Don't take on too many clients.

Author

Kevin Szabo
February 27, 2026

In partnership with

Subject: the week I said yes to everything

There was a period last year where I thought I had finally figured it out.

Four ghostwriting clients at once. All paying.

Calendar completely full. I remember looking at my inbox one morning and feeling something that I can only describe as proof.

That feeling lasted about nine days.

By week two I was waking up at 6am not because I wanted to but because my brain was already running through the list before my eyes were open.

This person needs their X posts scheduled by Thursday.

That person hasn't sent me their voice notes and I need them to move forward.

The other one wants a call to talk about their content direction but I have no idea when to fit it in.

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I was working more hours than I ever had and somehow producing worse work than when I had half the load.

The first thing that slipped was the thinking time.

The part before you actually sit down and write, where you just let the person's voice settle in your head for a bit.

With ghostwriting that part is everything.

You're not just writing, you're disappearing into someone else's perspective and making it sound like they wrote it on their best day.

That takes space. When your schedule has no white space that part disappears first and the writing starts sounding like writing instead of sounding like a person.

Then the communication started lagging.

I'd read a message and tell myself I'd reply properly when I had a clear head and then four days would go by.

People I genuinely liked working with started to feel like obligations.

One client, a founder I'd been writing X content for over several months, sent me a note that just said "everything okay on your end?"

It was kind. And it was worse because of that.

I had to be honest with myself about what was actually happening.

I wasn't running a thriving ghostwriting business.

I was running a version of myself into the ground and calling it success because the invoices were going out.

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The problem with taking on too much isn't just burnout, though that's real and it's coming if you keep going.

It's that the people who hired you stop getting the version of you they hired.

They get the tired version of me.

The one who is physically present in the document but mentally somewhere else thinking about all the other documents.

With ghostwriting specifically this is a quiet disaster.

Your client is putting their name on what you produce.

Their audience, the people who follow them on X, the people who bought their course, the people who trust their perspective, they're all reading your work and believing it's theirs.

When you're stretched thin that trust is the first thing that cracks even if nobody can see it yet.

I'd have four different voices living in my head at the same time.

Four different tones, four different opinions, four different ways of opening a thread or landing a punch line.

At full capacity I could hold all of that cleanly.

Overloaded, they started bleeding into each other.

I'd catch myself writing something and realize it sounded like the wrong person entirely.

That's not fair to them and it's not fair to you.

I've talked to a lot of people who do this kind of work and the ones who seem the most settled, the ones who've been doing it for years without hating it, almost all of them have some version of a rule about capacity.

Not a complicated system. Just a number they don't go past.

Three clients. Four. Whatever it is for them, they know it and they hold it.

Not because they don't want more money but because they've learned that past a certain point more clients doesn't mean more of anything good.

It just means more.

For ghostwriting on X specifically I think the ceiling is lower than people expect when they're starting out.

Each client isn't just a content calendar.

It's a relationship. It's weekly calls and voice notes and reading their old posts to stay calibrated to how they think.

It's being available when something happens in their industry and they want to respond quickly.

It's a living thing that requires ongoing attention.

Two or three of those done well is a full job. Four or five done badly helps nobody.

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I ended up having an honest conversation with two of those four clients and restructured the timelines.

One of them was completely understanding.

The other one less so, and that was uncomfortable, but it was still the right call.

The work got better almost immediately.

I could hear each person's voice clearly again.

The threads started feeling sharp.

I stopped second guessing whether something sounded right before I sent it over.

I started sleeping through the night again.

There's a version of this work that's actually sustainable.

Where you write well for people you like at a pace that doesn't hollow you out.

Where your clients are getting the real version of you, the one that's actually listening, actually thinking, actually invested in making their content land the way it should.

It's not the version where you say yes to everything that comes in.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out.

But the day I got comfortable with a smaller roster was the day the work started feeling like something I could do for a long time.

That's the version worth building toward.