Ghostwriting Services Cost: Ghostwriter Rates Per Word, Hour, Page and Book

By the word

Ghostwriting rates per word, by content type

Per word is the unit to insist on. It is the only one where both sides can check the number before anyone starts, and it is the unit the industry's own published chart is built on. The table below is the full ghostwriting section of the Editorial Freelancers Association rate chart, the closest thing US ghostwriting has to a public price list. The association compiles it from member surveys, and it notes that the upper and lower figures are set by the average variation from the median rather than by the extremes anyone reported.

Two rows in that table deserve a second look. Short story at 3 to 4 cents and graphic novels at half a cent to a cent are not ghostwriting bargains, they are different jobs: a graphic novel script carries very few words per page of finished art, so per-word pricing collapses and the work is really sold per project. And memoir sitting above nonfiction is not sentiment. A nonfiction author usually hands over an outline, a body of existing material and a clear argument. A memoir client hands over a life, and somebody has to interview it out of them first.

Open marketplaces run well below the EFA figures at the entry end. Reported 2026 bands put entry-level ghostwriters at 3 to 8 cents a word, mid-level at 8 to 20 cents, and established writers at 50 cents to $1.50 and above. Reedsy, which vets its writers, reports $0.10 to $2.00 a word across its marketplace. The spread between 3 cents and $1.50 is fifty-fold, and it is almost entirely a spread in how much finishing you will have to do yourself.

By the book

What it costs to hire a ghostwriter for a whole book

Most book projects are sold as one fixed fee, so the per-word rate is really an input the writer uses to build the quote rather than something you are billed on. To read a project fee you need the target length. Nonfiction runs 50,000 to 80,000 words, memoir 60,000 to 90,000, and business or self-help books are shorter than people expect at 30,000 to 50,000. A typical chapter is 2,500 to 5,000 words, averaging about 4,000, so a 60,000-word book is roughly 15 chapters.

Notice how the tiers overlap rather than stack. A $20,000 quote could come from a mid-career professional pricing a short business book at the top of their range, or from a beginner pricing a 90,000-word memoir at the bottom of theirs. The fee alone tells you almost nothing. The fee divided by the agreed word count tells you a great deal, which is why the first thing to settle in any ghostwriting conversation is the target length.

By the hour

Why the hourly rate and the per-word rate do not reconcile

The EFA chart publishes a pace column alongside the rates, in pages per hour. That makes a second test possible. If the columns described the same work, then the per-page rate multiplied by the pace should land near the published hourly rate. On the editing rows it broadly does. On the ghostwriting rows it does not come close.

This is not a mistake in the chart, and it is not an arbitrage you can exploit. It is the single most useful thing in the whole dataset once you read it correctly. The pace column measures how fast a ghostwriter drafts when they are drafting. The per-word and per-page columns price the entire project. The gap between them is everything that happens in a ghostwriting engagement that is not typing.

Run it on one book and the scale becomes obvious. A 60,000-word memoir is 240 standard pages. At the EFA memoir pace of 3 to 4 pages an hour, drafting it takes 60 to 80 hours, about two working weeks. But the same chart prices that memoir at $30,000 to $60,000, and at the published $80 to $100 an hour that fee implies 300 to 750 hours of work. Drafting is somewhere between 8% and 27% of the project. For full-length nonfiction the drafting share works out at 14% to 40%.

The other 60% to 90% is the part nobody puts in a proposal: recorded interviews and the listening back, reading the client's existing material, chasing down facts and permissions, arguing the structure into shape, and then two or three full revision passes after the client reads a draft and changes their mind about chapter four. That is also why a book takes six to twelve months rather than two weeks, and why an hourly ghostwriting quote deserves more scrutiny than a fixed one. At $80 an hour with no cap, the difference between an 80-hour engagement and a 400-hour engagement is $25,600, and nothing in the quote tells you which one you signed.

The build option

Hiring a writer in-house instead, and where the line falls

For a company producing a steady stream of long-form work under someone else's name, an employed writer is a real alternative. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the 2025 median wage for writers and authors, occupation code 27-3043, at $76,910 a year or $36.98 an hour, across 135,400 US jobs, with the field projected to grow 3% to 4% through 2034 and to open about 13,400 positions a year.

Salary is not the cost. Using the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation figures, wages are 69.9% of total private-industry compensation and benefits 30.1%, so the loaded multiplier is about 1.43. That takes the median writer to $109,981 a year, or $52.88 an hour across 2,080 hours. The question then becomes how much finished work that person has to produce to beat buying it.

Read the middle row carefully, because it is the realistic one. To justify an in-house writer at general nonfiction rates you need close to four full-length books a year out of one person, every year. Almost nobody needs that. Where in-house does win is when the work is continuous and varied, a stream of articles, executive posts, internal narrative and one book, because then the writer is busy all year and the alternative is a dozen separate freelance engagements with a dozen separate briefings. For a single book, or one every couple of years, buying it is not close.

One asymmetry is worth pricing in. A $30,000 book bought from a freelancer costs $30,000 whether it takes them 200 hours or 500. The same book produced in-house at $52.88 an hour consumes 567 working hours of a salaried person, about 3.3 months of their year, and that time is gone whether or not the book lands. On a single project the freelance route transfers the schedule risk to somebody whose business model is built to carry it.

Pick your band

What each budget realistically buys in 2026

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