Flattered? Yes, but small payment for using my name? No thanks ….

To anybody else who writes for a living, this is a question for you. Recently I was approached on a website where I frequently work and invited to be a ghostwriter for a website. It was flattering because my experience is obvious and they wanted to make me a small payment to use my name, and then allow some cheaper writer to submit articles in my name.

I don’t know how other experienced writers feel about this or if this a frequent experience for you all. Has this happened to you? How did you react? Are you in favour of this type of approach and more particularly, are you ok with another writer penning articles under your name?

This is definitely the conundrum of the “Ghostwriter”. My own feeling was “No thanks. I prefer to actually check any articles with my name on them.”

However, I am really happy ghostwriting non-fiction work for anybody and I sign NDAs and stick to them. I guess my issue is that in the future, this website could publish anything with my name attached and I would have no way to refute it if the payment had been made.

Let me know any experience or thoughts on this. Is this practice common? Do you think you would accept it or not and why?