Your pitches are croissants
A note for any ghostwriter who has spent the last few months wondering if they're the problem. (Spoiler Alert: They aren't.)
Let’s say you’ve been pitching ghostwriting clients for what feels like months now. You’ve found prospects on LinkedIn, on X, in newsletter archives, and in those “founders to follow” lists everyone shares around like a chain letter. You’ve crafted thoughtful cold emails. You’ve sent free outlines. You’ve hopped on a discovery call or two.
And the response, mostly, has been a polite “we’ll be in touch.” Or, more commonly, the kind of silence that makes you wonder if Gmail is even still delivering your messages or if it’s just keeping them as a souvenir.
If this has been your rinse and repeat for a while now, it’s easy to see why you might be losing steam. You might even be wondering if you should shelve the whole ghostwriting thing and go back to whatever you were doing before. And worst of all, that little voice in the back of your head might be whispering the worst possible thing it can whisper.
Maybe my writing just isn’t good enough.
Let’s pump the brakes on that one.
You are not the problem
I want to say that as plainly as possible, because the longer you sit with the other story, the more convincing it gets.
If you are out here pitching clients, writing free outlines, taking the calls, and putting yourself in the arena (which, by the way, is a really uncomfortable arena and not enough people will tell you that), you are most definitely a skilled writer with the drive to do something real with the craft. You wouldn’t be pitching at all if you weren’t. People who aren’t serious writers do not voluntarily spend their free time writing a 1,200-word outline for a stranger on LinkedIn. That’s simply not a thing, o friend of mine.
Silence from a prospect (or even a flat “no, thanks”) is not the same as “you aren’t good enough.” It usually just means the offer didn’t land at the right moment, for the right person, in the right way.
Here’s a comparison that might help. Picture yourself walking into a coffee shop on a Tuesday morning, holding a tray of perfectly made croissants you baked yourself, and offering one to the first person you see. They wave you off. Are the croissants bad? No, the croissants are great. The person already ate breakfast. The person is on a call. The person is gluten-free. The person was raised in a household where you do not accept baked goods from strangers in coffee shops (though, to be fair… I would have asked if I could take five… but that’s another story for another day).
The croissants are fine. They’re FIRE.
Your pitches are croissants. And they are not ON fire.
Why this stretch feels worse than it is
There’s something weird about cold outreach that nobody really warns you about when you start. In most other parts of life, effort and outcome are at least loosely related. You study, you do better on the test. You practice the song, the song gets sharper. You go to the gym, eventually a shoulder appears where there wasn’t one before.
Cold outreach does not work that way, and the brain handles it badly.
You can do everything right and hear nothing. You can do everything right for months and hear nothing. And because the only feedback you’re getting is an empty inbox, the brain starts filling in its own explanations for why. The brain, as a general rule, is not great at this. The brain will reach for the most personal, most catastrophic explanation available, because the brain has been watching too many movies and thinks every plot needs a third-act crisis.
The actual answer is almost always much more boring. Your prospect was in a meeting. Your prospect was on vacation. Your prospect opened the email on their phone, meant to respond later, and then their toddler threw a yogurt and that was the end of that. None of those things have anything to do with you.
What to do instead of spiraling
The first thing is to take the question seriously enough to set it down. Not bury it or pretend you never asked it. Set it down, the way you’d set down a coffee mug you’re not ready to put in the dishwasher yet. It’s there; you’re just not drinking it right now.
The second is to remember why you started this. You picked ghostwriting because you wanted to take ownership of your work and your time. You niched down because you wanted to be the obvious choice for a specific person. You wrote those free outlines because you actually wanted to help. None of that has changed because the inbox is quiet this week.
The third is the part of the advice that everybody needs. Lean on your people. The friends who will pick up the phone. The family member who always asks how it’s going. The writing group. The one weird friend who replies to your voice notes with their own three-minute voice notes (best believe everyone has this friend and they are a treasure). Encouragement from people who actually know you carries way further than any motivational post on the internet ever will.
And the fourth is permission to step away from the pitching grind every now and then without feeling like you’re slacking. Take the walk. Take the afternoon. Watch a movie to relax (or maybe even laugh until you cry). Give yourself a little of that “me time” so the work doesn’t start to feel like a punishment for the crime of being a writer.
The part where I tell you to keep going
Your persistence is going to pay off. That’s a sentence I’m willing to put my name on, because the writers who keep refining and showing up are the ones who eventually land the right fit. The client you’ve been hoping for is, in all likelihood, much closer than the inbox is making it feel.
And because you’ve taken the time to niche down, sharpen your offer, and actually understand the people you’re reaching out to, when “yes” finally comes, it’s going to be right on time. The reason matters here. You aren’t trying to land any client. You’re trying to land the client who is a fit for the specific thing you’re good at. Those clients exist. You’re already doing the work to find them.
The ghostwriting hunt is hard when it isn’t producing results yet. Most worthwhile things are. The next email you send could honestly be the one that changes the whole picture, which is a thing I say not because it’s a motivational fortune cookie but because that is mathematically how this kind of work tends to go. The “yes” doesn’t announce itself in advance. It just shows up one Tuesday while you’re making coffee.
So go send the next one. Refill your croissant tray. Walk back into the coffee shop.
You’re a lot closer than the inbox is letting on.
And if you need someone to hear you out, my DMs are always open. And free. Like unexpected croissants!