Before I Write a Word

The biggest mistake ghostwriters make is starting too soon. A client shows up with energy and enthusiasm and a folder full of notes, and there’s a temptation to dive in.

To start outlining. To start drafting. To produce something visible that justifies the investment the client has made and the fee they’re paying. I resist that temptation every time. I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, that the pages you write before you understand the person are pages you eventually throw away.

And those pages do more than waste time. They set the wrong expectations, give the client a false sense of where the book is going, and make the correction harder to execute than building the right foundation would have been.

What does the discovery interview process look like?

Before I write a single word of someone’s book, I interview them.

Not once. Not a quick intake call. I mean structured, recorded, multi-session interviews that go deep into what they know, how they think, what they’ve done, and what they believe. The interviews I conducted with Joe Rockey ran across several weeks and covered more than twenty prepared questions, plus all the follow-up those questions generated. By the time we finished, I had a knowledge base thorough enough to write from with real confidence.

What the interviews are for

What I needed wasn’t confidence that I knew Joe’s field the way he does. I’m not a sales consultant. I’m never going to know the subject matter at the level of someone who has spent years inside it. What I need is to know Joe’s position on the subject matter. His language for it. His examples. The things he believes that most people in his industry would argue with.

His level of certainty on different points and the places where his thinking is still developing. That’s what the interviews produce.

This is the distinction that separates a ghostwriter from a journalist or a researcher. I’m not building an objective account of sales consulting.

I’m building a faithful map of how one expert thinks about it, including his blind spots and his strong opinions and the places where he’s more certain than the evidence strictly warrants, because all of that is part of his voice and his argument. A book that smooths those out into balanced neutrality stops sounding like the author.

Fidelity to the person is the whole goal. Encyclopedic accuracy belongs in a textbook, and a ghostwriter who chases it ends up with a book that sounds like a committee wrote it and that the author barely recognizes.

How are discovery questions built?

The questions I bring into a discovery session are built for the person I’m interviewing. I do research before the first session, looking at what the client has published, what they’ve said publicly, what their clients say about them.

I’m looking for the gaps between the polished public version and what I suspect is a richer, more specific private version underneath. Those gaps are where the interesting questions live.

For Joe, the early sessions covered the foundation, who his clients are, what his process involves, how he got into this work. Standard material. Useful but not yet interesting enough to build a book from.

The number of prepared questions is only the skeleton.

The value is in the follow-ups, the where exactly, the why that, the can you give me the specific case, that each prepared question generates. A single planned question about how Joe handles a struggling team can branch into forty minutes of stories, qualifications, and exceptions. The prepared list keeps the session moving through the territory that has to be covered. The follow-ups are where the territory turns out to be more interesting than the map suggested.

The interesting material comes later

The interesting material came when I asked harder questions.

Where has his methodology failed? What does he believe about sales and leadership that most consultants in his space wouldn’t say publicly? How has his thinking changed over the years he’s been doing this work? Joe made a distinction early on that shaped how I listened across every later session:

Your motivations flutter. Your strengths are how you’re hardwired.

He was explaining why his assessment work focuses on strengths instead of motivations. The same principle applies to the interview process. I’m not capturing what Joe feels like saying on a given day. I’m capturing how he thinks, the hardwired version. And when I pushed him on where that thinking originally came from, his answer was short:

First off, by failing.

Cutco knives. A financial advising firm where the training was minimal and the product was complicated. Years of figuring out what doesn’t work before he had any real structure for what does. I designed the interview process to surface that kind of honesty, and it almost never appears in a first session. The failures are where the real expertise lives, because they’re where the generic advice broke down and the person had to build something that worked.

What emerges over a long discovery process?

There’s something that happens over the course of a long discovery process that doesn’t happen in a single conversation. The client stops performing and starts thinking. In the first session, most people give me the version they’ve given a hundred times before, smooth, confident, well-practiced. That version is the starting point. It’s never the destination. By the third or fourth session with Joe, the quality of the conversation had shifted in a way I recognize from working with clients who have real material to mine.

He was following ideas somewhere he hadn’t taken them before and qualifying positions mid-sentence when he heard something that didn’t quite hold. And he was going deep on stories he’d mentioned in passing, because the passing mention hadn’t done them justice.

That’s the material a book is made of: the examined version of what someone knows. The polished version is what they’ve already said on every stage and podcast, and a book built from it gives readers nothing they couldn’t have gotten from a free video.

Each session is recorded and transcribed. The transcripts aren’t the product. The product is the summary document I build from each transcript, stripped of small talk, organized by topic, with the direct quotes that deserve preservation pulled out and kept intact. Joe reviewed each summary. If something was wrong, he corrected it. If something important was missing, he flagged it. By the time we finished the interview phase, the knowledge base was both complete and verified by the person whose expertise it represents.

That verification step counts for more than it might seem. A ghostwriter who works from memory or rough notes will eventually put something in a manuscript that’s not quite right. A client story slightly misremembered. A position stated more than the client holds it. In a book that goes out under someone’s name, those errors are a problem the author has to live with permanently. The review process catches them before they become permanent, while they’re still cheap to fix.

The whole process is slow by the standards of clients who want a manuscript in thirty days. Writers who promise a finished book a month after the first call are selling speed, and the client pays for it later in a book that falls apart under a close read. Shortcuts show up on the page, and readers feel them even when they can’t name them.

Something about the book feels thin, or borrowed, or like the work of someone who understood the topic in theory but had never really lived inside it.

If you’re thinking about writing a business book, ask yourself one question before you do anything else: could you sit down for multiple hours of structured conversation, across several sessions, and articulate what you know clearly enough that a skilled writer could build a real argument from it? If the answer is yes, you have material worth working with. If you’re not sure, the process itself will give you the answer.

Ask any ghostwriter you’re considering how many hours of interviews come before the first page. A writer who shrugs at that question plans to fill the gaps with guesses and publish them under your name, and I think that betrays the one thing a client trusts us with.

Frequently Asked Questions

From the author

The Ghostwriting Advantage
Discovery is where a ghostwritten book is built. The Ghostwriting Advantage explains how to get your book written for you, so you know what the work asks of you before it starts.