Let's complain about being an academic ghostwriter

I'll start...

1. I have been in this industry for 7 years now, the golden days are over, only brutal competition for scraps is left

2. 6 months out of the year is pure famine, you can still get something but it is not nearly enough to make a living.

3. Other 6 months are pure madness, you get tons of orders but only have 2 hands to write. You can outsource, but it is risky and can cost you dearly, especially if you work for a company (can get fired).

4. Easy orders are sent to Nigeria for 2 bucks a pop. What is left for you are most atrocious, complex, time-consuming orders ever imaginable. You will spend more time on those than you thought, essentially bringing your hourly rate below the minimum wage.

5. Students are rude, entitled brats, pestering you with 1000 emails, wasting time, then not ordering anything, or requesting endless revisions, etc.

6. Companies are getting worse with every passing day, no respect for writers, management will always take the client's side, endless penalties, etc.

7. There are more writers and companies but fewer orders. Just yesterday ITT closed, 40,000 students were left high and dry. A lot of clients typically come from these "for-profit" colleges.

8. Searching for clients is a never ending process. Word of mouth does not work, students do not advertise their use of service, they graduate, and it means that a writer has to do a constant client search, eating up more time and resources.

feel free to add....especially if you have something good to say about being an academic ghostwriter

Regarding:

1. You may be partially right. But the days of QUALITY freelance writers (but not pseudo-experts) are not over. I'd say that there is brutal competition for poor and average-level papers that quite often may be successfully written by ESL writers, but when it comes to high quality / professional / specialized assignments the competition is quite low.

2. Partially true. It's probably 4 months, not 6 though.

3. Yes, the example academic research is mostly a seasonal job; still, there are people (usually adult students) who may partially compensate for few orders during the summer months.

4. Mostly correct. Easy orders taken by ESL writers from less advanced countries who are okay with working for $2 per page. The problem (for good writers at least) starts when complex orders only pay $8 per page and their failure rate and research time are great.

5. Mostly true. Quite often a student who gets the best deal / discounted price gives most of the headaches.

6. It may be true for foreign sweat-shops, but the ones from the US or UK tend to treat their writers as an important asset and usually cover the cost (don't give any 'penalties') as long as the writer did its job well and followed the customer's instructions.

7. Hm, have to read the news about ITT (haven't heard of that).

8. Yes, students aren't typically helping when it comes to advertising of a freelance writer or a writing service (even if they achieved great results with them). You'd think they have 5K followers and they'd mention you if satisfied, but it's rarely happening. They just don't care and some of them don't want to discuss it in details anyway.

I agree with everything dd says (except 2 [challenging but still possible], 5 [many of my clients call me "sir" and treat me better than my family] and 6 [likewise the company I've worked with for the past 17 years]) and yet this is still the best job in the world -- at least for me.

p.s. I've only seen their television commercials so I can't speak to the quality of education they received and I don't recall receiving any work from an ITT student over the past 19 years or so, but it seems they have been poorly served. I don't think ITT was accredited and doubt these 40,000 students will even receive any transferable credits. Maybe they'll all enroll in Walden or Phoenix and we'll reap the benefits.

I had some students from for-profit places in the past, not many but still....I just feel that a writer can hardly make a living today on ghostwriting for students alone. If you have some steady income from somewhere else, then sure, freelancing money would be a great help. But to live off writing alone (and I mean working for a company, and taking additional orders) does not seem possible any longer. Unless, of course, you live in Thailand or something. But maybe I am wrong...

I don't necessarily disagree with you, and it's interesting to get the perspectives from some of experienced people in the industry on this topic, like Major and Professor Verb.

But what you're saying is also a little conflicting. On one hand you're complaining about the poor wages and work available, but then on the other saying that half of the year there is such an abundance of work you can't even handle it all. Was there ever really a time when down months like August (and even September to some degree) were considerably more profitable than they were now? Maybe when October hits you'll think differently :)

I'm also a little worried about the ITT shutdown, but I'm assuming those students are just going to attend different institutions.

Gather 'round, young'uns, and I'll tell you a story that you'll find hard to believe. There was a time in this country when students in need of research papers roamed the plains in the tens of millions year round. You could buy a piece of pie, a cup of coffee, a double-feature and a good used car for a nickel and TurnItIn wasn't even a twinkle in the eyes of the four UC Berkeley students who designed it as a peer-review application. Yessir, those were the days. Now go fetch Grandpa another glass of bourbon.

pre-Turnitin days must have been wild :)

Here's a typical staff meeting from the era:

Not to the best of my knowledge.

I'm starting to agree with DD on this. It seems like there's a race to the button in terms of sacrificing quality for price or sheer production with a lot of companies that's more severe than in the past, making it increasingly difficult for students to find the few companies and solo writers that uphold standards acceptable for most American and British universities.

Fines for writers? That exists? One of the worst ideas I've ever heard of.

Besides square tires and bologna-flavored whip cream, I agree.

