Table of contents:

• What Makes Up Your Personal Brand
• The Authority that Books Convey
• Repurposing Your Ideas for Greater Visibility
• Choosing the Right Topic is Key
• Your Long-Term Brand Strategy

In a recent article for Chief regarding the importance of a personal brand for senior executives, Danielle Hughes, founder of branding consultancy More Than Words Marketing, said, “A personal brand has gone from being a nice-to-have to a need-to-have.”

This is especially true for ambitious business leaders.

Everyone has a personal brand. Your brand is based on what you’ve accomplished, what you’ve shared online, where you’ve spoken, and other evidence of your ideas and interests. However, your current personal brand may or may not represent how you’d like to be perceived.

Yes, blog posts, media mentions, TED Talks, and other recognition help establish your presence—your brand—but nothing else elevates your professional reputation like publishing a book.

Authorship is one of the most powerful ways you can build a credible, authoritative personal brand. Here’s why:

What Makes Up Your Personal Brand

At its core, your personal brand is made up of three components that together shape how others see you professionally: 1) Expertise, 2) Reputation, and 3) Visibility.

Your expertise consists of your experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and insights. It’s what makes you a professional standout.

Your reputation reflects how others see and describe you. Your reputation is made up of your track record of success, your credibility, and authority. How people describe you when they tell others about you contributes to your professional reputation.

And visibility is determined by how well people remember you and recommend you to others, often based on how easily you can be found online. If people need to dig deep to come across your profile or anything that has been said about you online, your visibility would be considered low.

Unless you’re already a celebrity in your industry, it’s very likely you’re weak in at least one of these areas. For example, you might have a tremendous reputation within your company but be a complete unknown outside of it. Or maybe you have recognized expertise, but people don’t know you well enough to be able to speak out in support of you.

The good news is that writing and publishing a book can address all three of these components in one fell swoop.

The Authority that Books Convey

No matter how many speeches you’ve given, presentations you’ve made, or consulting engagements you’ve won, none of those impact your personal brand like claiming author status. Being able to call yourself an author instantly elevates your reputation.

Sure, there are industry icons who blog or have a podcast or YouTube channel, and many may be considered “influencers.” However, writing and publishing a book signals a different level of influence, of commitment to your field, as well as a higher level of expertise. You can write hundreds of articles and blog posts, but penning an entire book is an entirely different accomplishment, and everyone knows it.

In part because of the space that books provide, you have the freedom to articulate original thinking and innovative ideas that distinguish you from your colleagues. That’s the power of long-form content. When you have 50,000 or 60,000 words to use, you can delve deeply into your area of expertise and define new frameworks, point out coming industry trends, and speak out for or against what’s already headed your way. That’s harder to do in a 1,000-word blog post or article. Books can shift your career in new ways more quickly than any other tool.

The fact that media outlets and websites prefer to interview authors, or view them as credible sources for stories, confirms this enhanced credibility and authority. When you take the time to organize your ideas and insights into a book-length work, your efforts and serious engagement with your ideas are respected and even rewarded with increased attention.

With more credibility and attention comes new opportunities. Those new opportunities often include speaking invitations at events, podcast guest offers, as well as magazine columns or guest blogging requests. Landing consulting engagements, expert witness gigs, and board of directors offers are not unheard of. Your book becomes your business card.

Repurposing Your Ideas for Greater Visibility

Although a book is a way to package your expertise, it doesn’t have to restrict you. Once you’ve written a book, you can then deconstruct it and slice and dice it in new and different ways, for greater reach and impact.

For example, each of your chapters could become a related blog post. Pithy quotes can become graphic posts on Instagram. You could take an idea from your book and record a 30-second explanation or example to share on YouTube. You can create a course or courses based on your book or host a webinar or masterclass. That book becomes the center of a new content system to which you can return for more ideas over time.

Choosing the Right Topic is Key

Of course, your book has a better chance of being a jumping-off point for your personal brand if you select a topic that is at the intersection of your interests and expertise as well as your audience’s interests and information needs. No matter what, your book needs to offer a unique take on a topic or provide a new way of understanding it, such as through a framework, blueprint, or system.

When faced with a choice between what you want to write about and share and what your target audience wants to hear about, choose the topic they want to know more about. No, it may not be what they need, but by giving them what they want, you have a shot at attracting their attention. Over time, you can start to serve up what you know they need, but if you lead with what you want to write about, you may never sell enough books to have the impact you hope to.

As you’re evaluating topics and angles, think about where you want your personal brand to go. What do you want to be known for in the future? If you want to shift into doing more consulting, for example, weave in success stories and hit hard on corporate strategy. If you want to be considered for a global role, make sure you include content that addresses a global perspective. And keep in mind that long-term, you may write several books, so this first title does not have to include everything you have to say on a subject; go with the most relevant and perhaps unconventional, to attract attention and raise some eyebrows.

Your Long-Term Brand Strategy

The good news about a book is that it has staying power. Although LinkedIn users may come across your post once and promptly forget about it, your book may sit on their desk or bookshelf for several weeks or even years. For that reason, a book can have a larger impact on your brand-building efforts. A book can demonstrate that you have the experience, the insights, and the expertise worth paying attention to.

