What happened to three clients who wrote their books?
You don’t need to be a writer to have a book.Share on X
After ghostwriting 54+ books, I can tell you that the clients who moved forward didn’t have fewer doubts than the ones who didn’t. They had the same fears, the same hesitations, the same questions about cost and time and whether it was worth it. They just decided to start anyway. Here are three of them and what happened after they did.
I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the doubt and very little for the stalling. Every month an expert spends deciding is a month their knowledge sits where nobody can use it, and I think the years people lose to deciding do more damage than any rough first draft ever could.
Clients tell me they’ll do it next year all the time. I tell them I’ll probably be booked by then, but if they want to wait, that’s their call. One told me he didn’t have the money for the book yet and wanted to do it later. I told him the best move was the Book Discovery Intensive. We’d do the interviews and write the outline now, and the book would be ready to go when he was.
He took it. As soon as we finished the Intensive, he went straight into the book, on a payment plan that let him start without paying much up front.
The Manager Who Broke Through
This client was a diligent manager stuck in his career. He had the expertise, the track record, and the industry knowledge, but he’d hit a ceiling. No amount of performance reviews or internal networking was moving him to the next level. He needed something that would reposition him entirely. We collaborated on a book that captured his industry insights and leadership philosophy. It was a strategic tool, built to show the depth of thinking his daily work couldn’t put on display. The book broke through the ceiling.
It led to speaking engagements he hadn’t been considered for before.
A university adopted it as a resource in their program. It became the credibility foundation that helped him secure funding for his own startup. The expertise was the same expertise he’d carried for years, and now the people who could act on it could read it, hold it and pass it along.
Too many capable managers sit under that same ceiling for a decade because their best thinking only exists in meetings. Companies promote what they can see, and a book puts that thinking in front of people who were never in the room.
The Entrepreneur Who Needed Investors
This client was entering a new business field and needed to establish credibility fast. He understood the industry deeply, had a clear vision for his company, and knew the opportunity was real. What he didn’t have was a track record in this space that investors could evaluate.
We expedited a ghostwriting project that encapsulated his industry understanding, his structure for the opportunity, and the insights that distinguished his approach from competitors. The book was a strategic argument for why this market was about to shift and why his company was positioned to capture the change.
The finished book raised his reputation in the field before his company had generated significant revenue.
Investors who read it came to meetings already understanding his thesis. Instead of spending the first 30 minutes of every pitch explaining his credibility, the book had done that work in advance. It portrayed him as a recognized expert and significantly improved his chances of securing the investment he needed.
Doris and the Dream Journal
From Conversations With Influencers
Keya Murthy has worked with roughly ten thousand clients over eighteen years, having come to the work after four years of personal crisis she frames as transformation. She told it on Conversations With Influencers.
Not every book is a business strategy. Doris had been keeping a dream journal for years, documenting vivid, strange, sometimes hilarious dreams that she’d always wanted to turn into a book. Career advancement and investor pitches had nothing to do with it. She had something she wanted to create, and she finally decided to do it.
Our collaboration lasted 16 months. Doris’s material was rich and personal, and the process of shaping dream journal entries into a coherent, entertaining book required patience and a real understanding of what made her dreams worth reading about. The result was “Gators in the Soup”, a book that exists because Doris stopped thinking about it and started doing it.
Doris wanted the book for herself, with no career goal attached, and I think that’s a perfectly legitimate reason to move forward. Plenty of people talk themselves out of a personal book because it won’t pay for itself. She didn’t, and now the book exists.
What objections almost stopped these clients from writing a book?
Every one of these clients had hesitations before they started. The same ones I hear from every prospective client.
“I’m not a writer.” None of them were. That’s the entire point of hiring a ghostwriter. The client provides the expertise, the stories, and the voice.
I provide the craft. What a book asks of the client is something worth saying, and every one of these three had that long before we started.
“It costs too much.” A ghostwritten book is a significant investment (my rate is on my ghostwriting services page). The manager’s book helped him launch a startup. The entrepreneur’s book helped him secure funding that dwarfed the cost of the manuscript. Doris got something money can’t easily buy: a lifelong dream fulfilled.
I tell clients up front that they’re very unlikely to earn the fee back by selling copies. The return comes when the book becomes the foundation of their marketing, the thing that gets them the talk, the meeting, the contract.
For these three clients, it came back that way. Any writer who promises you royalties will cover the cost is selling you a fantasy.
“I don’t have time.” The manager was running a department. The entrepreneur was building a company. Doris had a full life. None of them had spare months to sit down and write.
Their time commitment was the interviews: a few hours a month of conversation.
I handled the research, drafting, structure, and revision. The book got written around their schedules. The excuse I won’t accept is waiting until things calm down, because things don’t calm down for people like this, and the ones who wait for it are the ones whose books never exist.
“My ideas aren’t unique enough.” The manager’s leadership philosophy wasn’t revolutionary in isolation. But combined with his industry experience and his particular way of thinking about problems, it became a book no one else could have written. Uniqueness comes from your own combination of experience, perspective, and voice, and no one else has that combination.
What Happens When You Don’t Write Your Book?
The opportunity cost of waiting wasn’t dramatic. No one’s career collapsed because they didn’t write a book. But the speaking engagements, the investor conversations, the credibility boost, the personal fulfillment: all of that was delayed by however long they waited. The book they eventually wrote could have been working for them the entire time.
The ones who never came back, I don’t know their stories. But I know the book they talked about still doesn’t exist. And the expertise they wanted to share is still locked in their heads where no one else can access it.
That loss is the one that hurts most. Somebody spends thirty years learning a trade, and when they step away the knowledge goes with them, because the book stayed a plan.
The First Step
Moving forward with a book starts with a conversation. What do you know? Who needs to know it? What would the book do for your career, your business, or your life? Those questions have answers, and those answers become the foundation of the project.
If you’ve been thinking about your book for months or years, the thinking phase is over. The information you need to decide is available through a consultation. Reach out, and we’ll figure out together whether your book is ready to move forward. For more on what ghostwriting involves and how the process works, see What’s Ghostwriting? For how a book works as a business development tool, see How a Book Builds Your Brand Identity.
I’ve run out of patience with the idea that a book has to wait until you feel ready. The three clients in this piece didn’t feel ready either. They had the same doubts as the people who never called back, and the only thing separating the two groups is that one of them now has a book working for them every single day.
