Congratulations to my valued book development client Jared Gleaton on the publication of A Feast for the Senses: The Psychological Art of Eating Well. Join Jared on his deeply personal and transformative journey as he sheds 170 pounds in just one year. Drawing from his experiences as a school psychologist, his struggles with weight, and his lifelong passion for food, Jared shares a story that is as much about self-discovery as it is about health and fine dining.
In A Feast for the Senses, Jared reveals how his relationship with food evolved as he explores the psychology behind eating—what he calls “foodology.” It represents the emotional connection we share through food—a soulful intertwining of experiences and traditions that create a universal bond. It’s about how beloved dishes become a common thread, weaving love and familiarity into the fabric of our lives.This book goes beyond a personal weight-loss story to examine the profound impact of the senses on our choices and lives.
Through Jared’s journey, you’ll delve into:
The Five Senses and Food: Uncover how sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing shape your eating experiences, and learn how this understanding can transform your relationship with food.
Psychological Insights: Gain valuable lessons from the emotional and psychological factors that influenced Jared’s journey and discover how these insights can support your own path to better health.
Practical Strategies for Lasting Change: Benefit from Jared’s hard-earned wisdom, including actionable tips for achieving and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
Oklahoma’s Culinary Scene: Explore Oklahoma’s vibrant culinary landscape through Jared’s eyes as he showcases some of the nation’s best dining experiences. He provides reviews of some of the region’s most extraordinary restaurants and undiscovered gems.
Transform the way you think about food and health with A Feast for the Senses. Let Jared’s journey inspire your own as you embrace the universal language of food and embark on a path toward better well-being. The result is a charming, thought-provoking, and undeniably hunger-inducing book. It invites readers to not only savor the foods they love but also to cherish the moments of connection with family and friends that these culinary traditions inspire.
This book combines two seemingly unrelated approaches to achieving goals into a unified framework, showing you step by step how they can complement each other to create a method stronger than either one on its own.
The first approach, the agile method, originated in software development but has since been embraced by many industries. It is often paired with the scrum methodology, which serves as its operational framework. While agile and scrum come with formal rules, in practice, these are adapted to fit the unique needs of the team and project.
At its core, the agile/scrum approach emphasizes delivering workable iterations of a product. Rather than completing and delivering a finished product all at once, this method focuses on building a simple, functional version first. The customer tests and accepts this initial version, and through iterative improvements—often organized into “sprints”—additional features and refinements are added until the product fully meets the customer’s requirements. For instance, if a customer needs a website interface with product recommendations, the team might first deliver a basic version and then enhance it through successive iterations.
This approach offers two major advantages. First, it allows flexibility to adapt and reprioritize deliverables as the project progresses—this is the essence of agility. Second, delivering a simple, testable version early on helps identify and address bugs or defects that could otherwise become more challenging to fix later. The scrum framework keeps this iterative process efficient and organized, making the best use of the team’s skills while maximizing value for the customer.
The second approach, manifestation, focuses on the psychological aspect of goal achievement. Rooted in the law of attraction, manifestation emphasizes the importance of mindset and attitude in achieving success. Unlike the operational nature of agile and scrum, manifestation recognizes that human beings are driven by emotions as much as logic. A positive mindset can often be the determining factor in success, influencing how opportunities are perceived and pursued.
Congratulations to my valued book development clients Dr. Labib Ghulmiyyah and Dr. Caehla McGready on the summer 2024 publication of their groundbreaking self-help health book, A Toxin-Free Pregnancy. This powerful and insightful guide reveals how human history is deeply intertwined with the environment, and the impact of pollution on human health dates back to ancient times. Early settlements faced local contamination from waste, while the industrial revolutions brought large-scale pollution. A Toxin-Free Pregnancy explores this evolving relationship, tracing key historical moments like the rise of coal burning in the 11th century, advances in smelting during the 17th century, and the severe urban pollution crises of the early 20th century in cities such as London and New York.
As society advanced, pollution sources became more varied and harder to detect. The transition from visible smog to invisible chemical pollutants introduced new challenges. Industrial waste, colorless vapors, and synthetic products have contributed to widespread contamination. This has led to the emergence of “forever chemicals” and endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which pose significant health risks, particularly during pregnancy. These chemicals—including heavy metals like lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, and nickel—disrupt hormonal systems, affecting both expectant mothers and their developing babies.
In A Toxin Free Pregnancy, you’ll find an in-depth exploration of pollution’s historical context and its increasing impact on human health. The book provides clear, evidence-based insights into how toxins, especially EDCs, affect pregnancy and fetal development. It offers practical steps for reducing exposure to harmful chemicals in daily life, covering everything from household products to dietary choices. With actionable strategies, expectant mothers can make informed decisions and advocate for a healthier environment.
This book is a vital resource not just for pregnant women but for anyone concerned about the broader implications of environmental health. Combining historical context, scientific accuracy, and practical advice, A Toxin Free Pregnancy empowers readers to take charge of their well-being in a polluted world.