The main problem that I had when I was an academic writer was having to deal with clients who did not understand what their homework was all about themselves. These "weak at English comprehension" students always sounded the panic button for every small detail of their essay. I would write an A grade paper for the student, then submit it, only to have the student send me a message indicating that they could not understand what I wrote and was I sure that I wrote it according to their instructions? No amount of reassurance could give them the confidence that the paper was on the right track and they would get a good grade for it. So they would file a chargeback claim on the order until they got their grade back. Needless to say, even the company did not appreciate these sorts of moves on the client's part. While this was a major complaint I had back then, it did not compare to the students who had a tendency to deliver incomplete instructions for the paper so that after I submitted a paper, they would again, hit the panic button and demand a revision because I failed to respond to the other half of instructions (which were not submitted along with the order in the first place.) When I demanded extra pay for the additional work, they threatened to simply cancel the order instead. How rude!

Such students may be a pain indeed. How can they 'cancel the order' if most (if not all) of it has already been delivered? Like cancelling an ice-cream desert after eating most of it ;)

At the two far ends of the spectrum (requests to cancel far in advance and requests to cancel very close to deadline and/or after work has already begun) are the easiest issues: it's fair to expect to cancel on the former and it's unfair to expect to cancel on the latter. The tricky situations are when someone places an order a month or more in advance and then asks to cancel a week or several days before deadline. While we might not have yet actually begun work on it, we might already have turned down another project with that would have been a conflicting deadline based on the expectation of having to do that first project.

Any problems that I had with being an academic ghost writer mostly related to payment collections. It was easy when I was just starting out and I could knock on my dorm mate/client's door, hand over the paper and get the payment immediately. Left hand, right hand. We were both happy. When I branched out to writing for online students, I would receive a down payment and then have to track them down for the rest of the amount owed. Since I never handed over the paper without a full payment received, This meant that I would often end up with only half a payment for a 50 page order if the client asked for the paper without handing over the full payment first.

When I began hiring my own set of writers, I ended up doing the QA for their work, which meant that there were times when I had to correct the paper myself and penalize the writer for being sloppy, regardless of how small the infraction was. I needed to take a cut since I basically helped to write the final version of the paper. I guess that comes with the territory though. At least I was doing less writing already which I found to be more tiresome than proofreading the paper as my writers completed the orders.

This is exactly what some client have a hard time understanding, along with the inability for some to understand that they are not the only customer we have.

One of my pet peeves is to have a client fuss when I can't fit in their project since it's "only 4 pages" and "can be done in a few hours." While 4 pages can be done in a few hours (less in some cases), I have a steady schedule and it is often not possible to fit in even short orders. Of course, if I have time, I certainly try to accommodate, but most of the time, I need a few days to avoid having to rearrange projects already in progress.

I don't keep a regular schedule at all: sometimes I sleep at night and other times I work through the night and sleep during the day. Generally, I'll do what I can to help my clients out (and to get new clients' future business) by taking on their last-minute emergencies; however, that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm available at anybody's beck and call 24/7/365 or that I won't charge for the inconvenience of having to change my own plans to accommodate someone's needs. I workout almost every day, I have hockey games and practices, I'm the VP of my co-op's board of directors (which also involves a lot of writing), my wife and I sometimes make plans, I like lying in the sun when it's nice out, and I also need a certain amount of downtime after writing all night (or all day, as the case may be).

If I have to change my own plans about any of that (especially if I also have to start scrambling to contact my other clients to find out who can afford to give me a last-minute deadline extension) just to fit in someone else's emergency project, you can bet that I'm going to charge enough to make that inconvenience worth my trouble. In most cases, the rush is only necessitated in the first place because the client waited until the very last minute to contact me and not because a professor assigned a project with a one-day (or 6-hour) deadline. Someone else's procrastination is not my emergency unless it's worth it to me to make up for the inconvenience. Conversely, if I make a rare mistake that justifies an emergency revision to make a deadline, that's a totally different story and I'll drop whatever I'm doing (except making someone else's deadline) to get it done ASAP. If the emergency rush is my fault, that's legitimately my problem; if it's not my fault, it's not my problem unless it's worth it to me to make it my problem.

Having a slow season to deal with during the summer and holiday months. It really irritates me to have to suddenly change my writing mode from academic to advertising, and have my writers go from academic, to copywriting because it kind of messes up our routines. Then again, shaking up the routine once in a while isn't a bad thing. Additionally, having to project how much money I will need to set aside during the regular season for the slow season tends to get a bit messy because of inflation and insurance costs. Would I want a regular 9-5 job with a fixed income? Not on your life.

How much does it cost to get a ghostwriter?

Ghostwriting costs vary a lot! For a seasoned writer, expect anywhere from $25,000 to over $100,000 for a book, but newer writers or affordable ghostwriting services might charge $5,000-$15,000. Rates can be per word, page, or hour, so it's worth discussing options to match your budget. Visit site for reliable writing services.

I wouldn't be too optimistic about the quality of anything that costs barely 20% of the standard market rate for that service. As with anything else, you get what you pay for.

The cost for the ghost writer should also be based upon the writing experience of the human being. While there are some people who rely on AI for ghost writing these days, they have found that it is not always a good option because "I could have done better writing it myself". Let's face it, AI is manned by people on the other end. They are the ones that feed information to the AI. So what benefit does AI give you that a human being cannot deliver in a better and more accurate form?

Exactly. Anybody can call just himself a "writer" and start advertising or otherwise soliciting for clients to "try out" academic writing or to do it temporarily for the first time while they're in between fulltime jobs. There are very few people with the ability to produce a high volume of good academic projects regularly who aren't doing something else for a living, and even fewer who've provided many thousands of projects over 20+ years in this business.