Some of the most successful authors started with one book that made a splash and they followed that one with another, in between speaking engagements and other invitations that quickly heightened their visibility. Their books sparked movements that positioned them for many more revenue-generating opportunities even years later. Just look at Malcolm Gladwell, James Clear, or Cal Newport, for example. They’re no longer just authors; they are massive brands. But their careers really took off when they decided to invest the time in writing a book.

You have a similar opportunity to make your mark.

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Table of contents:

• Why Workbooks Are Trending Right Now
• The Business Case for Companion Workbooks
• What Makes a Good Companion Workbook
• Which Book Topics Work Best for Workbooks
• Creating Your Workbook

Ask a literary agent what types of books are selling right now, and in addition to prescriptive memoir, self-help, and fiction, you’re likely to hear them mention workbooks.

Search on Amazon for workbooks and you may be surprised by the number that have emerged on the publishing scene. There are workbooks to accompany all types of books, from business to memoir to textbook, thought leadership, children’s, and reference, among many others.

Many bestselling titles now have workbooks available, although not all have been created by the original author.

Why Workbooks Are Trending Right Now

Workbooks have burst onto the publishing scene very recently as readers increasingly want to understand how to apply what they’ve read.

The shift toward practical learning, rather than reading for information or pure enjoyment, seems to have sparked interest in creating supplementary tools. Instead of taking in a memoir to better understand the author’s experience, for example, readers now appreciate ancillary tools, like workbooks, that help them pick up the intended takeaways and consider how they can help improve their own lives.

You’ll spot many books now offering a companion workbook to aid in comprehension or application of the material.

The Business Case for Companion Workbooks

From the authors’ perspective, workbooks offer new opportunities.

Yes, designing and creating them requires work, but once produced, workbooks can provide a new product line and additional revenue stream. They can be sold independently or bundled with the accompanying book, increasing the profits from each sale.

They can also help improve the Amazon rating by helping each reader get the maximum benefit.

What Makes a Good Companion Workbook

Now, not all workbooks are useful; there are good workbooks and bad. One recent one I bought was nearly a complete repeat of everything in the book, rather than containing exercises to help apply the takeaways. It was disappointing.

Some common elements of helpful workbooks include:

• Exercises that reinforce concepts
• Fillable forms
• Action items
• Space for reflection
• Templates
• Tracking forms
• Scheduling tools
• Calculators
• Additional reference materials and resources

The best workbooks complement and deepen the reader’s understanding of the original book, rather than simply regurgitating the same material. It should help the reader figure out what to do with the knowledge they’ve gained.

For example, a workbook to accompany a retirement planning book could have many types of financial tracking tools, evaluation forms to help determine where you are in your retirement planning journey, links to online calculators, and perhaps some pages to brainstorm and dream of what an ideal retirement would look like.

Which Book Topics Work Best for Workbooks

It’s surprising how many genres and subjects could use a workbook. Obvious topics, such as self-help, business, fitness, hobbies, careers, and how-to, where the reader is looking for education and guidance, are fairly easy to convert into a workbook format.

Others may be more of a challenge, such as fiction, art, or cookbooks, but with some creativity, I bet you could come up with some useful pages to help readers reflect and learn from the original content.

Creating Your Workbook

If you’d like to consider producing a workbook, start by designing some of the key sections, much like you crafted your original book’s outline.

Is there a chronological process that could form the backbone of your workbook? Are there certain milestones or core lessons the reader needs to comprehend? What exercises or actions could support their application of your material?

Could you provide a list of essential tools and equipment? How about a typical timeline for implementation? Photos to demonstrate the ideal outcome?

As long as you keep your readers’ interests and needs front and center in your planning process, I’m confident you’ll be able to think of many additional exercises and tools to aid them.

Workbooks are hot right now, so do your best to design and produce one soon, to take advantage of this trend. Because workbooks help readers make better use of your book, they can also convert one-time fans into repeat customers.

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Table of contents:

• The Traditional Publishing Situation
• The Self-Publishing Revolution
• The Marketing Challenge

Fifteen to 20 years ago, if you wanted to publish a book, you had one legitimate option: traditional publishers. These are the big names you’d recognize, like John Wiley & Sons, Penguin, Random House, and HarperCollins, to name a few.

Sure, you could go with a vanity press if traditional publishers weren’t interested in your book, but vanity presses have little to no quality control and charge high fees to produce and print books. They’re not a great option because they’re frequently expensive and sketchy.

In the last few years, however, several new publishing paths have emerged thanks to new printing technology. These printing options are called by different names, including independent presses, hybrid publishers, author services companies, and do-it-yourself platforms, but what they all have in common is that you are in control of your book.

For that reason, they are all forms of self-publishing.

Big picture, the book publishing landscape has fundamentally shifted in the last couple of decades. Traditional publishers no longer hold a monopoly, and self-publishing companies have earned credibility and respect.

Which publishing path makes the most sense for you depends primarily on why you’re writing a book, what you want to have happen once you’re a published author, how much money you have to invest, and what your timeline is.

