There’s a bottle of pills on my kitchen counter. The label says to give one to the cat twice daily. It doesn’t mention that my cat, a fifteen-pound tabby named Buttercup, would rather die than let this happen.
There’s also a manuscript on my desk. Three hundred pages that need to become a book. The client, a successful entrepreneur who built a logistics empire from nothing, would rather do almost anything than sit still for interviews. (He’s a composite of several clients, with the details changed. The cat is not.)
I have ghostwritten 54+ books for other people. I’ve also owned cats my entire life. Neither experience has prepared me for what I’m about to describe.
Day One: The Approach
The vet made it sound simple. “Just open his mouth and pop it in. For more, see business book ghostwriter. Cats are easy.”
I corner Buttercup in the hallway. He looks at me with an expression that suggests he knows exactly what I’m planning. I crouch down, speaking in the soothing voice I reserve for frightened animals and nervous clients. “Hey buddy. Just a quick thing. Won’t take a second.” For more, see from idea to finished book.
Buttercup bolts. He’s under the bed before I can blink.
🐾
Cats and clients have one thing in common: both will resist you.Share on X
The client made it sound simple too. “I’ve got all my stories in my head. We just need to get them on paper.”
Our first interview is scheduled for Tuesday at 2 PM. At 1:45, his assistant calls. Something came up. Can we reschedule?
We reschedule for Thursday. On Thursday, he’s running twenty minutes late. When he finally joins the video call, he’s in his car, driving to another meeting.
“Let’s just do this quick,” he says. “What do you need from me?”
I need three hours of your undivided attention. I need you to tell me about your childhood, your failures, the moments that shaped you. I need you to sit still.
“Just a few questions to start,” I say. “Won’t take long.”
He takes another call before I finish my first question.
Day Three: The Strategy
Heard elsewhere
The process starts with the reader instead of the author, then works back to what the client wants and the single thread tying them together. Richard walked through it on The Elevated Brand Podcast.
I’ve done my research. The internet says to wrap the pill in a treat. Buttercup loves those little salmon-flavored things. I’ll hide the pill inside, and he’ll swallow it without knowing.
I prepare the treat carefully, tucking the pill deep inside. I present it to Buttercup with the confidence of a man who has solved an impossible problem.
He eats around the pill and spits it onto the floor. It sits there, wet and rejected, while he looks at me with something approaching contempt.
🐾
I’ve done my research on the client too. I read every interview he’s ever given. I watched his keynote speeches. I found articles from fifteen years ago when he was just starting out. I know his story better than he thinks I do.
Armed with this knowledge, I try a different approach. Instead of asking him to tell me about his life, I tell him what I already know and ask him to correct me.
“So you started the company in your garage with $2,000 and a used computer.”
“It was $1,800,” he says. “And the computer was borrowed.”
We’re talking. He’s engaged. For twenty minutes, I get the real stuff. The fear. The doubt. The moment he almost quit.
Then his phone buzzes. “I gotta take this.”
He doesn’t come back.
Day Five: The Escalation
The internet has more suggestions. Crush the pill into powder. Mix it with wet food. The cat won’t notice.
Buttercup notices.
He sniffs the bowl, looks at me, and walks away. He’d rather starve than be deceived. I respect this, stubborn as it is.
I try the direct approach. I grab him firmly, pry open his jaw, and shove the pill toward the back of his throat. The vet showed me how to do this. It should work.
Buttercup twists in a way that defies feline anatomy. He rakes his back claws down my forearm and launches himself across the room. The pill is somewhere on the floor. I’m bleeding.
🐾
The client has stopped responding to emails.
It’s been a week since our last interview. I need four more hours minimum to finish the research phase. I’ve sent three messages. Polite. Professional. Increasingly desperate.
I call his assistant. She’s sympathetic but firm. He’s traveling. He’s busy. He’ll get back to me when he can.
I consider the direct approach. Showing up at his office. Forcing the conversation. Making him understand that his book won’t write itself.
