“Maybe when things slow down.” “Someday.” You’ve been saying both for years, usually right after “I don’t have time to write a book.”
You’re right. You don’t have time.
Four hours a day of chapters written from scratch, plus story structure, narrative pacing and seventeen different ways to handle flashbacks, plus a blank screen and words that won’t come: you don’t have time for any of it.
Nobody has that kind of time. CEOs and coaches don’t, and neither does the retired executive who thought retirement would finally be relaxing, so my interview process builds the book from a few hours of conversation.
I’ve written 113+ books, and ghostwritten 54+ in addition.
I’ve worked with Fortune 50 executives whose books helped them raise over $30 million in venture capital. The time excuse buries more good books than bad writing ever has, and it frustrates me, because the people who finish books are rarely less busy than you are. They found a way to get the book written without doing the typing themselves.
Do you really not have time to write a book?
When someone tells me they don’t have time to write a book, they’re really saying they don’t have time to write a book the way they imagine it has to be written.
They see themselves alone in a cabin somewhere, laptop open, coffee steaming, grinding out pages like Hemingway. Ahead of them are months of isolation, sacrifice, and discipline they know they can’t sustain. For more, see book marketing.
That’s one way to write a book, and for a busy professional it’s the worst one. I’d never ask a surgeon or a CEO to work that way, and I don’t understand why so many of them demand it of themselves.
Your book needs your stories, your expertise and your perspective far more than it needs your typing. The typing is my job, and I’d much prefer you spend your hours on the part nobody else can supply. For more, see ghostwriting science fiction.
What Does Writing a Book Look Like Day to Day?
When I work with clients, their time commitment looks like this: one to three interviews per week, about an hour each. We talk. They tell me their stories, share their frameworks, explain what they’ve learned over decades in their field. I record everything, transcribe it, and turn their spoken words into polished chapters.
That’s it. An hour here, an hour there, talking about things they already know.
You never face a blank page or learn a craft from scratch. You talk about work you already know cold, and the hard part stays with me.
I’ve worked with surgeons who operate twelve hours a day. They found time. I’ve worked with parents of young children, caregivers for aging parents, people in the middle of career transitions and health crises. They all found time.
What changed for them was the method. Their calendars stayed exactly as crowded as they’d always been.
The Numbers That Change Everything
Let’s say you need 60,000 words for your book. A solid business book or memoir runs about that length.
Writing that yourself at 500 words per day, you’re looking at 120 days of writing. Four months of daily discipline, assuming you never miss a day, never get stuck, never rewrite anything.
Now add the learning curve. Figuring out structure. Wrestling with transitions. Cutting the chapters that don’t work. You’re looking at a year. Maybe two. Maybe never.
Or you could spend 20 to 30 hours total in conversation with someone who’s done this hundreds of times. You’d have a finished manuscript in six months.
So quit asking whether you have time and decide how you want to spend it. Those evenings belong to your family and your business, and I think spending them wrestling with transitions is a poor trade when someone else can do that part for you.
What Is Your Time Worth as an Author?
Here’s a calculation most people never do.
If you bill at $500 an hour as a consultant, and you spend 300 hours writing your own book, that’s $150,000 in opportunity cost. Time you could have spent serving clients, building your business, being with your family.
A ghostwriter costs a fraction of that and gives you back all those hours.
But it goes deeper than money, and the cost that hurts most is the one nobody ever sends you a bill for. What’s the cost of not having the book?
The speaking engagements you didn’t get because you had no book to establish authority. The clients who went with your competitor who did have a book. The legacy you didn’t leave because “someday” never came.
The Real Obstacle
When you say “I don’t have time,” you’re saying “this isn’t important enough yet.” And that’s fine. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe the book can wait.
But if it’s important, if you’ve been carrying this story or this knowledge around for years, if you know the book needs to exist, then the time objection is just a wall you built to protect yourself from starting.
You don’t have to write your book alone.
You don’t have to figure out structure, wrestle with prose, or learn a craft that takes years to master. You don’t have to sacrifice your evenings and weekends. You don’t have to choose between the book and everything else in your life.
You can just talk. Tell your stories to someone who knows how to capture them. Share your expertise with someone who can shape it into something readers will devour.
Your job is to know what you know. My job is to turn it into a book.
What does waiting five years to write your book cost?
I’ve written memoirs from a person’s papers after they died, interviewing the family to fill in the gaps. Those books are worth doing and I take them on, but the family is guessing at things only the subject could have told me.
What do you want to be true?
Do you want to still be carrying this book around in your head, waiting for a magical window of free time that never opens? Or do you want to be holding the finished product, seeing your name on the cover, knowing your story exists in the world?
The people who get their books done are the ones who decided to stop waiting.
You have time for what matters. The only question is whether this matters enough.
Let’s Talk
If you’ve been carrying a book around in your head for years, let’s have a conversation. No pitch. No pressure. Just a chance to talk about your book, what’s stopping you, and whether working together makes sense.
Schedule a free consultation: https://thewritingking.com/booking-form/
Five more years of someday is a choice, and if the book matters to you, it’s the wrong one. I’d rather hear your story now, from a crowded calendar, than have it go untold because the perfect free week never showed up.
