Is using a ghostwriter dishonest?

Worth asking. Most people who ask it are asking sincerely, and the industry's standard answer — a breezy "everyone does it!" — doesn't actually engage with the question.

So: no, with one real exception, and it's not the exception people expect.

What's actually being sold

Nobody reading a chief executive's post believes she sat down at 6am and typed it herself.

Books by public figures are ghostwritten. Speeches are written by speechwriters, and nobody thinks a head of state personally drafts an address. Annual letters to shareholders go through several hands before they're signed.

The convention is understood. Attribution on a piece of writing has never meant "this person physically typed this." It means "this person is accountable for this."

Which is the thing that has to be true.

Where the line actually is

The line isn't who typed it. It's whether the views are yours.

If you believe it, you've said it before out loud, you'd defend it at a dinner table, and you'd stand behind it when a client raises it in a meeting — it's yours. Somebody else arranged the words.

If you don't believe it, or you've never thought about it, or you couldn't argue for it if pushed — it isn't yours, and publishing it is dishonest regardless of who wrote it.

That distinction has nothing to do with ghostwriting. A founder who writes her own posts about values she doesn't hold is being more dishonest than one who has a ghostwriter transcribe views she'll defend for the next decade.

The version that genuinely is dishonest

A ghostwriter who invents the opinions. It's common.

It happens when the process is a briefing form instead of a conversation. The writer has nothing to work from, so they generate something plausible for someone in your sector — a take, a lesson, a tidy story about a failure that never happened — and you approve it because it sounds fine and you're busy.

Now you're publishing views you don't hold and anecdotes that aren't true. That's not ghostwriting. That's fabrication with your name on it.

It collapses the first time someone asks you about it in person. And someone always does.

We won't do it, and not out of virtue — it doesn't work. Writing that isn't rooted in something you actually think reads as hollow even to people who can't say why.

The fabricated-story problem

The specific failure mode on LinkedIn is the invented anecdote.

The taxi driver who said something profound. The junior employee who taught you humility. The deal you walked away from that never existed.

Readers have got very good at detecting these. The genre is so well-worn that a true story in that shape now reads as false, which is a genuine loss for people who have real ones.

We write what happened. Where nothing happened, we write the argument instead and skip the story.

Who owns it

You do, on full payment. Your name, your idea, your copyright.

We don't retain rights, we don't reuse the material, and we don't put it in a portfolio. Almost everything we write is under NDA and stays there — no logos on this site, and we won't ask to use yours.

The disclosure question

Do you need to say you use a ghostwriter?

No, and almost nobody does. But the test is worth applying: if it came out tomorrow, would you be embarrassed?

If the answer's yes, that's not a disclosure problem. It's a sign the writing has drifted from what you actually think, and the fix is upstream.

Some clients mention it openly. It costs them nothing, because the ideas were visibly theirs all along.