they know what you're asking.

            2. Assuming you want to put out a halfway decent product, your idea to rewrite awful writing will almost certainly take more time than it would to just write from scratch. It's not like all you'll need to do is run their writing through a spell checker. Writing is about organization, logical flow and above all good ideas. And all of the above is especially true, since it sounds like you're talking about writing fiction. If you were writing non-fiction, maybe -- though even here I doubt it -- you might save some time by hiring these awful writers since they'd assumedly find some of the facts you need for your final work. (But even then, with writers that cheap, I'd be inclined to fact-check everything until I knew I could trust them and even then...)

            3. Even if you could make it work. Even if you could pay someone $5 per 8,000 words and get great quality, it wouldn't be the right thing to do. Yeah, I know it's kinda weird, but ethical business practices are important to me. And paying someone a fair wage for the work they do definitely falls under this heading. So developing a business model that involves significantly underpaying your most important workers just doesn't fly with me. As I said, I think at the rate you're talking about, you're going to have a hard time finding someone to take the job. But even if you do find someone to do the work for peanuts, that doesn't make it right.
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            • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
              Originally Posted by Celandine View Post

              My plan was to give the ghostwriter a very specific original plot, thereby making it impossible to just copy and paste, at least not without great difficulty.


              I was also going to take the mediocre quality writing, read through it, and edit it into better quality writing.
              I once tried something similar, although I certainly didn't stoop to the $5/8000 words hacks. I bought the rights to an okay novel that was going out of print and the original author didn't want it back. Got the rights from the publisher for $50.

              Spent so much time trying to fill the gaps and bring up the quality that I finally gave up.

              If you're good enough to create the detailed plot and edit mediocre writing, you'll save time and headaches just writing it yourself.
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      • Profile picture of the author DABK
        Except, at $5 for 8,000 you are not going to get mediocre, original writing. You're either getting something like this:
        I be special most amazing people love me.
        Or they're going to copy passages from the lesser-known works of lesser-known authors from decades ago.

        Kilgore gave you good advice... In a funny form.



        Originally Posted by Celandine View Post

        My plan was to give the ghostwriter a very specific original plot, thereby making it impossible to just copy and paste, at least not without great difficulty.


        I was also going to take the mediocre quality writing, read through it, and edit it into better quality writing.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jon Crimes
    I've personally had some good results on Elance (now Upwork) but needed to up the budget a bit!

    One of the ghost writers I hired charged $110 for around 8000 words which might seem a bit steep to some but the quality was spot on and they had experience in the niche that I was targeting.

    Not for everyone I know but it worked for me and its paid for itself now.

    Cheers
    Jon
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  • Profile picture of the author Princess Balestra
    You gotta figure how long it is gonna take to hack out 8,000 words.

    *injects steroids*

    K, so I am a 200wpm typisterwrist now.

    I do not require cyber implants, an' I do not man a keyboard in any kinda word factory.

    So, hey —

    p-ding!

    Here are your 8,000 words, blasted from brain to forever again in 40 minutes.

    Prolly I should raise my rate here to $7.50 to take account of the 20 minutes I saved, but I gotta figure here on what I get outta the deal.

    Thing is, I am addicted to super cool underwear, an' it is not cheap.

    Gotta bust on a whole buncha $7.50s to glitz myself out, an' I am wondrin' whether the lingerie shops gonna petrify to dust before I get to spend any of your moolah.

    An' these 8,000 words I just wrote out, like I was frickin' Superwoman — how fulla capacity for flight an' wonder are they gonna be?

    What kinda abundant reflection is gonna infuse them with readability to prompt kisses from "the voracious"?

    I wanna slap you so very hard for diminishin' the craft of writin'.
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  • Profile picture of the author cebuy
    I had a 4000 work fiction book written for $40 recently on Fiverr and I am afraid it wasn't what I had really hoped for, but with that in mind, you can't expect much out of $5 for 8000 words. It is just not going to happen. The writer is not going to care what happens in the story.

    This is what i did. I sent out sample requests to 20 writers. Once I got those back, I then evaluated who was the most talented without looking at the quotes. It so happened that the two most talented writers were the cheapest. Even though I picked the best writer, I think my main issue was the length of the book. It is hard to develop a story arc in 4000 words. So anyway, point is this.. you really need to balance the budgeting needs with the need for QUALITY, with quality being the #1 goal. The cheapest just helps you narrow down from there.
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  • Profile picture of the author ryanstevens93
    Amazon used to pay $1.4/borrow before 1st July 2015. Now they pay an embarrassing amount of $0.004/read page. My sales wend down from $920 in June to $490 in July, so more than 50% decrease!

    As for the short books written on Fiverr... Honestly, I started with Kindle exactly that way and 3 things happened:

    1. I realized that it was wrong what I was doing and I started writing lengthier, greater books on my own.
    2. Lots of "catfish" authors started to upload 10-20-30 page books to make money out of them. That method is now completely dead.
    3. People on Amazon got smarter on Amazon and you need quality to convince them to buy.

    If you want to make money with Kindle you need an email list, money to advertise, quality in your writing, a general topic (which would fit a general audience) which should be easy to understand or read, and you would need at least 150 pages and 30 reviews.

    If you have all the tools mentioned, you can make thousands out of a single eBook. Kindle is profitable, but for those who are serious, committed and have long-term expectations.
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