He’s sold six companies. We’re eleven chapters in, the material is strong, and he’s just told me the book reads like a highlight reel.
I hear a version of that sentence on most executive memoirs I write.
Sometimes it arrives as a note in the margin. Sometimes it’s an email at eleven at night. Once it was a man asking me to remove the fact that his father paid for Harvard, because it didn’t fit the story he’d been telling about himself for forty years.
The instinct behind it is decent. Nobody wants to be the person handing out a book about how impressive they are. But acting on the instinct without examining it produces a worse book, and usually a dishonest one, so this is a conversation worth having properly.
Why does my book sound like bragging?
Start with the obvious answer, because you already know it’s true. A memoir of a career is a highlight reel. You sold six companies. The book is about how you sold six companies. That’s the premise, and a reader who picked it up already knows.
Describing what you did isn’t the same as claiming to be the best in the world at it. The first is reporting. The second is a posture, and readers detect it instantly.
The sentence that ends this argument with most clients: the book says this happened, here’s what it cost me, and here’s what I’d tell you if you were about to try.
Nobody resents that. What they resent is the version with no cost in it, where every decision was correct and every quarter went up and to the right. That reads as marketing, and the reader stops believing any of it by chapter three.
A manuscript that reads like a highlight reel is usually missing everything around the wins: the doubt, the cost, the people who carried part of the load. Cutting the wins gives you a thinner book with the same hole in the middle of it.
How do you tell if your memoir really sounds like bragging?
Are some clients right to worry? A few are. A small number of manuscripts are self-absorbed, and the author is the last person to notice. Here’s the diagnostic I use. It measures my own reaction. A self-regarding manuscript makes me uncomfortable to read. It’s physical. I find myself wanting to put it down, and I have to stop and ask what would make a reader stay. When that feeling shows up, I say so, and the conversation changes completely.
If I don’t feel it, the author is flinching from a story that’s fine, and your ghostwriter can tell you the same thing if you ask properly. That gives you something usable. Ask your ghostwriter, your editor or a reader whose judgment you trust whether the pages make them want to stop reading. Skip asking whether it’s too much about you. That question invites reassurance, and reassurance is the last thing a nervous author needs at this stage.
Look at the most famous film ever made about a powerful man. It tells you almost nothing in his own voice. It’s built from the accounts of people who knew him, and he comes out larger and more human for it. I think any executive worried about a highlight reel should study that structure before opening another business memoir, because it solves the exact problem he’s afraid of.
Four moves that fix it without losing the story
When the worry is a flinch and the material should stay, four things work. I use all four on nearly every executive memoir.
Get other people on the record. This is the strongest of the four and the one most authors skip. If somebody else describes what you did, it reads completely differently from you describing it, and it costs the book nothing. Interview the co-founder, the operations lead, the assistant who was there for the bad quarter. Quote them directly.
Two warnings. Talk to them yourself instead of printing what the author remembers them saying, because a secondhand quotation in a published book is a real legal exposure and a weak page besides. And take what they say, even when the author hoped for a different version.
Lead with the feeling instead of the outcome. “We closed at forty million” is a fact. “I sat in the car outside the closing for twenty minutes because I couldn’t work out whether I’d just won” is a scene. The second one has the same achievement inside it and reads as a person instead of a press release.
The low points belong in the book too: the night it nearly collapsed, the payroll you weren’t sure you could meet. Readers came for those as much as for the wins, and a book without them has no shape.
Recast the sentences that open with I. A page where most sentences start the same way feels self-centerd whatever the words say, because the rhythm is doing the talking. “When we walked into the meeting, the offer had already changed” carries the same information as “I walked into the meeting and found the offer had changed,” and it doesn’t put the author first in the sentence. Change a third of them and the page transforms.
Give away the credit that’s owed. Most executives had help and can name it. Putting that on the page is accurate, and it does more for the reader’s opinion of the author than any amount of modesty about the achievement itself. Two of my projects resolved this way entirely, with the author reframing himself as somebody who spotted talent and built teams. It only works if it’s true. Performed humility reads worse than plain reporting.
What will a ghostwriter refuse to write?
I won’t write a version where the money appeared and the author was merely present.
That’s the request underneath some of these conversations, and it produces an unreadable book.
The man who wanted Harvard removed was asking me to write a struggle he hadn’t had. We spent three months on it before landing somewhere true. The true version is better, because the interesting question about a man handed advantages is what he did with them. Deleting the advantage deletes the question.
It’s also a practical problem. Readers in your industry know your history. Half of them know who funded you. When a memoir skips a fact everybody in the room already knows, readers call it evasive, and then they start wondering what else is missing. That’s the worst trade an executive can make in print: giving up credibility to buy a modesty nobody believes.
Where do you start fixing a memoir that sounds like bragging?
Short version, if you’re writing this yourself.
Keep every achievement. Add what each one cost. Put the people who helped on the page by name, in their own words where you can get them. Write the failures at the same level of detail as the wins. Almost nobody does. Break the sentences that all start with you. Then ask one honest reader whether they wanted to stop, and believe the answer.
And accept that some readers will find you arrogant regardless. A minority decide that about anyone who describes doing something difficult. You can’t write around them without writing a book that says nothing. That’s a real cost for a very small return.
What surprises people
Across these projects, one pattern keeps showing up. The authors most worried about sounding boastful are, almost without exception, the ones whose manuscripts are fine. The self-absorbed client never raises it. He’s not anxious about how he comes across, because he’s confident he comes across well, and I’m the one raising it with him, chapter after chapter, asking what the reader gets out of a passage that exists to flatter its subject.
So if you’re lying awake wondering whether your book is too much about you, that worry tells you something about your character and nothing about your manuscript. Take it seriously enough to run the test. Then stop letting it cut the material that makes the book worth reading.
For how the interviews behind this work, start at my ghostwriting hub. If you want somebody to handle all of it, that’s what my ghostwriting service is for.
