# 241 Steve Eggleston – Ghostwriting

Ghostwriting with Critically Acclaimed Author Steve Eggleston Have you ever considered ghostwriting? Then our podcast with author Steve Eggleston is essential listening! Steve talks about how he became a critically acclaimed ghostwriter. He currently lives in Somerset, with Glastonbury just on his doorstep, but was born in Miami and grew up spending most of his life in California. Funnily enough, he didn't start out his career ghostwriting. Steve went to law school in California, and studied to be a lawyer. When he got divorced he moved to San Francisco where he began his career as a Ghostwriter. Today, Steve tells us how he became one of Amazons best selling authors, and what ghostwriting really is all about. How to Become a Critically Acclaimed Author To become critically acclaimed, you only really need one thing, Steve says. That one thing is to have an author with high stature review your book and give you a critically acclaimed review. Steve managed to get New York Times best selling legal thriller author John Lescroart to acclaim his work. Anything as little as a 10-second clip would be enough to get the title of a critically acclaimed author, explains Steve. If one person gives you a good review of that stature and lets you put it on the cover of your book, then everybody else will then follow in line. As a result, it will get the ball rolling. So as Steve said, along as you get a good review from a good well known author, then people will be more persuaded to buy it. What is a Ghost Writer ? A Ghostwriter is someone who writes a book for someone else or a company and gets no author credit for it.  A ghostwriter's name won't appear on the book and no one knows a ghostwriter or a particular person wrote it and that's the way it goes. Steve explains that nowadays a lot of "Ghostwriters" are really just collaborators.The contracts are still called a Ghostwriting contract but there's a provision in it dealing with author recognition that says "yes" or "no" and so forth.   If they want you kept secret, you'll sign a very strong NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) which over the years, has become extremely harsh, Steve warns.   Ghostwriters have a website where they would put their books on it and if somebody really wanted to find out who the author was they might find out. But today, there's the potential of something possibly blowing up if someone finds something you've done in your past.    Even though your name is not on the book, if people find out, you automatically become associated with that book. Therefore, it ends up being a financial loss. Steve advises that if you do become a ghost writer, you shouldn't tell anybody to avoid these situations.      How Can You Sell Yourself if Nobody Knows Who You Are?  Steve was lucky because he has had a lot of stuff already published in his name at the time of becoming a Ghostwriter. The answer to that question would be to work through an agent and then the agent would handle it.   Steve warns that it would be tough with nothing published in your name,