A book that hands over everything converts what should be a relationship into a transaction.Share on X
There’s a tension that comes up in almost every business book project, and it came up with Joe Rockey too. It surfaces somewhere in the middle of the discovery phase, usually after the client has been talking openly for several sessions and has said things they wouldn’t normally say in a sales conversation. And then they pull back a little, reconsider, and ask a version of the same question: how much of this is going in the book?
It’s exactly the right question. I’d be more worried if a client never asked it. And the answer to it shapes the entire second half of the project. Most people ask it six months too late, after they’ve already said things on the record they’re not sure they wanted to say. With Joe’s project, we asked it before the outline existed. That made everything easier.
That moment in a project is a good sign, because it means the client trusts me enough to say too much. It’s also where I get protective. A business book that hands competitors the operating manual can cost an owner the very clients it was supposed to bring in, and I won’t let a client do that to themselves by accident.
What if your book gives away the business?
Joe Rockey is in a position that sharpens this tension considerably.
He built something that doesn’t have real competition yet. He’s operating in a space he largely created by combining approaches that no one else in his industry had assembled in the same way. When you’re in that position, writing a detailed book about how your methodology works is more than a marketing move.
It’s an invitation for better-resourced competitors to replicate your model before you’ve captured enough of the market to make replication too costly to bother with. He named that fear out loud in one of our sessions and was somewhat surprised to hear himself say it clearly. Naming it changed the conversation about what the book should contain.
Every client of mine gets an hour-long kickoff before the real interviews begin, and I tell each one the same thing: never tell me anything you don’t want in the book. Months later I won’t remember which story was off the record, and I’d hate to be the reason a trade secret ended up in print. When a client drifts into material that can’t be published, I stop them and ask them to tell it in a way that can.
An author who gives the store away out of nerves, hoping generosity will read as expertise, is walking into a trap.
Writing a vague book won’t fix this. Vagueness is the instinctive response to this fear, and I think it’s the worst response available, because it produces bad books. Vague books don’t generate leads. They don’t build the kind of authority that makes a reader feel they’ve met someone who knows something important at a level others don’t, and they don’t earn trust. They get a polite nod that fades before the reader has decided whether to reach out, and a polite nod has never filled anybody’s calendar.
The solution is understanding the difference between principles and proprietary application, and putting only the first kind in the book. Joe drew the line clearly:
Most leaders treat incentive trips like a reward. You treat them like infrastructure.
That’s the principle. The insight that changes how a leader thinks about what an incentive program is and what it can do. How Joe’s company designs the infrastructure, the assessment process, the communication structure, the contest structure, the way it implements the system in a real organization, that’s the proprietary application. The first belongs in the book. The second belongs in the engagement.
On what the cruise is inside the system:
The cruise is the mechanism.
And on where it sits relative to the work itself:
The cruise is literally the cherry on top. The hard work is the consulting beforehand.
Those three statements together define the line with precision. The book teaches why the mechanism matters, what it produces when deployed correctly, and what the principles behind it look like in practice.
Joe’s company delivers the mechanism itself, designed, structured, and managed. A reader who finishes the book should understand the problem more clearly than before, believe that this approach works, and feel the gap between their understanding of the principles and Joe’s ability to implement them. That gap is what produces a call.
Why giving everything away backfires
Something Joe said in a different context applies directly to this editorial decision:
If you’re not in a relationship that you want to see be successful, don’t be in it.
A book that hands over everything converts what should be a relationship into a transaction.
The reader takes the manual, implements whatever they can on their own, and has no particular reason to ever reach out to the author. That’s a very expensive piece of free consulting. The purpose of a lead generation book is to make the reader feel understood and to make them see that the author has more to offer than the book contains.
An author who gives the store away out of nerves, hoping generosity will read as expertise, is walking into a trap. The reader walks off with the manual, tries a half-built version on their own, gets poor results, and decides the method doesn’t work. The author loses the client and takes the blame for somebody else’s shortcut.
