Cybersecurity Process

Most books take 4 to 8 months from kickoff to finished manuscript. Length and technical complexity are the biggest factors, along with how much access I have to you for interviews. When a real deadline drives the project, a conference keynote, a product launch, or a publisher contract, shorter is possible. I’ve turned manuscripts around in 90 days when the situation called for it.

Yes. I ran enterprise security for two decades and handled annual PCI compliance at Trader Joe’s, with 33 years in enterprise IT overall. I was the technical editor on Cyberheist for KnowBe4 and wrote Family Cybersecurity and Sins of the Internet. You won’t spend the engagement explaining what a threat model is, and I won’t flatten or misstate the material to make it easier to write.

Yours drives it. The expertise, the opinions, and the direction come from you. My job is to develop that into a structured, well-crafted book, handling craft-level decisions like chapter order, pacing, and prose. I write from your interviews so the voice is yours, and nothing goes in the book without your approval.

You do, completely. I’m hired to write your book, not to share in it. All rights, royalties, and intellectual property belong to you. I don’t take a byline or cover credit unless you specifically want one. This is standard professional ghostwriting practice and it’s written into the Statement of Work before any work begins.

Both are fine starting points. If you have a stalled draft, a pile of articles, or old talks, I can work from existing material, fix what’s there, or rebuild from scratch. If you have only a general sense of “I should write a book,” the discovery process develops that into a clear structure. You don’t need a finished outline to start.

It starts with structured interview sessions over video call, recorded with your permission. From there I build an outline you approve, then write the book in stages, sending chapters for your review as the work develops. You read each one, correct the technical detail, and direct revisions, so the book never drifts away from what you actually mean.

Yes. Strict NDAs are standard and confidentiality is the default. Your name is on the cover and mine is nowhere on it unless you decide otherwise. Anything sensitive you share in interviews stays between us, and we agree in advance on what does and doesn’t go in the book.

Most ghostwriters can’t speak the language of your field and will flatten the technical material to get through it. I ran enterprise security for two decades, served as technical editor on Cyberheist for KnowBe4, and wrote Family Cybersecurity and Sins of the Internet. With 113+ books authored and 54+ ghostwritten, you get a writer who understands the material cold and won’t fake his way around it.