I’ve never sat down and counted all of my ghostwriting/editing clients. Every once in a while, when I go in to clean up my file folders, I realize that I’ve had more than I thought and that I’ve actually forgotten about some of them. Some I work with once and that’s that; some I’ve been working with for years. A lot of them, in one way or another, came to me from one of several editorial services I’ve done work for—companies who, in turn, came to me through a wonderful (but, alas, deceased) freelance resource called Freelance Daily.
The clients that puzzle me most stand at two ends of a spectrum. At one end are talented people who have no desire or who lack the confidence to take the next step toward getting published. At the other are people with little or no writing talent, a seeming inability to understand how either the writing craft or publishing works, and the ambition and sheer moxie to believe that they can be or are writers just as good as Ray Bradbury or Shirley Jackson or Umberto Eco (you may add your favorites to the list).
Take the fellow who wrote a brilliant murder mystery set in the dotcom boom and bust then hired me to edit it. He decided to self-publish despite my strong belief that the book—which was 200,000 words in length and riveting through just about every one of them as far as I was concerned—could be a bombshell. His reason for self-publishing: he was unwilling to let anyone else control any aspect of his work. Having read the book—which was autobiographical in part (he really did write what he knew)—I understood the impulse. Still . . .
Then there was the fellow who penned rough drafts of one novel after another set in different time periods and who hired me to rewrite them. He had a few issues that . . . well, let me share a handful. Continue reading
