Interview with a Barefoot Writer:
Laura Gale
By Mindy McHosrse

“If you can get connected with people, they’re going to
want to work with you and they’re going to want to recommend you.”
— Laura Gale, Ghostwriter, Editor, and Coach

If you have even an inkling of a dream to write books for others, this interview with Laura Gale is going to push you over the edge. Not only does her candid take on ghostwriting paint a vivid picture of a relaxed writing business with terrific income, but her genuine love for the long-term power of books offers reassurance that this specialty is alive and thriving, no matter what the rest of the digital industry throws our way.

Along with ghostwriting, Laura works as a developmental editor, focused on entrepreneurs and marketers who want to produce meaningful books about their businesses. With a background in the traditional publishing industry, she has cultivated her own unique system of directing, writing, and editing the creation of each book project she takes on.

Just some of the books she has under her belt are Carline Anglade Cole’s My Life as a 50+ Year-Old White Male, Marcella Allison’s Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me This Sh*t Before?, and Brian Kurtz’s Overdeliver.

In addition, Laura co-hosts the Business of Writing Podcast with Rachel Mazza, which delves deep into the art, science, and business of great writing. Now based in Bath, England, Laura writes from the comfort of her home office with her dog nearby.

Your writing career started in the traditional publishing world, correct?

I went almost straight into a writing and publishing position out of school. I got an internship in the Little, Brown division publishing house, which is part of Hatchette, which is a big global publishing company. But then one day I went in and it turned out that the lady that I was reporting to had quit on the spot, and they were in this nightmare where they didn’t have somebody. They said, “Do you want a job?” So I walked straight into a job, which was amazing. That gave me a bit of a view into what life as a writer might be like. I really loved the position. I felt very spoiled to be able to spend several years just reading and writing.

What did you gain from working there?

It was three years that I was with them, and I got to work on some really amazing projects. I arrived just as the Twilight Saga was in full swing — all of the vampire books. That was one of our books. Then J.K. Rowling started publishing her adult fiction at that time … Michael Palin was putting out books — he’d done all of the Monty Python– type stuff. Nelson Mandela put out a book, Tina Fey. It was just one thing after another of these amazing authors. As a publicist that’s kind of the dream. Everybody wants to feature these people and talk about them.

I got to hit the ground running. Working on some of those bigger projects meant that when it came to smaller things with people who weren’t so well known, I already had some good contacts and some good strategies; I’d learned a lot already. So I was ready to tackle those things that were not quite as obvious a sell.

What led you to jump ship into freelancing?

Amazon was getting really big around this time, so unfortunately quite a lot of the workforce in the publishing world was getting laid off. Even though I kept my job — I had a really amazing boss who looked after me on that front — it was not going to be something that we could avoid forever. So I thought, Right: I need to get out into the world and freelance and try to be a bit more in charge of how I make my money.

Did you transition straight into ghostwriting?

No. It was a long, trial-and-error-heavy Laura loves hiking and nature; here she’s hiking process, and I ended up writing a lot of other in the Daintree Rainforest in far northern Australia.

types of content for clients. Then one day a guy said, “Hey, would you consider doing a book? I know you have this publishing background.” And I was like, “I have never done that before. Just because I worked in the publishing industry doesn’t mean I know how to write a book, especially not for somebody else. So if you are game, then I am game, but let’s keep in mind that this is an experiment.”

But it went well, I assume.

It went really well, and he was very generous with giving me testimonials and introducing me to people, and it just snowballed from there. Within a year that was all I was doing.

Did you have any bumps in the road when you transitioned from your work in the publishing house to getting your own boutique service started?

Well, in between those two things, I decided that I was going to do something completely different that I had no experience in, because I was also really interested in nutrition. I had gone back to school at night to do a nutrition course. I had really enjoyed that and finished the course and thought I’d just become a nutrition consultant. I wanted to be able to travel and have something you can do anywhere.

But I just had no background in it. There were heaps of people doing amazing, very highly structured marketing, lots of affiliate stuff going on, but I had no connections, no plan, and I didn’t like doing the work. Though as it turned out, I found it really fun to write the plans and do the research.

Still, I was constantly casting around for other On the photo shoot for their Business of Writing things to be doing. It took quite a while to fig- Podcast, Laura and copywriter Rachel Mazza were ure out that I needed to go back to what I know, in Lisbon, Portugal, “having fun and getting into which is writing and helping people get their mischief as we’ve been doing for 10 years now.” stuff out there.