Getting that balance wrong costs more than any clumsy chapter could, because the damage lands on the business itself, and nobody can take a published book back.
| Approach | What the reader does | Result for the author |
|---|---|---|
| Vague book | Gives a polite nod that fades | No leads, no authority, no trust |
| Stingy on principles | Suspects there is not much underneath | Weakens the case for hiring |
| Gives everything away | Tries a half-built version, gets poor results | Method blamed, client lost |
| Generous on principles, protected on application | Understands the problem and feels the gap to doing it | That gap produces a call |
My take
Put the principles in the book and keep the application in the engagement. Nervous authors give the whole method away, hoping generosity reads as expertise. It backfires. The reader tries a half-built version, gets poor results, and blames the method, and you lose the client too. Teach why the mechanism matters and what it produces. Leave the reader seeing the gap between understanding it and doing it. That gap makes them call.
Why does giving away principles generously work?
There’s a counterintuitive truth underneath this. Giving away the principles generously, holding nothing back at the level of why and what, strengthens the case for hiring instead of weakening it. A reader who gets real value from the book trusts the author more. They conclude that if this is what the author gives away for the price of a book, the paid engagement must be substantial.
Stinginess at the principles level signals the opposite, that there may not be much underneath, and that’s why the vague book and the give-everything-away book both fail. Generous on principles, protected on application, is the line that builds trust and preserves the business at the same time. Given the choice, I’d take a generous book over a stingy one every time. Stingy books read like the author is afraid of the reader, and readers pick up on that fear within a chapter or two.
The principles behind Joe’s methodology aren’t secret. Understand your people as people instead of as categories. Communicate with them in the language that connects with their own motivations instead of the language that feels natural to you. Give a team a shared goal with a shared reward and the team starts to behave like a team. Follow through on every commitment, consistently, without exception. These ideas are well-supported by decades of organizational psychology research. None of them are Joe’s invention.
What’s Joe’s is the system he built to implement those ideas at scale and with consistency in organizations that have never worked that way before.
The assessment process. The communication translation model. The incentive structure design. The program management through the full contest cycle. That’s the application. A reader who understands the principles can’t replicate that application from a book, any more than understanding the principles of structural engineering lets you design a bridge.
The book teaches the principles. Joe’s company builds the bridge. Once we drew that line clearly, every later decision about content became simple. If a piece of information sits in the principles layer, the why and the what, it belongs in the book. If it sits in the application layer, the how and the exact how, it belongs in the engagement. You have to set the boundary before you build the outline and hold it consistently throughout. Joe and I made that decision early. Everything that follows from it is cleaner because of it.
I get impatient with the advice that a business book should hold nothing back. It sounds brave, and it wrecks businesses. An owner who spent years building an application layer deserves a book that sells it, and a ghostwriter who lets that owner publish the whole playbook for the price of a paperback has failed at the most important part of the job.
Frequently Asked Questions
The principles, not the proprietary application. Put in the why and the what, the insights that change how a reader sees their problem, and keep the how, the specific implementation system, inside the paid engagement. A reader should finish understanding the problem and believing the approach works, while feeling the gap between knowing the principles and being able to implement them.
Only if you write the application layer.
Principles are usually well-known and not yours to protect; your proprietary system for implementing them at scale is. A reader can absorb the principles and still not replicate your specific assessment, communication, and program-management system from a book, the same way knowing structural engineering principles doesn’t let you design a bridge.
Because vagueness is the instinctive response and it produces bad books. Vague books don’t generate leads, build authority, or earn trust. They produce mild positive reactions that fade before the reader decides to reach out. The answer isn’t holding back the principles but drawing a clear line between principles, which you share generously, and application, which you protect.
No, it strengthens the case for hiring. A reader who gets real value concludes that if this is what the author gives away in a book, the paid engagement must be substantial. Stinginess signals there may not be much underneath. Generous on principles and protected on application is the line that builds trust and preserves the business at once.
I make that call before the outline exists. Most authors confront the question about six months too late, once they’ve already said things on the record they’re not sure they wanted to say. With Joe Rockey, we asked it before we built the outline, and that made everything easier. Once I draw the line between principles and proprietary application early, every later content decision becomes simple: the why and the what go in the book, and the how and the exact how stay in the engagement.
Principles are the insights that change how someone thinks, often well-supported by existing research and not anyone’s private property. Application is the specific system built to implement those principles at scale and with consistency. The book teaches the principles; the company delivers the application. The first creates demand, the second is what clients pay for.
Clients worry about giving away too much, and a good ghostwriter helps draw that line. My book The Ghostwriting Advantage explains how to get your book written for you.
