A smoke alarm that never goes off is not a good smoke alarm. It is a decoration you have agreed not to test.
Plenty of people in this trade work that way. The client arrives with an idea, the idea has a serious problem, and nobody mentions it because mentioning it risks the deal. The deposit gets taken and the problem surfaces in month five when it is expensive.
I say it in week one. That is the whole of what people mean when they describe my style as blunt, and it is a method and not a temperament.
Why say the uncomfortable thing early?
Because the cost of a bad structural decision compounds.
A book built on a premise that does not hold is not slightly worse than a good one. It is a manuscript that has to be substantially rewritten, after months of interviews organized around the wrong spine, with a client who has been imagining a different book the whole time.
Told in week one, the same conversation takes twenty minutes and costs nothing. The client either adjusts the idea, convinces me I am wrong, which happens, or decides to work with somebody else. All three of those outcomes are better than month five.
I have had projects end at that conversation.
The book on this: Sell Your Books opens with the twelve copies, because a launch that went badly teaches more than one that went well.
Does bluntness mean being unpleasant?
No, and conflating them is how people justify avoiding both.
There is a version of directness that is really just permission to be rude, and it is common enough in this field that clients arrive braced for it. What I am describing is narrower: saying the accurate thing about the work, once, clearly, without decorating it.
The difference is what the sentence is about. Your premise does not hold up, and here is where it breaks, is about the book. Anything that is about the person is a different activity and it does not improve manuscripts.
I also say it once. Repeating a criticism the client has heard and decided against is not honesty, it is pressure, and it is their name on the cover.
The book on this: The Ghostwriting Advantage includes the case against hiring one, which is the conversation most people in this trade avoid.
Where does the humour come in?
In the writing, because a reader who is amused is still reading.
Nonfiction has a default register that is somewhere between a report and a sermon, and readers endure it instead of enjoying it. A joke does two things at once. It holds attention through material that would otherwise be dry, and it signals that a person is present.
The constraint is that the joke has to be about the subject. Humour used to decorate a paragraph is filler and readers can feel the difference. Humour that makes a point faster than the explanation would have is the good kind, and it usually replaces two sentences instead of adding one.
Self-deprecation is the safest version and the most useful. My first book sold about twelve copies, which is the opening of Sell Your Books. That is funny, it is true, and it does more to establish that I know what a bad launch feels like than any amount of credentialled explanation.
What does this style cost?
Clients who wanted reassurance, and I lose them at the first meeting.
Some people are not looking for a collaborator. They are looking for somebody to execute a plan they have already committed to emotionally, and any assessment of that plan reads as an obstacle. Those projects are unpleasant for everybody and they usually end badly, so losing them early is a benefit disguised as a cost.
The other cost is that it does not scale as marketing. A page saying I will tell you when your idea is weak converts fewer visitors than one promising a smooth process. It converts different ones, and the difference is the entire business.
The book on this: My Boss is Insane is nine kinds of difficult boss described without softening any of them.
Does it work with senior people?
Better, in my experience, and consistently.
Executives spend their working lives surrounded by people who agree with them professionally. Somebody who says the accurate thing is unusual enough to be valuable, and they recognize it immediately because it is how they got to where they are.
What senior clients dislike is not directness. It is being managed, hedged at, or told what somebody thinks they want to hear, which they detect faster than most people because they have been on the receiving end of it for decades.
The one adjustment is that directness with somebody senior has to come with the reasoning. Not because they need convincing, but because they will test it, and an assertion without support fails that test in one question.
Is any of this compatible with ghostwriting?
It has to be, because the alternative is a book nobody argued about.
The finished book is the client’s, in their voice, saying what they want it to say. That is not in tension with being honest during the making of it. The honesty is how the book ends up being one they can defend instead of one that collapses the first time somebody in their industry reads it properly.
My job is to make the book as good as their material allows and then get out of the way. Sometimes making it good requires telling them the chapter they love is the one to cut.
The rest of this series answers the questions people are usually too polite to ask: the honest case against hiring a ghostwriter, what if it doesn’t sound like me, and why don’t I just write it myself. The Ghostwriting Hub has the rest, and my ghostwriting service starts with the twenty-minute conversation nobody else wants to have.
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