Ghostwriting, Copywriting, and Content Writing Aren’t the Same Thing

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

The differences between these kinds of writing matter more than most people realize, especially when you’re trying to turn an idea into something worth reading.

I’ve noticed a specific hesitation in a lot of the messages I get. People have read something I’ve written, liked it enough to reach out, and then stall at the actual ask, because they’re not sure what to call the thing they need, or whether what I do has a name that matches it. So I want to lay this out directly, the way I’d explain it to a friend asking over coffee.

Here are the five ways people actually work with me, and who each one tends to fit.

1. Ghostwriting your book

For the person who has a book in them and has had it for a while, in notes, in memory, in a half-finished document they haven’t opened in months. This starts with real conversation, not a brief, because the material almost always already exists somewhere in your own history. My job is finding it, shaping it, and carrying it all the way to a finished manuscript that sounds like you, built on years of writing in voices that aren’t my own, which is a specific discipline, not a natural accident.