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This should be every ghostwriter’s pricing strategy:

Avoid the Middle.

Either be very expensive or be very cheap.

Most ghostwriters, when they sit down to come up with how much they should charge for their service, they either:

• Close their eyes, wait for a random number to pop into their head, and then decide, “That's how much I should charge!”
• Or they look around at all the other people who provide their ghostwriting service and then they go, “I should probably just do that but maybe at a discount so I can compete on price.”

Both are really, really bad ways to think about pricing.

I can pretty much guarantee what you’re charging right now is nowhere near the ceiling of what you could charge.

There are two reasons for why this is:

1. You have a business model problem. You've picked the wrong way to think about charging for the “value of your value.”
2. You have some faulty belief about your own self-worth. You think you’re not worth the price or there's no way someone would be willing to pay this. Or, because you’ve never seen someone else around you charge his, so there's no way you could do it either.

But if you can solve these two problems, it will have a huge impact on your earning potential as a ghostwriter.

So, let’s fix these problems, shall we?

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Ghostwriters: Stop charging per hour.

If you are charging per hour, stop immediately.

Charging per hour is a terrible business model because you are tying your earning potential to time and effort. You can only make more money when you work more hours, and you will never be rewarded for creating efficiencies in your service or process. Because if you get the work done in half the time, you make half as much money—which is a huge problem.

And then on top of that, whenever you anchor yourself to per hour, the client associates this rate with the hourly rate of every other person in their life:

• Their lawyer
• Their dentist
• Their gardener
• Etc.

So you’re placing yourself in the context of every other vendor that charges per hour, and most other people who charge per hour are typically not charging a premium.

Even lawyers are way underneath the market of what they could make.

But this isn’t your fault. Everyone price-anchors to hours. But you don’t have to make the same mistake. Even if you were to notch your hourly rate up to $500 or $1,000, you would still be leaving a ton of money on the table.

Instead, charge by project and outcome.

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Premium Ghostwriters charge by project and outcome.

The customer doesn’t care about the number of hours you work.

What they care about is the outcomes you deliver (and how you provide your service—get more tips on this here). They only care about the number of hours you work because that’s the way you told them you work. But if you were to charge by outcome (so by project) instead, you can easily charge more.

Let’s look at an example.

Instead of charging $30 per hour to write emails, you could charge $5,000 to write an Educational Email Course. What does the customer get? They don’t just get a bunch of emails. They get an entire asset they can plug-and-play into their business:

• They get an automated email sequence that will run on autopilot forever
• They get a sales-generating asset which (again) will keep selling for them forever
• They get your skill as a ghostwriter (which you’ve honed for years) for a one-off fee

And, as you get more proficient at writing Educational Email Courses, you can do it in half the time and still charge as much because you’ve decoupled yourself from charging for your time.

But to charge by project, you have to understand this fundamental reframe:

You’re charging for your pattern recognition and experience, not the hours you work.

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Charge for the value you provide, not the hours it takes to provide the value.

What the client is paying you for are all the years it took you to acquire knowledge in order to deliver the outcome.

So, let’s say a client asks you to put together a document outlining how to write the perfect marketing email. As a ghostwriter, you might think that’ll take you 4-5 hours and you’d charge $500 for it. But they aren’t buying your time. They are paying for your pattern recognition.

If you think that the best way to be compensated on this is how long it takes for you to create just the document or the template, you're leaving 10 years of value on the table because that's how long it took you to be able to create this in the first place.

As a writer, you have to understand the value of your value.

The client can take this document and easily get 10x, 20x, even 50x ROI on your knowledge if they were to teach it to their team (or if you were to teach it to their team).

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You’re passing along 10 years of knowledge to someone else's organization which they can use to get tremendous upside. So to charge for this, you’d reverse engineer the value of your value. And this might sound crazy, but why wouldn't you charge something like $50,000 for this? After all, if they can use this to 10x their sales via email, then why wouldn’t they pay that? It’s a steal!

Look at it another way.  It sounds like a lot for a “project” but really $50,000 is the equivalent of a fairly entry-level/mid-level employee.

Pricing boils down to your own self-worth.

Did your mouth fall open when I dropped the $50,000 price tag?

If it did, then you don’t really believe you’re worth charging that amount.

You’re terrified and cannot fathom charging more than a baseline hourly rate the “world” has told you is fair. And I promise you, when you start to understand how higher-level decision-makers make pricing & packaging and buying decisions, they have no problem spending significantly more than you think because they're playing a different game, and they are not concerned with the time or energy or effort.

They're concerned about the outcome the service delivers.

So this comes down to the confidence **in yourself to charge that much. **And when I say confidence, I do not mean:

• Puffing your chest out
• Being the “alpha” of the sales conversation
• Or using a bunch of sales techniques that everyone says is how you trick someone into buying something high-ticket

That is not what I'm saying at all.

Confidence comes from your understanding of the value of your value.

It's not about proving yourself.

It's about understanding what you have, knowing why it’s so valuable to the client, and being happy to share it if you’re compensated appropriately. That’s it.

Alright, now, onto some tactical advice.

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3 more tactical ghostwriting pricing tips

Alright, now we’ve discussed why you should charge by project (and increase your prices), let’s look at some more tactical pricing tips.

• Tip #1: Avoid the Middle (or, in other other words, making it less expensive won’t make people buy). The number that you pick says a tremendous amount about your business. Let’s say I have a Ferrari for sale. Everyone knows a Ferrari costs $300k-$500k. But if I said I have one for sale for $500, you wouldn’t think, “Wow, what a steal!” Your first thought would be, “What's wrong with the Ferrari?!” A huge part of pricing is understanding how the price affects the customer or client's perception of what you do. Whenever you make something less expensive, fewer people buy because they assume you aren't the best. And why would they settle for less than the best?

• Tip #2: The true ceiling of your current service is 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x your current price. I've lived this. When I was building my ghostwriting agency, for the entire first year, we charged $2,000 or $3,000 a month for 3 articles/week. That was 12 articles/month. It was a tremendous amount of volume. It was horrible. But after 2 years, we’d switched to charging $5,000 for 2 articles/month. The best part? Clients were actually happy that we were doing less volume (because they couldn’t keep up). So when you think, “No one would be willing to pay that,” know this is just a faulty belief you have in yourself.

• Tip #3: Ask, “What would I need to do to charge this much?” Don’t think “I can’t charge this much.” Instead, ask what you’d need to deliver to charge the amount you want. This is a packaging technique. Make a list of everything the client would want. What would make them ecstatic for you to tell them or give them? Then the price point rationalizes itself.

So, to wrap up, whatever you're charging right now, I can guarantee is nowhere near the ceiling of what you could charge.

Use these frameworks and tips to go out and charge more—and get paid what you’re worth as a writer.

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