- Remote, you can work from anywhere
Type of Employment
- Freelance (with possible option to move to full time)
Necessary Skills & Qualifications
Here is the list of skills we believe are necessary for this career.
- High-level book experience: In order to be considered for this role, you’ll need to have at least a decade of high-level writing and editing experience, especially experience positioning and structuring books. At a minimum this means you’ve worked on a lot of good and successful books. Credentials are not required but always helpful in your application. For example, experience as a full time editor at a publishing house, book agent, experience writing your own books, experience working on best selling books, etc, is great to have (though we have excellent full time and freelance Scribes without these credentials).
Excellent writing and editing skills: This should be obvious and a given, but we’ll say it: you must be a very good writer and editor.
Good people/interviewing skills: This is the big differentiator between who does and does not succeed with us: the good writers who are also really good with people tend to do well with us.You’ll be on the phone with authors a lot, so comfort with people and talking on phones is a necessity.What’s really important here, though, is good interviewing skills. You must be able to listen closely, understand what the author is saying, and then ask the pertinent questions that ensure he or she fully explained his or her point, and extract every piece of relevant knowledge.
Furthermore, you must be able to help the author fully unlock and explore their idea. Though you’re not a ghostwriter and the ideas in their book are theirs only, you still need to be good at helping people flesh out and explain their ideas.
There are many, many excellent writers and editors who do not succeed in our process because they have poor people skills.
Organized and detail oriented: This is another obvious one, and if you’ve been successfully freelancing for awhile, then this should be easy: you need to be organized and detail oriented. In addition to writing, you’ll be asked to work within our project management system, which is simple to learn, but does require you to keep up to date. This is not a “free for all” writing system.
Salary & Benefits
Competitive Pay: $60-$70 an hour
Yes, I know what you’re thinking—if you are a successful freelance writer, this is probably less than your normal rate. But, remember that the reason you have to charge $100-$150 an hour to regular clients is because you have to bake into your fee all the unpaid time you spent finding the client, negotiating your deal, admin work, etc. Working with us, there is none of that unpaid time. What most freelancers find is that though the hourly rate is a little less with us, they actually make more money in total, and their quality of life goes up because they are doing less work that they don’t like.
Be Part of a Tribe: This role is intended to begin as freelance, but we have several full time Scribes and would like more. There is real potential to move to full time, given you want this and you do a great job. We see ourselves as a tribe of people who are working hard together to accomplish a specific mission (become the default publishing option for professionals), in service of a larger purpose (create books that help the world). We also have a pretty cool set of principles that we live by as a tribe, you should check it out, because this is the operating system for our Tribe.
Freedom: You can work from anywhere—we don’t care. We only care that you have reliable phone and internet connections and that you do your job well.
Fun & Fast-Paced Work: We don’t have boring days. Some are hectic, some are hard, some are incredibly rewarding…but they are never boring and never exactly the same. That’s what happens when you’re solving real problems for people.
Work with Interesting People: You’re not just working on any books. Past authors include major company CEOs, famous entrepreneurs, professional athletes, and people with amazing personal stories. These are books people read and use.
At Scribe, we don’t just accept differences — we support them, celebrate them, and as a company, we thrive on them. Scribe is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and we actively look for and hire people who bring new perspectives and experiences to our tribe.
One last thing before you apply: this is a multi-step application process that is long and involved. Before you fret, know that we have many accomplished Scribes who have won Emmys and Pulitzers and other writing awards—and they all went through this application process.
We don’t do this to annoy you, and this is not a wasted, bureaucratic effort—we do it because it’s necessary. Like we said earlier, there are a lot of great writers who are not a good fit for our process, and much of what we test is not your actual writing ability, but more your people skills.
Please don’t take any part of the application process as an insult or a comment on you or your writing. If this were just a normal ghostwriting gig, then none of this would be necessary, but it’s not. After working with over 1,000 authors, we have a pretty solid idea of what it takes to do a good book in our process, but it takes us a few steps to really test for that.
Cool? Good, let’s get started!
You can expect to hear back from us either way within 2 weeks. To make sure we’re able to give your application the careful attention and time it deserves, please do not follow up with us unless you don’t hear back from us by then.
Note: If you’re on an external job site, we encourage you to apply directly from our career portal at https://scribe.breezy.hr/
Bonus: If you aren’t right for this career but you know the perfect person, send them this career description.
If we hire them, we’ll give you a 2k bonus.
Totally serious—every person we hire, we ask them who referred them to us, and we pay the bonus to the referrer. That could be you if you share this career ad with a friend who’s perfect for it.