When I finally made that decision, I was about 10 grand in debt and just freaked out, because I had no idea what I was going to do. I started saying to everybody that I met who had a business, “I can write stuff; I’m a good content creator. Anything you need written, I can do it.”

And that led to your first assignments?

I got really lucky that a few people said, “Actually, yeah, I really need that. I just do not have time to do that.” I started out charging these really low numbers. I’d do a blog post for 80 bucks. For a while I was able to combine the nutrition and writing thing because there were a lot of content farms at the time.

This was 2011, 2012. There was this huge focus on content being pumped out by these big companies, and I was writing three or four articles for that thing a day, and they were paying about 30 bucks an article. It was really this churn-and-burn environment, which is not really how I recommend starting a writing career if you could possibly avoid it. It was very stressful and not a good way to make it into something that’s sustainable over the long term.

Eventually I got enough experience that I started referrals with people popping up organically to say, “Can you help me with my blog content?” or “Can you help me write these articles?”

It took a couple of years to get to a really sustainable rhythm, but after about two or three years of hustling like crazy, I could raise my prices to a point where I was working with clients that I really liked, and could be a little bit choosy about who I worked with. From there it morphed into the ghostwriting, and that’s where it really got good.

I love that phrase “churn and burn.” I know many writers who went through that process when they started. How did you break free from it?

Eventually I got enough experience that I started to get referrals with people popping up organically to say, “Can you help me with my blog content?” or “Can you help me write these articles?”

It took a couple of years to get to a really sustainable rhythm, but after about two or three years of hustling like crazy, I could raise my prices to a point where I was working with clients that I really liked, and could be a little bit choosy about who I worked with. From there it morphed into the ghostwriting, and that’s where it really got good.

You found your sweet spot. Was becoming a writer ever one of your long-term goals?

Honestly, I had always thought that being a writer was for other people. I thought, Sure, that sounds great, but everybody knows that you can’t make money as a writer. [Laughter] I had thought in my first job that I’d just be happy to be in proximity to it. It’s a very dynamic industry with lots of really interesting people. I thought, Maybe it’ll rub off on me and one day I’ll be able to write a book or something, but I’m happy just being in this environment.

It feels very ironic even now that I’m in this position of being able to write books on my own and work again with very interesting people, but in this much more hands-on way.

How did you transition into just ghostwriting?

I had slowed down the number of content clients that I was taking while I did this first book because I thought, I’m not going to be able to deliver that volume. But while I was doing it, I was like, Wow, this is awesome because it’s so immersive; it’s a much longer timeline. You can get really into the content in a depth that you can’t in blog content. I really enjoyed being able to do lots more research and take my time and really put it together in the way that I felt was going to land best with the reader. All the way through that project I was really, really enjoying myself. I felt so intellectually satisfied in a way that I just wasn’t getting with the more surface-level-type content. So when that finished, I thought, I would really like to do more of that.

I wrote up a case study about that book and had the client sign off on it so that I could share. We had met in an online forum for entrepreneurs. There were a couple hundred people in this forum, and I thought, If people know about this, then maybe this idea will catch on that people could write a book about their business.

Another one of the members said, “Hey, I’d really love to do a book.” That happened a few months after the first one. In the interim I was still doing lots of the content stuff, but with an eye on, Don’t get too busy, because you want to be able to say yes to the next thing that comes along.

When that second ghostwriting client signed on, I cut my content clients in about half. I stopped taking on so much work and petered them out basically over the course of that project, trying to force myself into having to get another book project. As I was working on this second book, I was doing lots of outreach and trying to do sales calls and figuring out how to get another person lined up. Once I had finished that book, I had another one lined up, and then I didn’t take any more content clients after that.

I’m impressed with how strategic you were about slowly backing out of the content clients and keeping your eye on the long-term prize. Now that you’ve been doing ghostwriting for a while, what are some challenges that you didn’t expect when it comes to that type of writing?

You do have to be really careful about how you use your time, because if you have a six-month timeline for the project, it’s very easy to say, I’ll do it tomorrow or I’ll do it next week or whatever. And then you whittle down the amount of time that you actually have available to do the work. So you do have to be pretty diligent about managing your time and being structured with your time. It’s very tempting when you are like, I’ve done a couple of calls this week; I’ve done my transcriptions. There’s not heaps of other stuff to do. Very easy to either start signing on more work or just going off and doing whatever else. Signing on more work can be good if it’s not the same type of project at once, with exactly the same timeline.