The Traditional Publishing Situation

What traditional publishers offer authors is credibility and a third-party endorsement. If an established traditional publisher evaluates your topic, your background, and the market and determines that your proposal has merit, they’re giving you validation.

As I said before, they are gatekeepers. And because everyone knows they play that role, getting past the gatekeepers can be a source of pride.

For first-time authors, one of the biggest advantages of working with a traditional publisher is that being offered a contract to publish your book means that you will not need to pay out of pocket for its production. That contract typically states that your publisher will assume all editing, proofreading, indexing, graphic design, formatting, printing, and distribution of your book, as well as accounting for sales.

That’s a big reason authors opt to work with traditional publishers: in addition to credibility and validation, there is no additional up-front cost to produce your book. You may be offered an advance against royalties as a pre-payment of sorts, and then when your book starts selling, you’ll earn anywhere from 8-15 percent per book after your advance is earned back. Generally, that royalty rate amounts to roughly $1/book.

Granted, to get to the point of a publisher considering your book, you did have to first land a literary agent and then craft a strong book proposal, which together can take many months and thousands of dollars if you hire a writer to support you. But after that, the publisher handles the cost of production.

The big disadvantage of opting to publish through a traditional publishing house is the schedule. Large publishers are not known for their speed. That means that it will take, on average, 18-24 months after you submit your finished manuscript before your book hits bookstores. If your topic or your perspective is timely or trendy, it’s very possible the market will be very different in 2-3 years; your book may be obsolete by that point.

Additionally, your publisher has the final say on decisions such as title, cover design, graphics, and cover price. Yes, you do get a vote, but ultimately the publisher has to do what’s in its best interest and what will increase the odds that your book will be profitable.

Since publishers are experts in the business, their decisions are almost always good ones. However, if they have to bump the price of your book well above competing titles in order to make their spreadsheet work, your sales may be impacted. What I mean is that if other books available on your topic are selling for around $24 and yours is priced at $39, you may be at a huge disadvantage. And that’s not a decision you get to make.

For all of these reasons, self-publishing can become an appealing alternative.

The Self-Publishing Revolution

Until fairly recently, self-publishing was synonymous with vanity publishing. The common belief was that if you had to pay to publish your book, it must not be very good.

That’s not the case at all anymore and plenty of self-published books hit bestseller lists. The quality is there; it’s the business model that has changed.

Yes, there was a stigma attached to self-publishing that has, for the most part, dissipated, particularly among business professionals.

Where traditional books require a literary agent, who takes 15 percent of any deal, and a comprehensive book proposal, which can cost $10,000-25,000 to prepare if you want outside help from a ghostwriter, I might add, self-published books do not. You do not need an agent and most publishers want a mini-proposal to better understand who you are, what your book will be about, and why now is the time to release it.

Hybrid and independent presses still review book pitches and do not accept all of them. They want to be sure any new books fit with their current list of books, and not all do. So the acceptance rate is not 100 percent, as it is with vanity presses.

The biggest advantage self-publishing variations offer is speed, as I mentioned. Instead of 18-24 months after delivery of a manuscript, other publishers can expedite production and get it done in 6-12 months. Sure, the more time the better, but if necessary, they can crash it.

Given this speed to market, your odds of obsolescence go way down, along with the chance of a competitor beating you to the punch. This allows you to capitalize on current market conditions.

What’s different about self-publishing options is that you pay for all production and printing costs. You’re effectively launching a new product, which has startup costs.

The cost for production services can range from a low of around $10,000, unless you’re going print on demand (POD) and will pay for each copy as it’s ordered, and can climb to over $100,000, especially if you’re expediting and adding on options like an audiobook (which you should) and other marketing support services.

In exchange for writing the check, you get the final say on everything. You choose the title, though your publisher will make recommendations. You choose the cover design, though your publisher will mock up several options to consider. You review all the interior pages once they’re laid out, and you approve the cover price.

Cover price becomes especially relevant here because you’ll receive the bulk of the proceeds when the book starts to sell.

If you work with a hybrid publisher, they will take 15 percent of sales off the top, just like an agent would. This gives them some skin in the game. Independent presses and self-publishing platforms generally do not take a percentage; you receive all the profits. Those profits typically range from around 35-70 percent of net revenue, or whatever you receive from the sale of a book.

The Marketing Challenge

Many authors mistakenly assume that traditional publishers provide built-in marketing support and that self-publishers do not. For that reason, they see traditional publishers as advantageous.

That is a misconception. Traditional publishers do not provide marketing support for the vast majority of their business authors. Unless you’re a celebrity, you will be solely responsible for marketing and promoting your book.

When I work with my clients, we start talking about marketing as we begin writing their book. I recommend they blog regularly on their topic, to establish themselves as thought leaders and industry visionaries. Associating yourself with your area of expertise long before your book comes out is essential.

Once you have your title and cover design, it’s time to work on pursuing publicity opportunities. I routinely send over publicity opportunities and some clients opt to hire public relations pros to support their launch.

Setting up a book website and landing page are also good ideas, to begin building an email list of potential book buyers and future clients, if you’re writing a book for business purposes.