Instead, I send a fourth email. This one includes the first chapter. It’s rough, built from the fragments I’ve gathered, but it’s something. Something he can see. Something that proves this project is real.
He responds within an hour. “This is good. Really good. When can we talk?”
Day Eight: The Breakthrough
I’ve accepted that Buttercup is smarter than me. Stronger than me. More stubborn than me. I can’t win this fight through force or deception.
I sit on the floor next to his food bowl. I don’t look at him. I don’t try to grab him. I just sit there, pill in hand, waiting.
Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. Buttercup watches from across the room, suspicious but curious.
Twenty minutes. He approaches. Sniffs my hand. I stay still.
Twenty-five minutes. He’s eating from his bowl, three inches from me. I reach out slowly, stroke his back. He tenses but doesn’t run.
I keep petting him. My hand moves toward his head. He’s purring now, lost in the attention. I tilt his chin up, and in one smooth motion, I open his mouth and deposit the pill.
He swallows before he realizes what happened.
🐾
The client has stopped running.
Something shifted after he read that first chapter. He saw himself on the page, and something clicked. It stopped being an obligation and became his story, coming to life.
Our next interview runs two hours. He cancels a meeting to keep talking. He tells me about his father, about the business that failed before this one succeeded, about the partner who betrayed him. The stuff he’s never told anyone.
I stop asking questions. I just listen. He keeps talking.
When we finally hang up, I have enough material for three chapters. More importantly, I have his trust.
Day Twelve: The Setback
Buttercup figured out my game.
The patient approach worked once. It won’t work again. The moment I sit on the floor near his bowl, he disappears. He knows what the stillness means now.
I’m back to square one. The pill bottle mocks me from the counter.
I try the towel method. Wrap the cat in a towel so he can’t scratch. Hold him firmly. Administer the pill.
The internet makes this look easy. The internet lies.
Buttercup becomes a furry tornado of rage. The towel provides zero protection. I end up with scratches on both arms and a cat who won’t come near me for the rest of the day.
🐾
The client loved the first three chapters. He hated chapter four.
“This doesn’t sound like me,” he says. “This sounds like a business book.”
He’s right. I got lazy. I fell back on generic language, the kind of stuff that fills airport bestsellers. I lost his voice.
“I’ll rewrite it,” I say.
I spend two days on the revision. I read his interviews out loud to get his rhythm back in my head. I delete every sentence that sounds like it could have been written for anyone else.
The second draft is better. He still doesn’t love it. We go back and forth for a week, adjusting phrases, cutting sections, adding stories I’d left out.
Chapter four takes longer than the first three combined.
Day Eighteen: The Acceptance
I call the vet. I explain my failures in detail. She listens without judgment.
“Have you tried the pill gun?” she asks.
I haven’t tried the pill gun. I didn’t know pill guns existed. She explains: it’s a plastic syringe-like device that lets you deposit the pill at the back of the cat’s throat without putting your fingers in harm’s way.
I drive to the pet store. I buy the pill gun. I feel like a man who has discovered fire.
That evening, I approach Buttercup with my new weapon. He’s skeptical but not alarmed. The device is unfamiliar, non-threatening. I pet him for a moment, load the pill, open his mouth, and press the plunger.
He swallows. Looks at me with mild annoyance. Walks away.
It worked. It worked.
🐾
The client calls me on a Sunday.
“I’ve been thinking about the ending,” he says. “I don’t want it to be about success. I want it to be about what comes next.”
This is the moment every ghostwriter waits for. The client has stopped seeing the book as a chore. He’s seeing it as something real. Something that matters.
We talk for an hour about legacy, about meaning, about what he wants people to take away from his story. None of this was in the original outline. All of it is better than what we planned.
“Can you write that?” he asks.
“I can write that.”
Day Thirty: The End
Buttercup takes his pill every morning now. He doesn’t like it, but he tolerates it. We’ve reached an understanding, the cat and I. He accepts that I’m going to keep doing this, and I accept that he’s going to glare at me afterward.
