Photographs by Nick Fancher
In the still hours before dawn while most of Dayton Ohio, sleeps, Joshua Lisec is already at work writing someone else’s life. Not just polishing a sentence or clarifying a timeline, but embodying their memories – kneeling for their first communion, flinching at their father’s temper, returning from a war zone with a newly hatched stress disorder, considering the rippling implications of an illicit, romantic dalliance.
Lisec has written more than a hundred such lives, many for clients he can never name. On the morning that we meet, via Zoom, he finished one before breakfast. These days, he restricts his workload to 10 book projects a year – a limitation imposed after he almost burned out trying to write 20. In the secretive, disreputable economy of ghostwriting, he is something of an anomaly: an unabashed capitalist, mercenary empath and, by his own account, therapist and hypnotist rolled into one.
“I’m often the first person they’ve ever told,” he says, referring to the more difficult memories that arise in interviews. “Not their spouse. Not their priest. Me.”
Lisec, who is balding at 33, with a thick ginger beard and quick dark eyes, sits in his office, in front of a framed poster of his self-published book, So Good They Call You a Fake. The book’s subtitle – Command Attention, Monetize Your Talent Stack, and Become the Uncontested Authority in Your Niche – betrays his own professional ambitions. He has turned ghostwriting into a personal empire, commanding six-figure fees for bespoke memoirs. Early in his career he ghostwrote for celebrities, signing non-disclosure agreements that forbade him from naming them. Today, he mainly takes on the lives of those who are, as yet, insufficiently notable to land a traditional book deal: CEOs and small-business owners wanting a high-end marketing tool; the moderately cancelled in search of a reputation buffer; older, wealthy clients who want an heirloom they can pass down to family members.
Whatever their story – or the story they want to tell – all of Lisec’s clients come to him with a common desire: to find someone who can help them make sense of their life, impose narrative order on the chaos of their experience, provide the reassurance that it all mattered.
These are not the collaborations that, for decades, have turned the lives of the rich and famous into bestsellers where, say, a former First Lady works with a Knopf veteran on a legacy volume. Lisec operates outside the velvet circle of traditional, coastal city publishing, building his business direct-to-consumer via his website and YouTube channel (tagline: “I write books of consequence”) where he posts videos with titles like How Cheap Ghostwriters Burn Your Brand and Autobiography Writing Made Easy.
Lisec is one part artisan, one part algorithm fluffer and all sales-person. His clients include billionaires, tech founders, cardiologists and survivors of the unfathomable. And despite a profession built on invisibility, Lisec has made himself known.
‘I’m often the first person they’ve ever told. Not their spouse. Not their priest. Me’
“I saw an early GPT-1 demo,” he says, referring to OpenAI’s language model. “It was terrible. But I realised then: this is going to change everything.” Lisec saw how swathes of the market in which he operates could be made extinct, as people feed their memories into Large Language Models, which could eventually return an ordered manuscript of self-publishable quality. Without name recognition, he realised, the anonymous ghostwriter would be exorcised from the market. To survive he had to do something his profession usually forbids: write himself into the narrative. “I thought: I have maybe 10 years to make myself famous.”
That realisation, in 2018, nudged him out of the shadows. Unlike the ghostwriters attached to New York and London agencies, who secretly bid on celebrity memoirs via their agents, who receive invitations to pitch clients, Lisec became his own brand. TikTok shorts, Twitter threads, his own book, and a website bristling with call-to-action copy all helped him position himself as the go-to guy for people in search of a story that might outlive them.
Lisec was born and raised in Englewood, a suburb of the midwestern city of Dayton, Ohio, in a home balanced precariously between affluence and adversity. One street away from “the hood,” as he calls it, and one more from cornfields, he grew up in a collision of urban, suburban, and rural America. His father was a government-contracted aerospace engineer who worked on secretive defence projects; his mother homeschooled her sons “before that was a cool thing to do,” he says. Lisec, bookish and introverted, spent his childhood reading the 1976 edition of the Encyclopaedia Americana, which his mother purchased for a few dollars when the local library had a clear-out sale. “I got to Z,” he says. “Took me about eight years.”
When he was old enough, Lisec landed a job at the same library. It was there that he encountered his first ghost. “I saw the same authors releasing new books every few months – James Patterson, Danielle Steele – and I asked, how is that even possible? This thing is 587 pages long…” The answer, suggested by a librarian, lodged deep: ghostwriters.
Lisec’s route into the trade was, in the family tradition, autodidactic. He declared himself a freelance writer in college – he was studying Organizational Communication at Wright State University – and picked up his first gig on a now-defunct freelancer platform for $1.67 an hour. “It was the first time I got paid to write,” he says.
The early years were lean and informal. He took whatever jobs he could find via online freelance marketplaces: editing, copywriting, blog posts. Ghostwriting, when it came, was slow, virtually unpaid, but also curiously intimate. Clients called weekly for a year or more, unwinding their lives down the telephone line. Lisec, who had grown up in a house and town filled with military secrets, was surprised to discover the space held between subject and ghostwriter often had the utility of a confessional booth. He listened as some shared traumas for the first time. “There were tears,” Lisec says. “A lot of tears.”
As his reputation grew, Lisec’s model evolved. Gone was the open-ended weekly call, through which a biography would slowly take shape. In its place, a more strategic, productised approach: identify the audience first, design the structure, extract only what’s needed. He specialises now in what he calls “memoir mashups” – hybrid texts that mix personal story with industry expertise and a dash of self-help: Lean In meets Chicken Soup for the SaaS Founder’s Soul. “Nobody wants a Wikipedia page in prose,” he says. “Unless you’re, let’s say, ultra famous, and even then, you’re going to lose people past the second chapter. Readers want transformation, drama, utility.” A life, in other words, rendered like a novel.
