Writers of the West Review: What I Found Before I’d Trust Them with a Book

If you spend enough time around books, you eventually become curious about the people behind them.

And if you’ve ever looked into getting a book written or published, you’ll know there are plenty of options: freelance writers, editors, self-publishing services, traditional publishers, marketing companies and businesses that promise to handle everything for you.

Writers of the West falls into that last category.

The company says its team brings more than 20 years of experience in writing and publishing and has worked with more than 2,500 authors. That immediately caught my attention, but numbers on a company’s own website only tell you so much.

So I spent some time looking at how Writers of the West actually works, what makes its approach different, and perhaps most importantly for someone who spends a lot of time around books, whether I could find the books outside the company’s own website.

There were a few things that stood out to me.

They don’t just assign the next available writer

This was probably the most interesting part of their model.

Writers of the West ghostwriting services works with a large network of writers covering different genres, backgrounds and levels of experience.

When a new project comes in, the details can be shared with writers who specialize in that type of book. Writers who feel they’re a particularly good fit for the project can express their interest, and the strongest matches can then be narrowed down.

I like the thinking behind that.

A memoir about someone’s childhood shouldn’t necessarily be written by the same person you’d choose for a business book. A children’s story needs something different again.

And with particularly personal books, technical ability isn’t the only thing that matters. You probably want someone who understands what you’re trying to say and can capture your voice without replacing it with their own.

Authors don’t have to give up ownership

This is another part of the model I think authors will appreciate.

Writers of the West provides professional help without taking ownership of the author’s work. Authors retain the rights to their books and their royalties.

For projects where privacy matters, they also offer NDA-based confidentiality.

That’s particularly relevant with memoirs, biographies and professional books, where an author may be sharing personal experiences or information they don’t necessarily want connected publicly to a ghostwriter.

The help can remain behind the scenes. The book remains the author’s.

The process can move at the author’s pace

Books take time.

And depending on how much professional help is involved, they can also represent a significant investment.

Rather than requiring the entire project to be paid for at once, Writers of the West offers installment-based payments and allows projects to move at a pace that works for the author.

I can see that being particularly useful for someone writing a memoir or another deeply personal book.

Sometimes you need a little time between chapters. Sometimes life gets busy. And sometimes you simply want to complete one stage before committing to the next.

A book doesn’t necessarily need to move according to somebody else’s clock.

You can keep the same team beyond the manuscript

This is where the model starts to make more sense as a whole.

An independent author can absolutely build their own publishing team. You can find a ghostwriter, then an editor, then a cover designer, then someone for formatting, then work out publishing and distribution, and eventually find someone to help market the finished book.

Writers of the West gives authors the option of keeping those pieces together.

Depending on what the book needs, the same company can help with writing, editing, proofreading, design, formatting, publishing, distribution and marketing.

There’s also a dedicated project manager involved, with support available seven days a week, so the author has one consistent point of contact rather than having to coordinate several different people independently.

Importantly, authors don’t have to use every service. Someone with a finished manuscript may need only editing and publishing. Someone else may arrive with nothing more than an idea.

Their marketing options aren’t one-size-fits-all

I was also surprised by how broad the marketing side is.

Writers of the West offers the more familiar options such as Amazon campaigns and social media, but its services can also extend to influencer outreach, author websites, book trailers, press releases and larger promotional campaigns.

That’s useful because books aren’t interchangeable.

The audience for a children’s book isn’t necessarily hanging out in the same places as the audience for a business book or memoir. Having several promotional routes available makes more sense than putting every author through exactly the same marketing package.

I went looking for the books

This was the part I was especially curious about.

It’s one thing to browse books displayed on a publishing company’s own website. I wanted to see what I could find once I left it.

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Books connected with Writers of the West can be found through familiar names including Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Blackwell’s, Walmart, Books-A-Million, AbeBooks and Bookshop.org.

But what surprised me was how international that footprint became once I kept looking.

I found books through Booktopia and The Nile in Australia, Bokus and Akademibokhandeln in Sweden, Hugendubel in Germany, LaFeltrinelli in Italy, bol.com in the Netherlands and Belgium, Saxo in Denmark, and other international booksellers.

These are online retailer and catalog listings, so that shouldn’t be confused with a promise that every title is physically sitting on the shelf of every bookstore.

But it does mean prospective authors can do something useful: go outside the Writers of the West website and look for the books themselves.

For me, that’s much more meaningful than simply being shown a portfolio.

There’s an independent footprint behind the company too

I also like being able to find information about a company somewhere other than its own website.

Writers of the West has an accredited Better Business Bureau profile with an A+ rating, as well as customer feedback on independent platforms including Trustpilot and Clutch.

No review platform should make a decision for you, particularly with something as personal and expensive as creating a book. But having multiple places where prospective authors can research the company, its reviews and its published work makes doing your homework considerably easier.

So who does this model make sense for?

I don’t think every author needs this level of help.

If you’ve already written your book, have an editor you love, know how to publish it and enjoy managing designers and marketers yourself, you may be perfectly happy assembling your own team.

Where Writers of the West becomes more interesting is for the person who wants professional help but doesn’t want to become the project manager of their own publishing company.

Maybe you have a story but don’t know how to turn it into a book.

Maybe you have a manuscript but don’t know what comes next.

Or maybe you simply want one team that can stay involved from the first draft through publication and promotion.

What stood out to me about Writers of the West wasn’t any one individual service.

It was the way those pieces fit together: finding a writer suited to the story, allowing the author to retain ownership, letting the project move at a manageable pace, providing one point of contact, and offering the option to continue with the same team through publishing, distribution and marketing.

And perhaps most importantly for someone like me who spends a lot of time looking at books, you don’t have to take everything at face value.

You can go looking for the books too.