The Difference Between Ghostwriting & Shortcut Content
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “What’s the Difference between Ghostwriting and Shortcut Content?”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Shayla: You are listening today to the Shortcut Content podcast and I’m talking with Dave Young who is the founder of Shortcut Content. And, Dave, tell me a little bit about ghostwriters versus Shortcut Content. How are they different and why might one be better than the other?
Dave: So the question is how is ghost writing different than what we do here at Shortcut Content? It’s really pretty a simple answer. If you’re going to write a book, for example, and that’s really the case where we think of ghost writers the most, if you’ve ever read anybody’s account of using a ghost writer, there are ghost writers that are good and there are ghost writers that are not so good, but most people’s experience with a ghost writer is that you just about have to adopt them and let them move into your house or follow you around the office. They become your ghost. And what they’re trying to do is get a feel for you, your style, your choice of words, maybe understand how you’d write if you were going to write and help. But it’s a time consuming process and it’s a very intimate process. And, in most cases, it’s a pretty expensive process. To have somebody follow you around almost 24 hours a day just to gather material for a book can be pretty expensive, especially if they’re a high end, high priced ghostwriter.
What we do at Shortcut Content is a little bit different. We don’t need to get as intimate with you to find the good stories. And the reason for that is we know those good stories are locked up in your head, we know that it would take a long time if we just decided to sit around and wait for those stories to just pop out of your head, so we have an exercise that we put all of our clients through. It’s about 45 minutes long. It takes you under an hour, including prep time, and what it does is it allows you to do a brain dump of all the topics that you know that you should be writing in the next year or so. You can also use this exact same process to dump out the outline of a book. So if you are planning on writing a book, what this process does is it allows you to, in under an hour, produce a complete outline of the book, including chapters and sub-chapters.
And that’s a pretty powerful thing. And if you know what the main chapters are of your book, and you know what the sub-chapters are going to be, odd are you already have that content in your head, and no all we have to do is interview you about each of those sub-chapters and assemble it in the right order. Now if you’re planning on blogging it all out, we can interview you in a random order with each of those sub topics. And the point is that we can do this and we can get to probably eighty or ninety percent of what a really good ghostwriter could do by only doing these in an interview session that lasts about an hour once a month. So for our weekly blog service, the way it works is after you’ve done that outline, you’ll take four or five of those topics and you’ll have a Skype call with one of our interviewers, and during that Skype call, you’ll do a series of five-minute interviews, each one about one of those topics or sub chapters. And by the time you’ve done all of those, you’ve produced enough content for weekly blog posts for the next month. And the next month after that we just rinse and repeat and do another four or five of them.
But really, what you’re doing is pulling that content out in an interview style, as opposed to somebody that’s just following you around, waiting for the content to just roll off your tongue in some magical fashion. Now that’s a pretty simplistic view of how ghost writing works, but the time consuming, and intimate part of ghost writing is just that, and to me, one of the drawbacks of that style and it’s one of the problems that we solve with the Shortcut Content method.
Shayla: If you guys have any questions, make sure you reach out to Dave and the team at ShortcutContent.com. Thanks, Dave.