Ghostwriters will often spend from several months to a full year researching, writing, and editing non-fiction and fiction works for a client, and they are paid based on a price per hour, per word, or per page, with a flat fee, a percentage of the royalties of the sales, or some combination thereof. In 2013, literary agent Madeleine Morel stated that the average ghostwriter’s advance for work for major book publishers was “between $40,000 and $70,000”.[5] These benchmark prices are mirrored approximately in the film industry by the Writers Guild, where a Minimum Basic Agreement gives a starting price for the screenplay writer of $37,073 (non-original screenplay, no treatment).[6]
However, the recent shift into the digital age (15–20% world market share of books by 2015) has brought some changes, by opening newer markets that bring their own opportunities for authors and writers[7]—especially on the more affordable side of the ghostwriting business. One such market is the shorter book, best represented at the moment by Amazon’s Kindle Singles imprint: texts of 30,000 words and under.[8] Such a length would have been much harder to sell before digital reader-technologies became widely available, but is now quite acceptable. Writers on the level of Ian McEwan have celebrated this recent change, mainly for artistic reasons.[9]