The scratches on my arms have healed. Mostly.
🐾
The manuscript is done. Three hundred and twelve pages. Twelve chapters. Eighteen months of work compressed into a document that will have someone else’s name on the cover.
The client reads the final draft in one sitting. He calls me afterward, and for a moment he doesn’t say anything.
“It’s like you climbed inside my head,” he says finally. “How did you do that?”
I want to tell him the truth. That I’ve had practice with stubborn creatures. That the secret is patience, persistence, and knowing when to try a different approach. That the hard part is earning the trust of someone who’d rather be doing anything else.
Instead I just say, “It’s what I do.”
The Moral
Cats and clients have one thing in common: both will resist you. Both will scratch. Both will run and hide and make you question every choice that led you to this moment.
But if you stay patient, stay flexible, and keep showing up, eventually something shifts. The pill goes down. The story comes out. The book exists.
And somewhere in the process, the creature who fought you every step of the way starts to trust you. Maybe even appreciates what you did.
Buttercup is purring in my lap as I write this. The client’s book hit shelves last month. He called to tell me about the first review, and for ten minutes he sounded like a kid on Christmas morning.
Neither of them will ever fully understand what it took. That’s fine. That’s the job.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for Buttercup’s evening pill. Wish me luck.
If you have a book in you and need someone with the patience to get it out, start with a conversation.
How does the ghostwriting process work in real life?
Less like a cat fight, most of the time, because the contract handles the parts Buttercup can’t be reasoned into.
Every project starts with an hour-long kickoff meeting. I tell each client that for the next six months or so we’re in a relationship between two adults: if something bothers you, say so, and I’ll do the same. I also give them one rule. Don’t tell me anything you don’t want in the book, because months later I won’t remember which stories were meant to stay private.
That rule sounds blunt, and it’s meant to. The alternative is a writer guessing, months later, which stories were private, and guessing is how a family secret ends up in print. I won’t put a client in that position, so the responsibility sits with the one person who knows what’s private.
Then come the interviews, lots of them, by Zoom, by phone or in person. Every one is recorded, and the contract says so. Zoom announces the recording and makes the client check a box to accept it. After each session I send the client a summary document, which AI helps me produce from the transcript, so they can see what we covered. I write the chapters myself, from the interviews, and send them as they’re finished, so there’s never a surprise at the end.
The interviews are the painful part. They can seriously make the brain hurt. I’m taking a drill to your brain, pulling out the information and covering your brain back up so you don’t die. I’m too much of a fiction writer sometimes. I even gross myself out. The writing is more fun for me, and you won’t have to be as involved.
I send chapters as they’re done because a writer who disappears for months and comes back with a finished manuscript is asking the client to gamble. By then every wrong guess about the voice is baked into the whole book. I think that’s a lousy way to treat someone who’s trusting you with their story, and a writer who didn’t deliver their voice is one of the complaints I keep hearing from people who come to me after trying someone else.
The contract sets the book at “up to” a certain length, such as 60,000 words, so there’s a price on it.
If the book needs to grow, that’s a change order. And for the clients who vanish the way the one in this story did, the contract puts a project on hold after 30 days of silence and treats it as abandoned after 60. A client who sends a two-line note saying they’re buried doesn’t lose their place.
People treat the contract as the cold part of a creative job. I think it’s the kindest part. Clear terms on length and on silence mean neither of us has to have an awkward fight later, and that protects the working relationship better than good intentions ever could.
When the manuscript is done, I send it to one of a couple of editors I trust, or the client’s own, for editing, proofreading and formatting. The client arranges the cover.
My ghostwriting services cover the full process, and the Book Discovery Intensive is a way to try it, interviews and all, before committing to a whole book. Cats not included.
Getting a book written should be a lot less dramatic than getting a pill into Buttercup, and a good ghostwriter keeps it that way. If a writer can’t tell you up front how the interviews, the chapters, the length and the silences will be handled, you’re going to find out the hard way, after you’ve already paid.
