Many of the people who contact me about ghostwriting services have great stories to tell but they can be told in just a few thousand words, and they are probably not something that the reading public would be willing to pay for in isolation. There can, however, be a market for these stories in magazines and there are ghostwriters who actively seek them out.
The downside is that you don’t have much control over how the stories are presented. If the magazine editor decides to add a gruesome headline or picture, or wants to cut it to fit the magazine layout, there is little you can do about it. You will also only get paid a few hundred pounds (if you get paid at all). If none of these things strike fear into your heart, however, then it is one way of getting your story out there and might be a first step towards getting a full-scale book deal, although probably not.
Often when people approach me about the possibility of me ghosting for them, they will supply an article which has already been written about them. Zana and Nadia Muhsen, for instance, had had their story told initially by The Observer, and then picked up by every other newspaper. Those articles helped me to see the overall structure of the story which eventually grew to become Sold. In other cases, however, the fact that a story can be neatly summed up in 500 or a thousand words indicates that there may not be enough material to hold the reader’s attention for another 70,000 or more words.