What LinkedIn ghostwriting costs in the UK

Almost nobody in this industry publishes a price.

We do. It's further down. First, the bands we see quoted.

What we see quoted

| Per month | What you're buying at that number | | --- | --- | | Under £500 | One writer with a lot of clients, working from a form you filled in. Often offshore. Often part-generated. | | £500–£1,500 | A junior freelancer, or an agency's junior with a senior name on the proposal. Briefed by email, not by conversation. | | £1,500–£3,000 | A competent solo freelancer. Real writing, done by a person. Usually no editor, so nobody argues with the first draft. | | £3,000–£8,000 | Senior writers who interview you. An editor who isn't the writer. Positioning work included rather than sold separately. | | £8,000+ | All of that, plus placement into publications, plus some portion of a name you're paying for. |

Those are bands, not a ranking. A good freelancer at £2,000 will beat a bad agency at £5,000 every time, and the £5,000 agency will have a nicer deck.

Why nobody publishes a number

The stated reason is that every engagement is different. Which is true.

The unstated reason is that a number you don't know is a number you can be talked up to.

Both are true at once. Only one of them is in your interest.

Per post is the wrong unit

We see rates quoted per post. £50. £150. £400 from the ones who've read a book about positioning.

Per-post pricing sounds fair. It isn't, because it prices the typing.

The typing is about a fifth of the work. The rest is the hour on the phone, the argument about what you actually meant, the two drafts nobody ever sees, and the decision not to publish the one that would have embarrassed you in front of a client.

Price the month. Don't price the post.

What we charge

The Writing Partnership — from £3,500/month. Four conversations, twelve to sixteen posts, one long-form piece. Three months minimum, then month to month.
The Full Partnership — from £5,500/month. The above, plus bylines pitched and placed, plus the positioning pulled apart every quarter.
Positioning Intensive — from £2,500, one off. Comes off your first month if you go on to a partnership within ninety days.
Perspective Session — £149. One hour. No commitment.

We take five clients at a time. That isn't a scarcity tactic, it's the number at which two people can have a real conversation every week with every client and still edit properly.

The VAT bit, which matters more than you'd think

We're not VAT registered. The number on this page is the number you pay.

If you're comparing us against a VAT-registered agency, add 20% to theirs before you compare. A £3,000 quote is £3,600 out of your account. Nobody puts that in the proposal.

That'll change as we grow, and this page will change with it.

What actually moves the price

Three things, and the third is the one people don't expect.

How much of the thinking already exists. If you've been arguing the same point for five years and just never wrote it down, that's cheaper than starting from nothing.

Whether you want placement. Pitching editors is a different job to writing, with a different failure rate.

And how much you'll actually turn up. The single biggest cost driver is a client who cancels the call. We can't write from a diary invite.

When you shouldn't hire anyone

If you're pre-revenue, don't.

Write it yourself, badly, for six months. You'll find out what you actually think, which is the expensive part. You'll also be a much better client afterwards, to us or to anyone else.

The people who get the most out of this are the ones who've already tried and got bored of sounding like everyone else.