The ghostwriter becomes a kind of medium – not for the dead, but for a self the client may have long since learned to edit out
Ghostwriters have long been in the business of turning a life into literature. In the 1880s, as US President Ulysses S Grant was dying of throat cancer and desperate to secure his family’s future, it was Mark Twain who stepped in – shaping and editing The Personal Memoirs of US Grant, then devising a publishing plan that earned Grant’s heirs around $400,000 (more than $13m today). Twain helped transform the manuscript into both a financial triumph and a literary classic – an early and instructive example of ghostwriting as both an act of craft and of commerce.
Today, at the top end of the market, a publisher might hire a writer of Twain-like calibre to shape and present the story of a world-famous individual – but doing so comes at a premium. JR Moehringer, the Pulitzer-winning American journalist who wrote Andre Agassi’s best-selling memoir Open, was reportedly paid a million dollars to ghostwrite Prince Harry’s 2023 bestseller Spare. If the ghostwriter has a useful reputation (or a sufficiently capable agent), the publisher will deploy the ghostwriter’s name as part of the marketing strategy. But the names and identities of most ghostwriters are rarely revealed. Their professional aims might be no different to their counterparts who operate in the golden air at the summit of the market (to render a life honestly, vividly, profitably), but they must do so while working from the wings, without even the credit enjoyed by a ventriloquist.
Ghostwriting is often framed as a kind of literary subterfuge, a process that swaps truth for expediency. The writer shapes a life story into something palatable, quasi-heroic, or suitable for tabloid coverage, depending on the needs and reputation of the subject. All narratives are distortions by degrees. Still, at a moment when audiences are more cognisant than ever before about the permeable borders between truth and fiction, what is revealed and concealed in the things they read, Lisec views ghostwriting as less a deception than a choreography – a performance of memory in prose, designed to persuade, console, or simply endure. “What I do,” he says, “is translate emotional truth into something useful.”
That emotional truth can be volatile. In one case, a woman revealed a long-buried family secret to Lisec before telling her husband. In another, a billionaire client recounted an assassination attempt that still reverberates through his daily life. Lisec listens without judgment to help clients move past emotional blocks.
‘It’s just me. No agency. No subcontractors. People don’t want Joshua Lisec & Associates. They want Joshua Lisec.’
In recent years, Lisec has added another tool to his repertoire: hypnosis. Certified by the National Guild of Hypnotists, he incorporates visualisation techniques not to lull his clients into false memory, but to coax loose the emotional truth buried beneath the polished retellings. When a subject stalls or circles a painful memory, Lisec might employ what he calls “hypnotic suggestions” – gentle prompts designed to lower defences and reframe experience. The aim is not confession, but contact: to help the client feel safe enough to remember how something felt, not just how it appeared.
The ghostwriter becomes a kind of medium – not for the dead, but for a self the client may have long since learned to edit out. “It’s not therapy,” he says carefully, “but it is therapeutic.”
This is not how traditional ghostwriters describe their work. Neither do they unduly concern themselves with the business of the endeavour. The elite pride themselves on literary discretion and a monkish detachment from commerce. Lisec, by contrast, talks conversion funnels, BISAC codes (the system used to classify books by topics and genres) and personal branding. He reads bestsellers like The Ask Method for structure, not style, and he quotes market positioning in the same breath as narrative arc.
Still, this is why the books he writes work, he says. Some have become New York Times bestsellers. Stay Off My Operating Table by Dr Philip Ovadia, a Florida-based heart surgeon, has sold more than 60,000 copies – enough to top the non-fiction charts, where anything more than 10,000 copies constitutes a hit, a threshold passed by fewer than 7% of books published by the top 10 publishers. (Lisec’s own memoir, he tells me, has sold around 6,000 copies.) And while Lisec can’t always verify sales numbers – publishers are opaque, he says – the steady stream of referrals suggests his model works.
His fee is substantial: between $100,000 and $200,000 depending, he says, on the “complexity” of the project, far more than many established writers receive as an advance. In his most successful year, his business grossed $1.5m. He has no plans to expand the operation, not least because doing so might dislodge the business he has carefully positioned. “It’s just me,” he says. “No agency. No subcontractors. People don’t want Joshua Lisec & Associates. They want Joshua Lisec.”
And yet, for all the control and capital, the work remains morally fraught. Ghostwriters are entrusted with secrets and sins. Lisec claims his clients have disclosed stories of child sexual abuse and domestic violence – things they have “kept locked in a steel closet, sometimes for a lifetime”. He is paid to shape a life into something legible and, ideally, marketable. What happens when those two goals diverge?
Lisec navigates this tension through a pragmatic filter. “I ask: what’s the reader supposed to take from this? If the answer is nothing, then it probably doesn’t belong in the book.” The question reveals how Lisec treats narrative not as pure revelation but as a transaction. Emotional truth must earn its keep. In his model, personal history is valuable only insofar as it is strategic, and useful – an idea at odds with the literary memoir’s more exploratory aims, where ambiguity, fragmentation, and irresolution are often the point. Lisec’s books, by contrast, are designed to convert: a feeling into a brand, a memory into an asset, a life into a message, or a sale.
For all his fluency with other people’s stories, Lisec’s most compelling narrative may be his own: a homeschooled Ohio kid who read his way into a trade, outpaced the machines – at least for now – and branded himself into relevance. He’s a contradiction, too: a ghost who haunts the spotlight, narrating other people’s traumas to construct a legacy of his own. He still believes that AI will steal much of the trade within a decade. But not all of it. “AI doesn’t know all your secrets,” he says. “And it doesn’t know which ones to leave out.”