Creating bonus materials for book buyers to access at your website is a smart move, to get them regularly visiting your website, as is scheduling webinars and encouraging book clubs to read your book.

The Best Choice

Traditional and self-publishing paths are both legitimate and credible. Either one has the potential to help you achieve your objectives, so one isn’t necessarily better than the other across the board.

You get to decide which publishing path is the best for you, given your objectives, timeline, budget, and definition of success.

NB: Yes, I missed my daily blog post for June 19 (I’m attempting to blog daily for the month of June) because the lawncare service weed-whacked my cable line. Since I had no internet for much of yesterday, I’ll make it up with a post on July 1.

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Table of contents:

• Setting the Foundation for Success
• The Discovery Phase
• Build Trust

Some of the most successful books turn out so well because they are the product of brilliant ideas and expert writing.

Most business leaders have the experience, stories, observations, insights, lessons learned, and vision to make a great book, but they don’t always have the publishing familiarity to be able to shape it into a successful read.

That’s often why they get stuck. Some aspiring authors are unable to proceed with writing a book because they’re not sure of the first step, or the step after that. They don’t know what the process of writing and publishing a book looks like.

Fortunately, that is exactly the type of knowledge and expertise that a professional ghostwriter brings to the table.

Of course, the success of such publishing partnerships depends on how well you collaborate. In many cases, the success or failure of a partnership or collaboration comes down to clear communication and expectation-setting.

Setting the Foundation for Success

The best collaborations begin with a plan, a roadmap for how the writing journey should go.

Before you dig into the writing process, it’s a smart idea to clarify exactly what each person is going to contribute to the project.

Set clear expectations for who will do what. Usually, that happens as part of a ghostwriting agreement.

Typically, you’ll offer the big-picture vision of the book and the defining purpose, as well as the subject-matter expertise and stories and examples that bring your insights to life. Your ghostwriter will bring their knowledge of how books are prepared, what publishers expect to receive, their familiarity with storytelling, and their ability to take complex concepts and turn them into easy-to-understand prose.

To ensure you both stay on course, put these understandings and expectations into a document. In the marketing communications world, this document is often referred to as a creative brief. Briefs lay out who the target audience for the book is, what the book’s bigger purpose is, what you want readers to understand or know by the end, when you’ve both agreed it will be done, and which publisher will be releasing it, among other things. You can fill it with as many particulars as you both prefer.

The goal of this brief, or roadmap, is to keep everything on course in terms of contributions to the narrative and the schedule. It also helps prevent scope creep, such as if you decide halfway through that instead of 60,000 words, you think 80,000 is a better length. You may be right, but that will require a renegotiation of your agreement with your ghostwriter. Likewise, if you both realize partway through that you need an outside researcher to dig for lesser-known case studies, you’ll want to update your blueprint to reflect how that work will be done and by whom.

You’ll also want to be clear about communication expectations. Will you schedule regular Zoom meetings? Will you share information via email, or will you create a Google Doc or a Slack channel? What is acceptable for a response time? Should you both agree to at least acknowledge a message within 24 hours? Or is 48 more reasonable? How about weekend communication? Is that okay or overstepping?

There’s no right or wrong answer here. However, you two need to agree on how and when you’ll collaborate. If you’re a morning person and your ghostwriter is a night owl, you probably won’t be receiving immediate email responses, though you may spot files landing in your inbox late at night.

If you talk about it upfront, no one will be surprised or disappointed by the timing of communications. That helps keep the work progressing well.

The Discovery Phase

Ultimately, the quality of your finished product will depend in large part on how well you transfer what you know to your ghostwriter.

You’ll do that by providing background materials you’ve probably been gathering for ages, as well as writing samples and videos of you presenting relevant material, as well as through the meetings you’ll have where you talk through the book’s content.

Before we start having phone or Zoom meetings, I prefer to send along questions in advance so that clients know what we’ll be discussing and can give the topic some thought. That frequently helps with recalling relevant stories or examples, which can be difficult to come up with on the spot. You might ask your ghostwriter to do that for you.

As you’re talking through content, be sure to share what you can about your preferred writing voice. How do you want to come across on the page?

Are you more comfortable with a conversational tone, to make your material more accessible, or would you rather take a more scholarly or professional tone, to convey your mastery of the subject? Telling your ghostwriter what you like helps them figure out how to match it in the writing.

Build Trust

Successful collaborations are based on mutual respect and transparency. Really, what that means is being honest.

Yes, you should express any concerns about whether you can actually make the deadline you’ve committed to in your publishing contract. Yes, you should share helpful pieces of information about you, such as that you’re hard of hearing, for example, or you’re nervous about sharing some personal stories publicly.

Professional ghostwriters value and appreciate clients who are willing to be open with them. They won’t judge you and they’ll be much better able to meet your needs or address your concerns if you let them know what they are.

When you’re just getting to know each other, it may be hard for your ghost to recognize when you’re joking, for example. Tell them, to be sure.

Be kind and thoughtful when providing feedback. Your ghostwriter is nervous and wants to give you exactly what you’re after, which can be difficult initially. So, when you provide feedback on chapters or section drafts, know that you will encourage your collaborator to continue to strive to do their best if you can be compassionate and clear when you offer input.