And if you’re trying to make as much money as you can, then obviously that’s an option. But you do have to be careful — again, because the burnout is a real factor. You’ve got to be really mindful about leaving enough gas in the tank for tomorrow and next week to be able to keep delivering on all of this stuff that you’ve said yes to. So yeah, it’s really about how you manage your time, but also about how you manage yourself.

Where do you find your clients for ghostwriting these days?

I do get a lot of referrals at this stage. When I first started, I was going _{she adopted in Portugal, is} to a lot of live events. I would go to conferences and masterminds, 3 years old and has overcome meetups, basically anywhere I thought my ideal client would be. a lot of anxiety to become Obviously you need to know who your ideal client is and figure out a happy, resilient little guy. where they’re going to be. But even at marketing events, there are very rarely any other ghostwriters in the room. So if you get chatting to people, people will be like, “Wow, that’s a really interesting job. I didn’t know that existed. Whose books have you done? What’s your area of expertise? Could you do something like that for me?”

The conversations tend to happen quite organically, so I’m never in that position where I have to be hard selling. I don’t do any social media promotion because I just don’t like doing it. The personal connection is so important because you’re going to spend so much time with this person, and they really need to trust you. They need to feel confident that you are legit and that you’re a safe pair of hands for their story and their brand. I always feel like the best option for finding clients is to just go out and meet them. You’re not going to sell a ghostwriting project the day you meet somebody, because again, there needs to be that trust, and it’s a big project. And they need to think about, Okay, how do I fund this?

How much money can a ghostwriter make?

Experienced ghostwriters can charge anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 or more. But for your first project, you’d probably start a little smaller.

When you talk about your past projects with potential clients, are you able to share which books you’ve ghostwritten or is that entirely dependent on the client and whether they’re willing to allow that information out into the world?

Most of the time that’s down to whether or not the client is comfortable with that. Most of my clients have been totally fine with it, and often they’re very upfront about the fact that they were not the ones on the keyboard writing this. It’s all their stories, it’s all their language. We sit down much like this interview and record the conversation, and I use as much of their speech just verbatim as I can, because I want it to sound exactly like them.

If it’s just exactly what they said, then that’s ideal. But it’s

definitely important to get that part right for them to feel confident about you sharing that you’ve worked on their book. They want to feel proud that they worked with you and you did a really good job. I think that’s also where that in. You have to earn that confidence.

Have you ever had, let’s say, a tough nut to crack — somebody who just had trouble opening up about their story?

It does happen, yes. Part of the reason that I like going to meet people in person before we work together is because it’s also important for me how I feel about them. Obviously I want them to feel confident with me and to trust me, but I want to feel confidentwith them. I want to feel like, Yeah, they’re going to play ball. And if they’re very cagey or they don’t want to talk about stuff, then it’s very difficult to get the kind of material that you need. So part of my process in deciding who I work with is [asking myself], Are they going to be open with me? Can they be honest? Do I think they have the vocabulary to talk about what they want to communicate? Because it’s not always obvious that you’ve got the selfawareness or the ways to describe what you’ve experienced and what you’ve built.

A lot of the times I’m talking to somebody, it’s the first time that they’ve ever looked back over the course of their career, because so many entrepreneurs — and I work mostly with entrepreneurs — they’re so forward focused, they’re constantly driving to the next thing. Often it is the first chance they’ve had to stop and be like, “Wow, I’ve come a long way. Actually, that thing was really hard. Wow, no wonder this thing is happening in my business right now, because that happened three years ago, and I’d never stopped to think about it.”

So they do have this really interesting process of putting the pieces together a lot of the time, but they’ve got to be willing to go there with you. It’s so much about that relationship. But yeah, we do a lot of interviewing, lots of getting into the deep dark past, and not all, but some of it, is heavy emotional stuff, because there’s a lot of you that goes into creating a business.

Do you find that books are still one of the most powerful ways to create authority and influence in comparison to social media or video?

Yes, because the barrier to entry is high. Anyone can make a video. Anybody can put up a post on social media. You can do that in 30 seconds and be done, right? It’s very easy. Everybody’s doing it. There’s no differentiation between you and the next person. I think the reason books are still so powerful is because they’re an investment. They take time, they take money and effort, and you really have to know what you’re talking about to produce a book. The books that I work on are 40,000 or 50,000 words. That’s a lot of blog posts. It’s a lot of content. So you’ve really got to have a good foundation. You’ve got to be legit in what you’re talking about, because if people read something in a book and think, I know that’s wrong or, That’s clearly false or whatever, it’s on this scale where it’s going to be noticed.

