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If you want to write a book but keep freezing the moment you hear what full ghostwriting costs full ghostwriting, this is the part of the conversation you actually need. A free consultation and a paid Book Discovery Intensive do two different jobs, and the paid one does the job that decides whether your book ever gets written. The free call tells you whether you might want to work with me. The Intensive lets you find out for real, with an actual piece of your book in your hands, before you commit to the whole thing.
That price freeze is the most common moment in any sales call, and it is rarely about the money. The person wants the book. They have wanted it for years. What stops them is that they are 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 the Intensive Actually Is
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, pull it together into a single summary, and we go over it together so you can see your own material organized in a way you have probably never seen it. 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 is not a separate expense. For more, see do ghostwriters get paid royalties? how ghostwriting payment. It applies to the cost of the full project if you move forward. So you are not paying twice. You are paying for the beginning of your book now, getting a finished chapter and a real outline out of it, and deciding from there whether to keep going. If you do, you are already underway, with the hardest part of any book, the start, already behind you. If you do not, you still walk away owning a professional chapter and a map of the whole book, which is more than most people ever get out of years of meaning to write one.
Something happens in those first interviews that people do not expect. They come in thinking they know what their book is about, and somewhere around hour four they realize the book they described is not the book they actually have. The good material is somewhere they were not looking, a story they almost skipped, a hard year they did not think counted. The summary and the outline are where that gets caught, because seeing your own life and knowledge laid out in order shows you the spine you could not see from inside it. That alone is worth the price for a lot of people, and they have not even gotten to the writing yet.
You Get to Test the Relationship, and So Do I
Here is what the free consult cannot give you, no matter how good it is. A book is a long relationship. We work together for months. Thirty minutes on a call tells you I seem reasonable and that is about it. It cannot 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 real question hiding under the price objection, which was never “can I afford this” but “can I work with this person, and is he actually 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 actually like working with me. Because price is usually not the problem. The problem is you do not yet know if you can work with me, you do not know what the process even is, you do not know 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 am also finding out whether I want to work with you. A ghostwriting project means I spend months inside your head and your story, so I need to know you are 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. 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 does not blow up in month four.
There is a side effect I did not 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 did not know were in there. And the fantasy that they could shortcut all of this with AI quietly dies, not because I argued them out of it, but because they got close enough to the real thing to understand why a book that sounds like you cannot come out of a machine. You cannot automate the part where a person remembers the thing they had buried for thirty years.
Both Serve You. Only One Proves It.
I am not knocking the free consult. It serves a purpose, and it serves you. It is thirty to sixty minutes, enough to get a feel for whether we are a fit, enough for you to judge whether you want to take the next step. That is its whole job and it does it well, and you should take one before you do anything else.
But it 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 have 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 is the closest thing to a test drive that a book project allows. You would not 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. The Intensive exists so you never have to gamble a year of your life on a stranger and a hunch.
Schedule a free consultation to discuss your book project.
Frequently Asked Questions
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