If you’re harsh or mean, they may shut down. They certainly won’t be able to give you a better product, and they may opt not to continue working with you.

Remember that your ghostwriter is your writing partner and not your employee. Consider them your equal and you will have a much more collaborative relationship built on mutual respect.

A collaboration blueprint can be as formal or informal as you both choose. However, you’ll want to be sure you establish clear expectations, maintain regular communication, demonstrate mutual respect, and express excitement for the chance to work together.

If you do that, your writing partnership will have the best chance of resulting in a manuscript that is even better than you had hoped.

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Table of contents:

• The Real Cost of a DIY Book
• The Professional Ghostwriter Investment
• When DIY Makes Sense

Most CEOs and business leaders would agree that thought leadership positioning can be good for business and good for your personal brand. To achieve that status, you need a strong public presence, which is typically accomplished through regular articles, blog posts, books, public speeches, and media interviews.

Given the frantic, often all-consuming schedule that C-suite execs and entrepreneurs grapple with, it’s almost impossible to keep up the pace of information-sharing without outside help. Retaining professional support has become a normal part of doing business now that we live in the age of 24/7 social media.

However, some leaders believe that the only way for their personal brand and reputation to be authentic is if they create their own content. For many, that holds true even when the possibility of writing a book surfaces.

The Real Cost of a DIY Book

Business leaders who consider writing their own book often focus on the financial benefits, to the exclusion of other considerations. They tally the cost savings of a do-it-yourself (DIY) book and arrive at a fairly large number.

After all, professional ghostwriters aren’t cheap.

But in making the decision only about money, they don’t take into account other costs.

The first is their time investment. To begin drafting a book, you can’t just start writing unless you’re working on a fictional account that can be made up in your head. If you’re writing a nonfiction book, you’ll need to study existing books on your topic, to confirm the book you want to write doesn’t already exist. You’ll need to spend time organizing your key points and creating an outline. Then you’ll need to do online research to confirm that your arguments and examples are based on fact and not hearsay or AI hallucinations.

Your first draft of a chapter could easily take 40 hours or more, depending on how fast a writer you are. Many of my clients are smart, creative, and articulate, but writing even a few paragraphs can take a full day, they’ve told me. Which means that 40 hours per chapter may be low.

When you start to calculate how much of your time you’ll invest, using your equivalent hourly wage as a rough estimate, you may be surprised by what writing your own book is costing you. If you’re paid, say, $100/hour, each chapter is costing you at least $4,000 if you can get it done in 40 hours. That may be optimistic, however.

Beyond the straight number of hours you’ll need to spend working on your draft manuscript, there is the issue of consistency. Rarely are weeks exactly the same schedule-wise, which means you may be able to find two hours this week to work on your book and maybe four next week, but it’s a challenge to make consistent progress.

Without a dedicated block of time in which to work on your book, it could take many months just to finish drafting a single chapter. It’s difficult to gain any real momentum when you’re working at that pace.

When your whole manuscript is drafted, are you familiar enough with the book publishing industry to know what to do with it at that stage? Do you know who should review it next? Do you have a publisher lined up?

Then there’s the quality question. You may be a decent writer, but are you a strong enough writer to pen a book you’ll be proud of? Are you confident it can stand head-to-head against other books on the same topic?

Poorly written content can do you more harm than good. If your book turns out to be mediocre, as evidenced by Amazon reviews or published book reviews, the damage to your reputation and career can be extremely costly.

Writing your book yourself can certainly help keep money in your pocket, but is that the best decision long-term?

The Professional Ghostwriter Investment

Professional ghostwriters charge tens of thousands of dollars to work alongside you and write your book. The more experienced, in terms of books published; the number of bestsellers to their name, NYT, WSJ, and USA Today; and the number of writing awards earned; the higher their price tag. That’s because with more experience, the lower your risk of ending up with a dud.

Newer book ghostwriters will certainly charge less. By “less” I mean under around $25,000. Celebrity ghostwriters will charge more on the order of $150,000 and up. And the rest will typically be somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000.

As with most things, you tend to get what you pay for.

Some of you are seeing those numbers and are certainly experiencing sticker shock. How can ghostwriters justify charging that much, you may be thinking?!

Well, they’re charging for their considerable expertise as well as for their time. Drafting, editing, and polishing your book will take months. And skilled ghostwriters bring to the project specialized publishing expertise that will also benefit the project.

The result is a book that is better, more insightful, and more skillfully written than you could have done on your own — without you having to spend hours and hours trying to finish it.

When DIY Makes Sense

There are situations, however, when writing your book can make the most sense.

The first is if you genuinely enjoy the writing process. If you love writing, then consider hiring a writing coach to guide you. You’ll be the writer, and you can have a consultant standing by to offer feedback and input on your drafts.

The second scenario when writing your own book makes sense is if you have lots of time. If you have free time and are interested in doing the writing, that’s another vote for a DIY approach. Of course, this assumes that you’re not already under contract and you don’t have a deadline hanging over your head in a couple of months.

