Your Team

You will work with a primary ghostwriter and a team leader throughout the development, writing, and rewriting stages of your project. A cold-eye Musical Line Editor will join the team after the manuscript is completed to your satisfaction. Once the MLE is finished, we will forward the work to a cold-eye copy editor; you and your team will review those suggestions together. We will then forward the work to a cold-eye proofreader; your primary team will review and incorporate those corrections. A marketing consultant may join your team if you opt for a Bestseller Marketing Plan. All team members are trained in discrete, secure, complex problem-solving, and enhanced communication combined with the professionalism and specialty skills of book-industry insiders and are jointly certified by California State University, Long Beach and WCLLC via Ghostwriting Professional Designation Program.

Responsibility and Transparency

We use Microsoft Word. We will open a dedicated Dropbox for your project to share our drafts and your edits. We will also email each chapter to you, if preferred. We will create a weekly meeting schedule to review the current chapter. You will forward all corrections, additions, deletions, and changes on each chapter on or before that chapter’s weekly meeting. You will inform us of any scheduled or unexpected work-flow interruptions that may impact our agreed-upon projected delivery date. You will supply all necessary supplemental information and appropriate photography, illustrations, and graphics. We will share all primary ghostwriter-team leader work-in-progress drafts at the end of the project, if requested. We will retain all materials as well as the final digital version for no less than six months after completion.

Rights

All materials, as well as the entire work, remains your proprietary property. You retain all copyright, byline credit, and other rights. We will maintain strict confidentiality in perpetuity except for those associations necessary to complete the work.

Risk Mitigation

If your Certified Ghostwriter cannot complete your project for any reason, we will immediately replace them with another equally qualified Certified Ghostwriter to finish the project. Monetary loss: zero. Time loss: minimal.

Fees

We calculate our fees to cover the full in-house expense of your project: primary ghostwriter, team leader, transcriptionist, marketing consultant (when applicable), musical line editor, copy editor, and proofreader. If we calculate correctly, your final payment should closely coincide with our final-draft delivery. If we overshoot our projection due to delays on our part, we will finish the project at our own expense. If we overshoot our projection due to delays on your part, we reserve the right to invoke our Contract Overrun policy.

Contract Overrun Policy

We calculate our fees to cover the full in-house expense of your project: primary ghostwriter, team leader, transcriptionist, marketing consultant (when applicable), musical line editor, copy editor, and proofreader. Based on our calculations, your final payment should closely coincide with our final-draft delivery, i.e., within four to six weeks. If we overshoot that projected completion date due to delays on our part, we will finish the project at our own expense. If we overshoot that projected completion date due to delays on your part, we will impose an overrun charge of $1,250 per week.

Guarantees

Wambtac Ghostwriters cannot guarantee the sale or representation of  your manuscript—few honest ghostwriters can—but we can and do guarantee it will be given the serious consideration it deserves in the marketplace.

Glossary

Three-tier Editing

  • Musical line-edit (MLE): full-manuscript massage that elevates the work to industry standards and ensures reader satisfaction
  • Copyedit: a cold-eye third-party review by an expert whose NDA is on file with the company
  • Proofread: a cold-eye third-party review by an expert whose NDA is on file with the company

Book Proposal

The book proposal, aka a manuscript’s business plan/marketing tool, reveals its Who, What, Why, Where, and How as well as its Urgent, Unique, Useful, and Ultra-Specific aspects. All nonfiction is sold by book proposal. All literary agents, scouts, and traditional publishers require them. Most marketing departments, distributors, and wholesalers want pieces of the information in them. The proposal’s information can also be re-purposed for publicists, booking agents, marketing agents, advertisements, cooperative marketing ventures, and self-publishers who want to develop affiliations with independent supply-chain entities. We use the same full-project methodology—i.e., we will conduct sufficient interviews to complete the full project—to write the first two or three chapters (25 to 30 pages or 5,000 to 7,500 words) and develop the Book Proposal document, which includes: 

  • Overview 
  • Market Analysis
  • Competition
  • Author Bio
  • Promotion
  • Book Details
  • Book Contents (annotated chapter summaries)

Bestseller Strategy Plan

The Bestseller Strategy Plan is an initial title-specific off-and online marketing plan to help launch your author career. It explains where to go and what to do to sell thousands (rather than dozens) of copies of your title. We may ask one of our marketing consultants to assist should you opt to include a BSP. The BSPincludes:

  • Industry pitch for distributors, wholesalers, and booksellers
  • Introduction blurb for hosts and emcees
  • Specific URLs for potential affiliates, fee-based promotion, power forums, consignment sales
  • Topic-related blogs and publications
  • Potential sponsors and product tie-ins 
  • Potential bulk-sale buyers
  • Potential hi-volume/low-margin booksellers 
  • Cooperative marketing campaigns
  • Off and online event possibilities