If you freeze the moment you hear what full ghostwriting costs, a free consultation won’t get you past it. It’s a conversation about whether we’d work well together, and that’s as far as it goes. The Book Discovery Intensive puts a real piece of your book in your hands before you commit to the full project.
That price freeze is the most common moment in any sales call, and it’s rarely about the money. The person wants the book. They’ve wanted it for years. What stops them is that they’re about to hand a stranger a large check and a year of their life on faith. When I bring up the Intensive at that exact moment, not one person has ever turned it down.
What Is a Book Discovery Intensive?
The Book Discovery Intensive is the front end of the real project, done as a standalone.
We sit down for the first six to ten hours of interviews, the same interviews that would open the full book, plus a follow-up session or two. I take all of that and pull it into a single summary. Then we go over it together, so you can see your own material organized in a way you’ve probably never seen.
From there I build an outline you approve, and then I write the first chapter, usually around two thousand words. For more, see the truth about “free stuff” on the internet.
The money isn’t a separate expense. It applies to the cost of the full project if you move forward. So you’re not paying twice. You’re paying for the beginning of your book. You get a finished chapter and a real outline out of it, and you decide from there whether to keep going. If you do, you’re already underway, with the hardest part of any book, the start, already behind you. For more, see Do Ghostwriters Get Paid Royalties? How Ghostwriting Payment Actually Works.
If you don’t, you still own a professional chapter and a map of the full book. That’s more than most people get out of years of meaning to write one.
The Intensive runs from interviews to summary, outline and a finished first chapter before you decide on the full book.
Something happens in those first interviews that people don’t expect. They come in thinking they know what their book is about. Somewhere around hour four they realize the book they described isn’t the book they have. The good material is somewhere they weren’t looking, a story they almost skipped, a hard year they didn’t think counted.
The summary and the outline are where that gets caught. Seeing your own life and knowledge laid out in order shows you the spine you couldn’t see from inside it. That alone is worth the price for a lot of people, and they haven’t even gotten to the writing yet.
Does the Book Discovery Intensive test the working relationship?
The free consult can’t give you one thing, no matter how good it is.
The good material is somewhere they weren’t looking, a story they almost skipped, a hard year they didn’t think counted.
A book is a long relationship. We work together for months. Thirty minutes on a call tells you I seem reasonable and that’s about it. It can’t tell you what it feels like to sit across from me for hours. To hand me your half-formed thoughts and watch what I do with them. To read a chapter of your own book, in your own voice, that I wrote from your words.
That experience answers the question hiding under the price objection. It’s “can I work with this person, and is he any good.”
The Intensive lets you dip a foot in before you decide to swim.
You see the process. You see results. You find out whether you like working with me. Because price is usually not the problem. The problem is what you don’t yet know. Whether you can work with me. What the process even is. What makes me different from the next ghostwriter, and you have a hundred other questions. None of those get answered by talking. They get answered by working together.
It runs the other way too, and that protects you as much as it protects me. I’m also finding out whether I want to work with you. A ghostwriting project means I spend months inside your head and your story. I need to know you’re reasonable, easy to deal with, and able to communicate like an adult. The Intensive shows me that the same way it shows you whether you trust me.
I’ve never ended a contract, and I think this is a big part of the reason. The screening happens before either of us has signed up for months together, when walking away still costs nobody much.
By the end of it we have both made a real decision instead of a hopeful guess, and a book built on a real decision doesn’t blow up in month four.
There’s a side effect I didn’t design but have come to count on. Somewhere in those interviews, people discover how much actual work a book is. They feel the depth of it, the digging, the precision, the way a good chapter pulls things out of you that you didn’t know were in there.
And the fantasy that they could shortcut all of this with AI dies.
I didn’t argue them out of it. They got close enough to the real thing to understand why a book that sounds like you can’t come out of a machine. You can’t automate the part where a person remembers the thing they’d buried for thirty years.
My take
A free consult tells you I seem reasonable, and it can’t tell you anything more. The Intensive shows you what it’s like to hand me your half-formed thoughts and read a chapter of your own book in your voice. It shows me whether we can work together for months. I’ve never ended a contract, and I think that screening is a big part of why. If you’re serious about the book, skip the hopeful guess and do the work first.
Both Serve You. Only One Proves It.
| Feature | Free consult | Book Discovery Intensive |
|---|---|---|
| Length | Thirty to sixty minutes | Six to ten hours of interviews, plus a follow-up session or two |
| Purpose | Decide whether we might be a fit | Show you the process and real results |
| What you get | A feel for the fit | A summary, an approved outline and a first chapter of about two thousand words |
| Cost | Free | Fee applies to the full project if you go ahead |
| Tests the working relationship | Barely; thirty minutes says little | Yes, in both directions |
| If you stop there | Nothing lost | You keep the chapter and a map of the full book |
I’m not knocking the free consult. It serves a purpose, and it serves you. It’s thirty to sixty minutes, enough to get a feel for whether we’re a fit, enough for you to judge whether you want to take the next step. That’s its whole job and it does it well, and you should take one before you do anything else.
What I dislike is a free call used as a pressure chamber, where a writer spends twenty-five minutes on flattery and the last five on a deadline to sign. If a ghostwriter needs you to decide on the call, ask yourself what they’re afraid you’ll find out later.
But the free consult is built to help you decide. The Intensive is built to show you. One is a conversation about whether we could make a great book together. The other is the first real evidence that we can, with a chapter to prove it and an outline to follow. When the stakes are a year of your life and the book you’ve been meaning to write for a decade, evidence beats conversation every time. The people who hesitate forever are almost always waiting to feel certain before they start.
The Intensive is how you buy that certainty for a fraction of the full commitment, and it’s the closest thing to a test drive that a book project allows. You wouldn’t buy a car you had never driven or a house you had never walked through. A book costs more than either in time and meaning, and yet people routinely sign for one on the strength of a phone call.
I think it’s wrong to ask anybody to bet a year of their life on a stranger and a hunch, and I’d sooner lose a sale at the end of an Intensive than win one on a phone call.
Schedule a free consultation to discuss your book project.
Before you commit to a ghostwriter, know how the work runs. The Ghostwriting Advantage is my book on how to get your book written for you, drawn from more than 54 ghostwritten books.