Finally, if you can’t afford to hire a professional, writing your first draft can be one way to reduce your need for a ghostwriter. If you can craft a rough draft manuscript that you can hand off to a developmental editor, you can save money that way, too.

Your decision regarding whether to write your book yourself or to hire a professional ghostwriter really comes down to opportunity cost.

You can absolutely write your own book. You likely have the skill and you have the ideas, so you could write it. But should you? Is spending months writing the best use of your time? What is your time worth? And are you confident that a manuscript you draft will be worthy of 5-star reviews on Amazon? Will it be the best version possible?

That’s where the true value of a professional ghostwriter can make all the difference. They can help ensure your personal brand and reputation are enhanced by your book and that you’ll have a positive return on investment.

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Table of contents:

• In Praise of Print
• The Digital-First Approach
• Print as a One-Two Punch
• Sequential Release

The vast majority of my clients come to me planning to publish a hard copy book. Not necessarily hardcover, because paperback is lighter and less expensive, but they want a tangible, physical book.

I don’t blame them, since print books are still considered the gold standard in building credibility and authority.

In Praise of Print

A print book has a “thud factor” — the satisfying sound it makes when you drop it on a desk. The heavier the book, the deeper the sound.

A print book also has a laundry list of potential uses. You can use it as a direct mailer to send to prospects and current clients as evidence of your expertise. You can bundle it with speaking engagements as a value add. You can assign it to students in the college courses you’re teaching as an adjunct, as well as many other promotional opportunities that are easier when you have a physical item.

People don’t generally throw books away, so your title will have permanence.

The two big downsides of print books are the speed and the cost.

No matter which type of publisher you’re working with, a print book will take longer because of all the pre-production work required. After the editing and proofreading, there is the page layout and print preparation, followed by the actual printing. Then the printed pages have to dry before they can be bound together.

I don’t think anyone has ever referred to printing a book as a “speedy” process. It’s not.

As for cost, if you’re working with a traditional publisher, your agreement likely requires that they pay for production. The tradeoff is that the speed of production is typically much slower than that of hybrid and independent presses. Hybrid publishers do require that you pay for production and printing, but it is possible to expedite the process.

Given the time required for books to be printed, there are many situations where it can make sense to release a digital version first. This would be in advance of your official release date.

You can still follow it with a hard copy book, but digital-first can help ensure you don’t miss any marketing opportunities that are time-sensitive.

The Digital-First Approach

Digital-first publishing allows you to get your ideas out into the market faster. In many cases, your book can be available in weeks versus months.

This can be critical when you’re addressing timely topics, a competitor is also working on a book, or in industries where obsolescence is a concern. You need yours out there first.

In addition to speed of availability, since digital-first means your manuscript is formatted digitally for availability online as an e-book, your potential reach is massive. When the electronic version of your book is available on platforms from Amazon Kindle to Google Play Books to Apple Books, buyers worldwide have access. There’s no shipping delay to get to the other side of the globe.

I’m not saying that this is an either-or situation, however. You can and should still proceed to release a print version of your book, but if time is of the essence, lead with a digital version while the hard copy is in production.

Print as a One-Two Punch

Physical books carry more weight as evidence of your accomplishments than digital versions. For that reason, business leaders building their personal brand will want to proceed with a print version.

Another important reason to proceed with a hard copy book is that traditional media outlets, conference organizers, colleges and universities, and corporate buyers prefer to see hard copy books. A print book is a tangible credential that digital-only authors lack.

Sequential Release

Frequently, it’s smart to release both versions of your book in staggered fashion: first comes the digital format, followed by print weeks later.

Launching a digital version first allows you to capture market attention.

The other advantage of leading with a digital version is that you can get reader feedback. This can be useful if you still have time to revise your hard copy edition before it goes to the printer.

With the pace of business only increasing, finding ways to circumvent traditional slow-moving processes can yield even greater success long-term.

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Table of contents:

• Writing for Anyone and Everyone
• Underestimating How Long a Book Takes to Produce
• Leading with Ego, Not Value
• Putting Off Marketing Until the Release Date
• Viewing their Book as a One-Off Project Rather than an Asset

Many CEOs have built successful companies. They’ve taken the helm and helped their businesses expand organically or through acquisition, rolled out new products and services, added headcount, and/or maybe pursued new target markets. They’ve generated millions, or even billions, in revenue for shareholders.

After those major accomplishments, you’d think writing a successful book would be easy, right?

Not so much.

Yes, my clients do well with their books, but not all books written by CEOs and business owners — even with the help of a ghostwriter — will automatically achieve their goals.

After ghostwriting dozens of business books with CEOs, business owners, founders, professors, and experts, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. I’ve also witnessed other authors with fantastic ideas make costly mistakes that negatively impact how well their book performs.

Fortunately, these failures are completely preventable. You just need to learn what the red flags are so that you can avoid them when you’re writing your own.

Mistake #1: Writing for Anyone and Everyone

One problem many business leaders have is that they almost know too much. They have so many amazing experiences and lessons learned that they know could be helpful. And they want to share all of them with everyone.

Unfortunately, targeting a broad audience can lead to a book that is so generic that it gets lost amongst all the other general business advice books.

