Podcast: Grant McDuling on The Business of Selling Words

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This is a must-listen podcast if you are interested in making a fulltime income as a writer. Grant McDuling is the author of 28 books, most of which have been ghost-written for clients with sales of over 1 million copies. He makes a 6 figure income from ghost-writing, copy-editing and proof-reading.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How a fulltime writing career can be built over time: from motor-racing, to reporting on the races, radio announcing, PR and marketing to novel writing and then ghost writing non-fiction. The writer's journey can span multiple opportunities.
• Publishing houses expect authors to do their own marketing – even Stephen King spends 90% of time marketing and very little time writing, so being a ghost writer is a great opportunity to write, and not market.
• Many people want books but are not writers – speaking circuit, professionals, business experts – this is a market that can be served by people who like writing

• How ghost-writing actually works: Identify aim of the book, understand the language of the person in order to write as them, who is the intended audience, what is the path the reader needs to take and what should they know at the end.
• How the structure of the book is formulated – essentially an end to end process for a non-fiction
• How a book can take 3-4 weeks… or 14 months
• How ghost writing can be costed: hourly rate, flat fee or royalty based

• Writing is a business like any other – treat it as selling words regardless of where they end up
• How does it feel when one of your ghost-written books sells millions of copies?
• Are 75% of books really ghost-written?
• How authors who write under their own name could also ghost-write in order to make a fulltime living writing – tap into a market of people who don't want to write
• How you can maintain a life and manage to write 10 books per year
• How to write a book in a year with 1 hour per day

• Why procrastination is the biggest enemy of any creative person
• How education, learning new skills and setting challenges for yourself can expand your career as well as your life
• How Grant wrote a novel and got a movie deal for it – by calling a director!
• Why authors need editors and proof-readers
• Why self-publishing is a good option (if you use a professional editor to maintain standards!)
• Why ghost-writing business books is a lucrative market

You can find some of Grant's books on Amazon including his novel “The Fields of Hope”.
His book “The Business of Freelance Journalism” is available from Zeus Publications.