Working notes from a professional ghostwriter — on the craft of writing, the business of publishing, the psychology of authors, and the changing landscape of books in the AI era.
These articles come out of 113+ books authored and 54+ ghostwritten. They cover what's actually working in publishing right now, what isn't, how AI is changing the work for both writers and readers, what executives and founders get wrong when they try to write their own book, and what they get right when they bring in help.
No SEO listicles. No content-marketer fluff. Just observations from inside the work — written for people who care about books and the craft behind them.
TechnologySeptember 9, 2026
The Tomatometer is not a rating. It is the percentage of critics who gave a film a passing grade, so a film everybody finds mediocre can score 94% while one people love scores 60%. Almost every complaint about the site…
PublishingSeptember 9, 2026
Amazon terminated my KDP account overnight because two books had the same content. One of them was unpublished, by me, that afternoon, following Amazon's own rules for changing a subtitle. No warning, no human, no appeal I could find. This…
PublishingSeptember 9, 2026
IngramSpark does hardcover, reaches the catalog libraries and bookstores order from, lets you set your own margin over a printing base price, and since BookBuilder arrived you no longer have to produce a wraparound cover PDF yourself. It pairs with…
GhostwritingSeptember 9, 2026
You can buy a ghostwritten book on Fiverr for a few hundred dollars. The arithmetic of what that buys is not a secret and not a matter of opinion, and it explains what arrives. This is the buyer's side, written…
BusinessSeptember 9, 2026
I sold twelve thousand dollars of model kits on eBay in 2025 and kept three thousand six hundred. I also wrote a book about selling there. This is what changed, why the Chinese dropship flood made browsing worthless, the shipping…
FictionSeptember 9, 2026
The English ghost story is one of the few literary forms with a documented inventor, a rulebook, and a measurable decline once writers stopped following it. M.R. James wrote the rules down, read the stories aloud at Christmas, and produced…
FictionSeptember 9, 2026
The gothic novel was invented in 1764 by a man who claimed he had found the manuscript in an old chest, was mocked as trash for a century, and has outlived nearly every respectable form that looked down on it.…
FictionSeptember 9, 2026
Telling ghost stories at Christmas was normal Victorian practice and considerably older than that. Dickens did not invent it, he wrote inside it and made it commercial. The custom then died almost completely in America while surviving in Britain, and…
FictionSeptember 9, 2026
The death-and-return is the most reused structure in fiction and the most frequently botched. It works when the death costs something permanent and fails when it is reversed for free. This is what separates a resurrection that lands from one…
Writing CraftSeptember 9, 2026
There are four books that get given to writers, and anyone who has been writing for more than a year owns all four. This is a guide to what to give instead, organized by what the person is struggling with…
Writing CraftSeptember 9, 2026
Calling a book a beach read is usually a way of praising it while making clear you are not taking it seriously. The assumption underneath is that easy reading means easy writing, and that assumption is exactly backwards.
Writing CraftSeptember 9, 2026
It's a Wonderful Life lost money, disappointed its studio, ended the production company its director had staked everything on, and was flagged by the FBI as possible communist propaganda. It became a Christmas institution decades later because a clerk failed…
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Professional ghostwriting for executives, founders, coaches, and authors who want to get the book done right. 113+ books authored. 54+ ghostwritten for clients.
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