An accountant hired me to write his book. When I asked what it was for, he said he wanted to put his brand out there. That was the whole answer, and I took the project on it. We did the interviews, I wrote the book, and it was a good book. He read it and loved it. He told me so more than once.
Then the book came out and did what an unpromoted book with no named reader does, very little, and he was disappointed. Mildly, and he was gracious about it, but disappointed. I’ve thought about that project for years, because the book wasn’t the problem. The problem was a suitcase packed for three different trips.
What was underneath the vague goal?
Three real goals, and I didn’t dig them out in time. He wanted to sell copies. He wanted to reinforce his brand. He wanted something to hand clients that would answer their questions before he had to.
Any one of those is a legitimate reason for a book. All three at once is a problem, because they pull the manuscript in three directions.
A book built to sell needs a hook, a promise, and a reader who doesn’t know the author yet. A leave-behind for clients needs depth on the questions those clients ask, in the order they ask them, and no hook at all because the reader already trusts the author. A brand book needs a point of view sharp enough to be repeated. You can pack for one of those trips. You can’t pack for all three in one suitcase and expect to be dressed right anywhere.
Too many ghostwriters take a phrase like that as a complete brief, because pressing a new client on what he really wants feels like it might cost them the job. I did it myself on this one. The client finds out a year later what that politeness cost him, and by then the writer has moved on to the next book.
Why did a good book disappoint a happy client?
Because he measured it against the goal he hadn’t stated. He wanted it to sell, and he hadn’t known that selling requires promotion to particular audiences in particular ways.
Nobody had told him, and I hadn’t asked hard enough to find out that sales were on his list. The book did its brand job well. He was pleased with the writing and let down by the numbers, and both reactions were correct.
Nobody had told him, and I hadn’t asked hard enough to find out that sales were on his list.Share on X
That’s the worst outcome in this business, worse than a bad book. You abandon a bad book. A good one you paid for, you like, and it sits there doing nothing, and you conclude that books don’t work. They work when the goal was real and single. His was real and triple.
Do most book goals go together?
No. This surprised me when I first said it out loud, and it’s held up across 54+ ghostwritten books. Sales and brand can coexist if the brand is the hook. Brand and leave-behind can coexist if the clients are the audience. Sales and leave-behind almost never coexist, because a book that answers your existing clients’ questions isn’t a book a stranger picks up in a store. The three-way combination is the one that fails.
The rule I use now: pick one. Two if they get along. Never three. When a client names three, I ask which one he’d keep if the other two were impossible, and that answer is the goal. The other two become nice-to-haves, and the book stops trying to be three suitcases.
A client who insists the book do all three is asking for a worse book, and I’ll tell him so before we sign anything. I’d rather lose the project in that conversation than deliver something he likes and can’t use.
What must the first hour of a book project settle?
Three things, and I don’t start writing until they have answers.
What does the book have to do? Who’s it for? How would we know it worked? The accountant’s honest answers would have been: sell, my clients and prospects, and copies sold. That’s a coherent goal, and it would have produced a different book with a launch plan attached, and a conversation about whether he was willing to do the promotion that a sales goal requires.
When those answers can’t be produced, the book waits. It waits because writing a book to an undefined goal is how you get a good book that disappoints. The guide to ghostwriting walks through that conversation, and the case studies show what different single goals produced.
How I would run that project today
I wouldn’t take the goal he gave me. I’d ask what he wanted the book to do for his practice in a year, and keep asking until the answer was an outcome instead of a phrase. Put my brand out there’s a phrase. Have my prospects arrive already convinced is an outcome, and it tells me the reader, the structure, and the promotion the book needs.
Then I’d ask what he was willing to do after delivery, because a sales goal without promotion is a wish. If he said he had no time to promote, the goal would change to the leave-behind, and I would build the book for clients who already trust him. Either way he would have a book that matched what he was going to do with it, and there would be nothing to be disappointed about.
Why the goal conversation has to recur
The first hour isn’t the only hour. During the interview sessions I break out, fifteen minutes or a whole session, and ask whether we’re still meeting the goal and how the book will be promoted at the end. If I’d done that with the accountant, the sales goal would have come out mid-project, while there was time to plan for it or drop it. Instead it came out after publication, when the only thing left to do was feel let down.
That recurring check is now a fixed part of every project I run. The ghostwriter is gone at manuscript delivery, so the marketing conversation has to happen while he’s still in the room.
Before you start a book, say out loud what you want it to do, and then say what you’d give up. If the second answer comes hard, you have more than one goal, and the book will pay for it. The Book Discovery Intensive is one engagement that forces the question before the money moves, and you leave with one goal, one reader, and one test. Connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me where your book is stuck. Part of The Publishing and Marketing Hub.
I don’t hold any of this against that accountant. He hired a professional, and asking which goal came first was part of what he was paying for. I’m harder on myself about this project than almost any other, because the disappointment was avoidable and I was the one in a position to avoid it.
