how do you pay a ghostwriter?

I don’t mean how much, because ghostwriters charge different amounts. I mean people’s preferences for being paid. Some ghostwriters on shorter texts charge hourly, but for whole books this gets to be cumbersome for them and their client. I tend to quote an overall price for the job based on how long a book will be, how long I think it will take, how difficult I think it will be, how urgent it is, and how busy I am at the time.

The choice then is either to link payment to milestones or to link it to the calendar.

Because it works better for my financial planning, I always link it to the calendar. That way I’m not penalized if, say, a work crisis distracts the author from a stage of the work for a significant time.

I typically estimate how many months a project will take and divide the total fee by the number of months plus two: a payment on signature of contract and a payment on completing the locked manuscript.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this. For me, the worst that could happen for me is that the project runs longer than I estimate and I end up working a month or two after the final stage payment where it feels as if I’m not being paid. For the author, the risk is the other way around: they could still be paying me after the work is all completed.

Either way, it seems as fair as any other way. It makes the financial load more manageable for the author and enables me to predict my monthly income.