I think books are great for authority because they are under much more scrutiny. We also really revere books as a culture. There are literally millions of books published every year and hundreds of millions of books published in the history of books, but we still really think of them as these important artifacts. They’re these vectors of information, and they are a real democratizing force. That’s something that I love about this work: You get to take information that is hardened and probably quite well protected in a lot of ways and make it accessible to other people who might not have had the opportunity to get that information handed to them.

How about books as self-promotional tools?

Books are amazing for businesses in that they’re out there working for you all the time. If you have a salesperson employed in your business, that person takes weekends off, they get sick sometimes, or they go on vacation. Books don’t do any of those things. They’re always out there representing you; they’re this amazing, persistent salesperson. They’re really evergreen assets. They really separate you from your competition, because by the time you put a book out and everybody else is like, “Oh, I should write a book,” you’re so far ahead of them, you’re leading the space.

They also give you heaps of marketing opportunities. There are so many ways that you can put books in front of new audiences. There are so

many things that you can use them for, such as Laura, Marcella Allison, and Jen Adams collapsed to access speaking engagements, podcasts, that in a heap after the book launch party for kind of thing. They are so multifaceted. Most Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me This Sh*t Before? other forms of content can’t really compete with at AWAI’s 2019 Bootcamp in Delray Beach, Florida. them.

I can’t imagine anybody not wanting to write a book after hearing that. Tell me, how do you take advantage of owning your own business and being in charge of your time?

Well, I follow a pretty rigorous schedule. It’s about four or five hours a day. So it’s not too demanding, I have to say. The thing with that is that I want to always make sure I’ve got energy for the next day. I could write for eight hours a day and projects would go faster, but by the end of a project at that pace, I’m exhausted and I need quite a long time to even think about doing something else. I’ve found less each day means more sustainable over the long run. Normally I sit down to work at about midday in the morning. I go for a big walk with my dog, I journal, meditate, talk to my family who are in Australia and who are obviously on a very different time zone.

I do a lot of my life maintenance in the morning. Then from noon till about 5 p.m., I work. It’s normally two or three hours of drafting or whatever the most important thing for the day is, and then most days I’ll have one or two calls. So it’s a pretty nice pace. In the evening I do my workout, my husband and I have dinner, and it’s quite a nice daily rhythm. I don’t work on weekends. That’s been a hard rule for a long time, because I think when you’re self-employed, it can really take over your life.

I realized before I even started ghostwriting that if I work on weekends, I start to get to this point where I feel like I can’t function. You need a break, because creative work is output. You’re externalizing stuff that is in you all the time, and if you’re never putting anything back in, you eventually become a husk. I had enough of feeling like a husk. So no more weekends.

I do try to take a couple of weeks of holiday each year as well, normally a week here or there. My husband works in a start-up-type business, and it’s all fairly intense there. So a week is a good amount of time for us to be away from that. But it’s a nice pace and I don’t feel like I am chained to my desk. I don’t feel terrorized by my calendar or my client demands. That’s the most important thing for me.

What’s your top advice for somebody who might want to get started in ghostwriting someday?

I think there is so much space in the market for it, so don’t be scared about trying. It’s really down to putting yourself out there, because this is a relationship business, so you’ve got to be willing

to go and make friends. I want to be friends with From her desk at her home in Bath, England, my clients. I want to get along with them. I want Laura loves to look out over all the Victorian to check in with them after the projects. I want to houses (130-plus years old) to the hills beyond. know how things are doing.

A lot of writers are very introverted, and certainly my natural state is to be introverted, but I’ve learned to be a bit more engaged with people and to look for things that I can connect with them about, because that’s where the big wins happen. If you can get connected with people, they’re going to want to work with you and they’re going to want to recommend you.

Overcoming any of that social anxiety, that introversion, and also the fear of promoting yourself is very important. I think it’s very scary for a lot of people to say, “I’ve written 20 books and 19 of them are bestsellers.” Because you don’t want to come off like you’re bragging. But actually if that’s true, you’re not bragging. It’s just about practicing how you say it — getting used to those words coming out of your mouth. Social skills are skills like anything else, and they get better the more you practice. Put yourself in these slightly uncomfortable situations, because then when you’re in an environment where your ideal client is right there, you’ve done the hard work, you know how to connect with new people. It’s not scary anymore.