A better approach is to zero in on a particular group that will benefit most from your insights and observations. Maybe that’s fellow CEOs of organizations with 1,000+ employees. Maybe it’s leaders of companies in the AI space. Or maybe it’s new college grads looking for their first job.

By focusing on one particular group of potential readers, you’re in a much better position to help them with their specific challenges and opportunities. But the challenges that new college grads are facing today are very different from what a Fortune 500 CEO faces.

Pick one narrow group and write your book for them, specifically.

A client of mine several years ago wanted to write his company’s corporate history for anyone, anywhere who had ever heard of it. That’s a massive audience, I pointed out. I encouraged him, instead, to write it for the company’s biggest fans. Assume some existing knowledge of the company and then share inside stories that its advocates would love to hear. After all, they would be the most likely to want such a book and to recommend it to others.

The book became an international bestseller.

Mistake #2: Underestimating How Long a Book Takes to Produce

Many business leaders have been thinking about writing a book for years. They’ve had a lot of time to think about it and frequently have a well-developed idea of what they want included. Although the scope of their book may be clear to them, they generally underestimate how long it’s going to take to draft a manuscript of 60,000 to 65,000 words.

Some think they’ll be able to work on it in the evenings or on weekends, or even while on vacation.

They expect that 30 to 60 days should be plenty of time to get it done. Of course, once they sit down and try to make significant headway on their own, they realize their thinking was flawed.

It typically takes much longer than 30 days to produce a quality manuscript, even with the help of a ghostwriter. A well-written, high-quality business book more often takes 9 to 12 months to finish. Yes, it can be done in less time, but only if the author (you) has the ability to carve out time weekly in their schedule to talk through chapters and review drafts. Without that dedicated time, it can take more than a year, or longer.

If you can block off 1-2 hours per week to meet with your ghostwriter, it’s possible to get your book done in a matter of months.

Mistake #3: Leading with Ego, Not Value

CEOs who write books to inflate their own egos generally end up with boring content. If the primary purpose is telling everyone how great you are, it’s going to fall flat.

I say that because most readers today want takeaways. They want actionable insights.

One of the bestselling categories at the moment is prescriptive memoir, because readers like compelling stories, but they also want to know what to do with the information shared. How can they apply it in their own lives?

CEO books need to include strategy, recommendations, and useful ideas, not just story after story about what an incredible job they’ve done at their current employer.

A CEO client of mine several years ago wanted to write a book to explain her company’s intellectual property. Her goal was to help other business leaders by sharing easy-to-understand anecdotes and stories alongside insights and recommendations. She wanted to have a positive impact, first and foremost.

Several times I had to push her to toot her own horn because she was so focused on making sure she explained the business principles and how-to information she knew would be helpful.

And it was. Her book immediately hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list because she made it all about service to her reader and not about her.

Mistake #4: Putting Off Marketing Until the Release Date

Many leaders are under the impression that marketing their book starts as soon as it hits bookstores. Some also expect publishers to do all of the promotion, which is not true, but what’s important to understand here is that activity surrounding raising the visibility of the author, their message, and their book needs to start well before the book is done.

I often recommend that authors begin blogging, if they aren’t already, about their book’s topic now. Start sharing research, reports, articles, op-eds, and related speeches that can help explain why the book’s content is needed or relevant.

Pursuing guest podcast interviews, public speaking opportunities, conference participation, publicity, and advertising are all good starting points to make your target audience aware of you and your message months before your book is out.

The worst thing that can happen is that you put off marketing until you have books in hand, and at that point, media outlets view it as old news. Some have three-month lead times and need to receive advance reader copies before the book is available in bookstores.

I can’t say that I have too many clients who wait until the last minute to promote their books because I’m constantly emailing them publicity opportunities to pursue while we’re working together. I push them to get their title finalized and cover designed so that they can share that image of their “forthcoming book” with everyone they come in contact with.

Mistake #5: Viewing their Book as a One-Off Project Rather than an Asset

Some CEOs get so focused on the process of writing their book that they lose sight of the bigger picture. They’re relieved when the time-intensive work on their book is concluded. Then, their book comes out, they share it, and they move on to other tasks.

Sure, their book is a useful credential, but they don’t invest as much time as they could in leveraging it.

In truth, a book should serve as an asset for years to come. The most successful CEO authors do all they can to extract value from their investment of time and money.

In truth, you can slice and dice the sections and chapters of your book in many new ways to repurpose it for maximum benefit if you’re strategic about it.

You can use chapters as potential keynote topics. You can take lessons from chapters and convert them into LinkedIn articles or blog posts. You can convert some of the content into lead magnets for your company. You can mail your book out with a personalized note as a way to forge new business relationships.

Really, the opportunities are endless.

One of my clients years ago wrote a book to launch their new company. From the outset, it was a critical asset, and they used it as evidence of their expertise. The book helped them land lucrative consulting engagements and training opportunities worth millions of dollars. Then, they pitched a second book, which they sold for a six-figure advance. That book, which I edited, was a New York Times bestseller.

