If you’ve ever been approached to ghostwrite a book, whether a memoir, a business book, or a novel someone else will put their name to, the contract governing that relationship is what actually protects you, and your client, once the writing begins. Here are the essential terms every Nigerian ghostwriter should ensure their next agreement covers properly.
Exclusivity
Secure your client’s agreement that you’ll serve as the exclusive ghostwriter for their project, meaning they won’t quietly engage someone else to work on the same manuscript alongside or behind you, unless either party has properly terminated the agreement first. Without this, you risk investing real time and creative effort into a project your client is simultaneously shopping to another writer.
Milestones
Build clear deadlines into the agreement for each stage of the project, the initial outline, the first full draft, and the final manuscript. For longer or more complex projects, consider breaking this down further still, 50 percent completion, 100 percent completion, giving both you and your client concrete, measurable checkpoints rather than a single, distant deadline with no visibility into progress along the way.
Price
Payment should be tied directly to your milestones, an upfront fee, followed by instalments released as each stage is genuinely completed and approved. Consider including clear refund language addressing what happens if your client is unhappy with the work at an early stage, giving both parties a defined, fair way to exit the arrangement if things go wrong, rather than an open-ended dispute over whether the work delivered met expectations.
Final Approval and Revision Limits
Agree explicitly, in writing, on how many rounds of revision you’re expected to complete for each milestone. Without a clearly capped number, you risk being pulled into endless, unpaid revision cycles with no defined endpoint, a genuinely common source of dispute between ghostwriters and clients who simply never articulated what “finished” actually meant.
Copyright Ownership
Your client will generally expect to own the copyright to the finished manuscript, and under Nigeria’s Copyright Act 2023, this needs to be handled correctly and explicitly in writing. Copyright ownership in a commissioned work does not automatically transfer to the person paying for it simply because they’re paying you, the agreement itself must contain a clear, properly drafted assignment of copyright from you, the ghostwriter, to your client, specifying precisely what is being assigned and when that assignment takes effect, typically upon final payment or delivery. Leaving this ambiguous is one of the single most consequential mistakes a ghostwriting agreement can make, since without a properly worded assignment clause, the ghostwriter may retain rights the client genuinely believed they were purchasing outright.
Dispute Resolution
Rather than defaulting to full litigation if a dispute arises, consider inserting an arbitration clause into your contract, generally faster and less expensive than a court proceeding, and increasingly well-supported under Nigeria’s modernised Arbitration and Mediation Act 2023. Where you include such a clause, ensure it properly specifies the seat of arbitration, the governing law, and the administering institution or rules, a poorly drafted arbitration clause can create as much uncertainty as no clause at all.
Confidentiality
Ghostwriting depends entirely on trust. Your client is sharing personal stories, business information, or creative ideas they haven’t yet made public, and your agreement should include a clear confidentiality provision covering everything shared with you during the project, both during the engagement and after it concludes.
Managing Expectations Through Clear Disclaimers
Never guarantee publication as part of your services. Your role as a ghostwriter is to deliver a finished manuscript your client is genuinely happy with, publication itself, and any commercial success that follows, sits entirely outside what you’re contractually providing. Being explicit about this boundary in writing protects you from a client later claiming you failed to deliver something you were never actually engaged to provide in the first place.
Additional Considerations Worth Building In
Beyond these core terms, a well-drafted Nigerian ghostwriting agreement should also address attribution and credit, will your name appear anywhere on the finished work, as a “with” credit, an acknowledgment, or not at all, and this should be agreed explicitly rather than assumed. It should address ownership of research materials and interview recordings gathered during the process, particularly relevant for memoir or biography projects. And it should specify what happens to partial work if the project is terminated early, whether the client retains rights to an incomplete draft they’ve already paid for, and under what conditions.
The Honest Bottom Line
Ghostwriting is genuinely creative work performed for someone else’s byline, and the contract governing that arrangement is what determines whether you’re paid fairly, protected from endless revision demands, and clear about exactly what you’re delivering and what you’re not. A properly drafted ghostwriting agreement protects both parties, and getting the copyright assignment, milestone structure, and dispute resolution terms right from the outset avoids exactly the kind of dispute that’s far harder, and more expensive, to resolve after the manuscript is already finished.
Cardinal Counsel drafts and reviews ghostwriting, collaboration, and publishing agreements under Nigerian law. Learn more at cardinalcounsel.co.
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