Sample profile · this writer is invented
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Sports memoirs and business books for people who have done the thing and now have to explain it. Thirty years, forty-odd books, two of them national bestsellers.
4.7
Across 3 closed contracts
This number is built only from contracts paid start to finish through Notable Authors. Nothing self-reported is counted. The clients behind it are real and anonymous: a redaction bar sits where each name would be. How that works →
I write the book you would write if you had a year and nothing else to do. Most of my clients are athletes, coaches and the people who run companies: they have a story or an argument that is already whole in their heads, and what they don’t have is the months. My job is the months. We talk, a lot, and I go away and come back with pages that sound like you on your best day. I have done this for a Hall of Famer, for a coach whose halftime speeches are still quoted, and for executives who wanted a book to send ahead of a meeting. The work is the same in every case: find the voice in the first hour, then protect it for three hundred pages.
Twenty to thirty hours of interviews, a full outline you approve, then the manuscript in four stages: outline, first half, full draft, final. Around 70,000 words.
Typical turnaround 9 to 12 months
The argument first: we spend the opening month on what the book is actually claiming, then build the chapters to carry it. 50,000 to 60,000 words, in four stages.
Typical turnaround 8 to 10 months
A smaller first contract: three interviews, a chapter-by-chapter plan, and one sample chapter, so we can find out whether we should write the whole book together.
Typical turnaround 5 to 6 weeks
3 closed contracts. Each one paid in full through the platform, each review published without the client’s name.
FROM THE LEDGER · 3 CONTRACTS PAID IN FULL
“I have been interviewed a thousand times and nobody ever got me on the page. He did, by the second chapter. My daughter read the draft and said it sounded like me at the dinner table, which is the only review I wanted.”
What could have been better
The middle third took a revision more than I expected. He warned me it would.
“He spent the first month arguing with me about what the book was actually claiming, and he was right to. The book we ended up with is the one I should have been writing all along.”
What could have been better
Replies could take two days during his interview weeks. Never longer, but I noticed.
“A serious professional. The plan was clear, every stage arrived, and I always knew where we were. The voice got closer with each pass and landed in the final draft.”
What could have been better
The first draft sounded a little more like him than like me. The final one didn't.
The writer’s own material, published exactly as written.
Nobody tells you it's the last one. That's the first thing I want to say, because everyone assumes there was a moment, some walk off the mound with the crowd on its feet and the wife crying in the good seats. There wasn't. It was a Tuesday in Cleveland, forty-one degrees, and I gave up a double to a kid I'd never heard of and walked back to the dugout thinking about whether the hotel bar was still open.
I was thirty-eight. My arm had been a rumor for two seasons. I knew, in the way you know a tooth is going before the dentist says it, and I had made a private deal with myself that I would never be the guy who hung on. Then I hung on. Everybody does. The money is one reason and it is not the main reason. The main reason is that you have been one thing since you were nine years old, and the day you stop being it, you have to find out what's left.
So here is what was left. That's the book. Not the no-hitter, though we'll get to the no-hitter, and not the trade, though my agent still won't talk about the trade. What I want to write down is what a person is made of when the thing they were made for is taken away, and whether it was ever really the thing at all.
Every deal I have ever lost, I lost in the first ninety seconds, and it took me twenty years to admit that. We tell ourselves the pitch fell apart on page eleven, on the pricing slide, on the question from the quiet man at the end of the table. It didn't. The quiet man had decided before you sat down. The pricing slide only gave him somewhere to put his no.
This is not a chapter about first impressions, which is a phrase for people who sell suits. It's about a specific and learnable thing: what a room is measuring in the time it takes you to cross it, and how to give it what it's measuring for on purpose rather than by accident.
Start with what the room already believes. It believes you want something from it. That belief is correct, and the worst thing you can do is pretend otherwise, because the room can smell a pretence at a hundred paces and will spend the next hour confirming its suspicion. So say it. Name the thing you want in the first sentence out of your mouth, and then, and this is the whole trick, stop talking about it.
Provided by the writer. Most ghostwriting is confidential, so we cannot confirm these and do not present them as fact.
National bestseller. Major publisher, hardcover and audio. My name is in the acknowledgements and nowhere else.
Fifty-five thousand words in nine months. Used company-wide in onboarding.
National bestseller. Serialised in a national newspaper.
A short book the firm hands to every prospective client. Four printings.
$45,000 – $90,000