The book was successful because they planned from the outset for it to be the foundation of their marketing strategy, which they then built on and added to so as to create new business opportunities.

Business leaders who invest in books as tools to showcase and amplify what they’re doing frequently find that it can spark new business opportunities for them and for their company. But it does take strategizing and planning from the outset.

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Table of contents:

• What Voice Matching Actually Means
• The Discovery Process
• Technical Elements of Voice
• Iterating to Achieve a Match

The biggest compliment I can receive as a ghostwriter is hearing an author-client’s friend or family member tell them that they loved the writing in their book. The vast majority of people have no idea that the author worked with a collaborator or ghostwriter, and when that’s not apparent in the writing, it’s a big win for the ghost.

I want their book to sound like they wrote it. That’s my job, after all.

What separates ghostwriters from authors or freelance writers is their ability to write in a way that sounds like someone else — their client. Capturing the language, the pace, the word choice, and the sentence structure of their client’s natural writing style is what differentiates ghostwriters from authors.

Authors share their ideas, their stories, and their expertise in their own words.

The ghostwriter’s challenge is to think about how someone else would explain something when they essentially step into the author’s shoes.

Matching a client’s voice, so that others have no idea that someone else assisted in conveying their message on the page, is the ultimate goal for professional ghostwriters.

What Voice Matching Actually Means

Although matching a client’s written voice is what ghostwriters strive to do, the challenge is more than just mimicking or copying what they say and how they say it. If you wanted to do that, all you have to do is copy and paste what comes from an interview transcript.

Authentic voice matching actually requires the ghostwriter to learn to think how their author-client thinks, how they process information, and how they view the world.

That’s why ghostwriting is such a challenge. Ghostwriters aren’t merely playing a part, such as when a comedian impersonates a well-known figure. That takes talent, certainly, but impersonators are merely copying mannerisms and facial expressions.

Ghostwriters are more like method actors in that they study the life experience of their character to understand their values, what experiences shaped their thought patterns, and their perspective on events.  The result is that they get into the heads of their clients so that they can think and write more like them.

You know the ghostwriter has been successful when readers see what’s on the page and recognize the words as having been expressed by the author.

The Discovery Process

Voice matching takes considerable time and effort, which typically begins with information gathering. The ghostwriter and author spend time together, with the ghostwriter asking questions about the author’s experiences, upbringing, likes and dislikes — you name it.

They want to view the author in their natural life, to witness how they behave around other people, what kinds of stories they tell, how they explain difficult concepts, to try to get at why they are the way they are.

You may recall that celebrity ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer moved into a house down the street from Prince Harry for something like a year, so that they could spend a lot of time together while working on the book Spare. Granted, that book was a memoir and not a business book, but the challenge of getting into the head of his client was the same.

In addition to spending time together, with the ghostwriter listening and observing or even shadowing, there is usually a fair amount of existing material that can be used as background research.

I always ask for and study on my own:

• Articles the author has written
• Articles that have been written about the author
• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Interviews
• Speeches
• Presentations
• Negotiations

In addition to learning how they communicate, I’m looking for patterns I can replicate. This could be recurring phrases they rely on, sentence rhythm and cadence, and techniques they use to emphasize a point or to diffuse tension.

Together with my own meetings and conversations with my client, I start to pick up on how they would say something.

Technical Elements of Voice

Although we don’t typically notice our own unconscious writing preferences, everyone is slightly different.

Some clients write in short, direct sentences that border on abrupt.

Others prefer to overcommunicate and end up using complex analogies, layered stories, and lengthy sentences that can be hard to follow at times.

There is also the component of tone, which helps determine where on the formal-casual spectrum the author lies. Academicians who lecture to classes tend to be more formal and more directive, while managers and business leaders may attempt to be more accessible and approachable. They don’t want to close any doors or hinder discussion, so they may be softer in their language choice and even self-deprecating.

The types of analogies can also differentiate one author from another. Someone who cites other great literary works apparently assumes their reader is well read and will pick up on their references. Whereas someone who relies more heavily on movie analogies or cooking jargon will come off differently to the reader.

A ghostwriter needs to pay attention to those anecdotes and make note of patterns or overreliance on particular types of stories for better voice matching.

Iterating to Achieve a Match

Rarely does a ghostwriter nail an author’s voice on a first draft. In fact, I tell clients that voice matching is not my primary concern initially, although I’m certainly listening and studying and practicing as I create drafts. But matching the author’s authentic voice generally doesn’t happen until the manuscript is complete and we’re at the editing stage.

Once my client has the chance to read all the chapters from start to finish and to recognize their hard work and insights on the page, then we can zero in on how they might express something differently than I’ve captured it.

Sometimes changes are as simple as word choice adjustments. Other times, the changes have to do with sentence length. During that last polishing phase, when all the content is on the page, is when we go through the draft to make sure the author likes what they see.

I hear some business leaders and experts worry about the authenticity of their book if they had a ghostwriter help. If that is one of your concerns, too, let me assure you that your book will be your book because you’re going to be involved in every decision made, every story told, every report cited. What you’re not going to have to do is spend every evening and weekend typing away on your keyboard.

Leave that to your ghostwriter.