Kate Hanley is an award-winning, New York Times-bestselling ghostwriter and developmental editor of prescriptive nonfiction books.
Kate collaborates on books with an important message that deserves a wider audience. Her specialties include women’s health (How to Menopause by Tamsen Fadal, The Perimenopause Survival Guide by Heather Hirsch, MD), evidence-based approaches to healthy aging (Reversing Alzheimer’s by Dr. Heather Sandison, Younger You by Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, and Ageless Aging by Maddy Dychtwald), and women’s leadership (Fight Like a Mother by Shannon Watts and The Grit Factor by Shannon Polson).
As a former website producer (iVillage.com) and writer for women’s magazines (Martha Stewart’s Whole Living, Parents, Yoga Journal) with a master’s degree in educational communications and technology (NYU), Kate is as skilled at crafting the reader’s journey and packaging the material as she is at wordsmithing.
Also a trained coach, Kate is adept at ushering authors through the personal development arc of becoming an author and sharing your work more widely.
Kate is a four-time author herself–of How to Be a Better Person, Stress Less, A Year of Daily Calm, and The Anywhere, Anytime Chill Guide–and host of the Finding the Throughline podcast and How to Be a Better Person YouTube channel. She lives in Providence with her family and a rescue dog named Cookie.
This is who helps you write books.
When the Great Recession led to most of my regular markets closing, I took any gig I could get, including one where I re-packaged articles written for mercola.com into standalone, book-length magazines that sold at Whole Foods. When Dr. Joseph Mercola got a book deal with Random House, he asked me to collaborate with him on the manuscript, and my pivot to ghostwriting started with a bang (that book was a New York Times bestseller).
As I was building my ghostwriting business, I hired a coach to help me figure out how to make more money as a writer. I found it so helpful to have an objective voice in my ear that I decided to get trained as a life coach and spent several years working one-on-one with people, helping them get out of feeling stuck and start creating positive changes in their lives.
I’ve also published my own books, including A Year of Daily Calm (National Geographic), Stress Less (Adams Media), and How to Be a Better Person (Adams Media), which I also turned into a podcast that I hosted for five years, over one thousand episodes, and a million-plus downloads.
Since the pandemic, my axis has tilted solidly toward writing, and I have continued to specialize in ghostwriting books about health while also collaborating on books about leadership, friendship, and parenting to keep things interesting. Although my experience as a coach absolutely helps me support my clients through the more intimidating parts of the publishing process!
As much as I love ghostwriting, it’s vital to me that I have a personal creative project. Currently, that project is interviewing working writers about their creative paths and processes for the Finding the Throughline podcast. And I’m starting to noodle on my next book idea, which is very exciting.
Personally, I’m in my hobby era–my husband and I recently learned how to sail and bought a boat that is nearly as old as we are off Facebook marketplace. So far we haven’t ventured beyond Narragansett Bay but maybe one day we’ll make it to Block Island. I’m also a recent pickleball convert.
The personal version
Reading and writing are in my blood. My mom is the biggest bookworm ever; she’s always reading at least three different titles and was instrumental in getting a new library built in my hometown. And I’ll never forget the look of bashful pride on my dad’s face when I was seven and he showed me the cover of the Sunday magazine of the Providence Journal where his essay on motorcycle riding was featured.
As a kid I’d crawl under a table with the floorlength tablecloth and binge the Narnia chronicles, Harriet the Spy, and anything by Judy Blume–I wanted so badly to live inside those worlds.
After entering every poetry, short story, and essay contest I could find and serving on the yearbook and literary magazine committees in highschool and college, I got my first job as an editorial assistant in at the tiny, now-defunct Woodford Publishing in San Francisco, founded by Laurence Hyman (Shirley Jackson’s son). I started off answering the phone and making the coffee for $7.50 an hour, but worked my way up to editor in two short years. Turns out I had a way with the red pen.
From there I switched tracks to work at iVillage.com, a network of websites for women, in New York City during the dot com boom. There I launched the computing channel and the home and garden channel, and edited three books of member-generated content for our flagship site, ParentSoup. Right before 9/11, I volunteered for the next round of layoffs–I wanted to try something wholly different and signed up for a yoga teacher training. During that intense year, I did so much practicing and meditating that I could finally hear what I really wanted to do next, which was write.
After earning my yoga teaching certification, I started pitching magazines. I went on to write for Yoga Journal, Health, Parents, Real Simple, and was a contributing editor to Martha Stewart’s Whole Living for many years. I also started a blog called MsMindbody and sold my first book, The Anywhere, Anytime Chill Guide.
“As an editor, I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with Kate. She has a unique voice, is completely genuine, and leaves you with a better under-standing of what’s important in life. I highly recommend working with her!”
— Lara Asher, New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning editor