Let’s say a leader or founder has a vision for their company. The vision is clear and simple, and represents an improvement in the lives of the company’s stakeholders and customers. The leader is purpose-driven, meaning they know what to do to achieve their vision and aren’t distracted by wasted efforts that don’t produce results.
The next step is to recruit and enlist other people to embrace the same vision and pursue the same purpose. Only by scaling up and reaching more customers can any fledgling business hope to survive. This was the relentless focus of Jeff Bezos as he scaled up Amazon; during the first nine years, from 1994 to 2003, Amazon reported virtually no profits, and Wall Street analysts wondered when the company might go under. But Bezos—a former Wall Street fund manager—had long insisted that investing in future growth was more important than hitting quarterly earnings targets.
No matter your business strategy, every leader needs support from investors, partners, employees, and customers. None of these people are mind readers. None of them can envision what the leader envisions. It’s incumbent upon the leader do the hard work of educating and motivating his or her stakeholders.
There are many ways to communicate a vision to other people. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The wise leader will use them all.
1. Written Communications
These take the form of emails, letters, memos, and long-form documents, such as annual reports. In these forms, the leader or leadership group can elucidate their ideas and policies for wide distribution, as well as report on current or historical facts.
Written documents are effective as references. They present current facts and findings that stakeholders should know, such as the quarterly report that reveals the company’s most recent performance. They preserve and present official organizational information such as production systems, organization charts, financial data, incorporation papers, rules of employee conduct, and operations manuals. They may also preserve and present the company’s mission and vision statements, so that every stakeholder may be reminded of them.
One of the most famous and influential business documents is the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, written in February 2001 at a ski resort called The Lodge at Snowbird, in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Seventeen software developers gathered there to discuss their shared frustrations with traditional software development methodologies and to find common ground in more flexible, people-centered approaches to software creation. The outcome of this meeting was the Agile Manifesto, which emphasized values and principles such as customer collaboration, responding to change, and prioritizing individuals and interactions over processes and tools. This manifesto laid the foundation for the Agile movement in software development.
No one doubts the value of paper in today’s business, even if that paper is an electronic facsimile that never takes physical form until someone prints it.
While written communications and records are vital for long-term success, they’re terrible for another application, which is communication designed to motivate a human being to do something. This is because while human beings have an impressive capacity for rational analysis and decision-making, our emotions are the most powerful drivers of behavior. We humans do what we want to do, and find endless ways of avoiding what we don’t want to do. Written documents, especially those use in business, are cold and impersonal, and can affect emotions in unpredictable ways.
Consider the manager who sends out an email to their team members that says, “Due to the lack of sales in this quarter, every employee needs to put in ten percent more effort to increase productivity.” Such an email will be ridiculed and ignored by the rank and file. It will be seen as just another one of those stupid things that bosses say, and will negatively impact employee engagement.
Or this, the email blast that says, “Congratulations to the team for another great quarter! Keep up the good work!” It’s superficially nice, but vaguely insulting in its glib dismissiveness. After all, reporting a “great quarter” implies some material benefits, such as profits. To the employees, the natural question then becomes, “Who’s reaping the benefits?”
2. Group Lectures
In large companies, it’s common for managers to call employees into a big meeting where some sort of news is presented—the good news of a new product or initiative, or bad news such as a facility closing. When human beings hear information from the mouth of another human being, it tends to “stick.” People are willing to listen because speaking takes effort (unlike sending an email, which takes zero effort).
In such cases, success depends upon two factors: the importance of the message and the skill of the speaker. A boring speaker delivering a boring message to a group of restless employees or investors will not go well. But an electrifying speaker delivering an important message can have a real impact.
One of the great corporate communicators in recent history was Steve Jobs.
On January 9, 2007, Jobs delivered one of the most iconic presentations in corporate history at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
Jobs began his presentation with a sense of drama and anticipation, as he often did. He teased the audience by stating that Apple was going to introduce three revolutionary products that day: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. After repeating these three descriptions multiple times, he finally revealed that they were not three separate devices, but rather a single device that combined all these features: the iPhone.
The audience erupted into applause as Jobs displayed the iPhone on the screen behind him. He described the device as a combination of a phone, an iPod, and an internet communicator. Jobs emphasized that the iPhone was not just a phone with a touch screen, but a breakthrough in mobile communication, media consumption, and internet browsing. He highlighted its sleek design, large multi-touch screen, and revolutionary user interface, which replaced physical buttons with a touch-based interface.
Throughout the presentation, Jobs maintained his signature style: a combination of humor, clarity, and enthusiasm. His presentation skills, combined with the groundbreaking technology of the iPhone, captivated the audience and generated a sense of excitement and anticipation.
The iPhone went on sale later that year, in June 2007, and quickly became a massive commercial success, setting the stage for subsequent generations of smartphones that would continue to dominate the tech landscape.
Steve Jobs’s 2007 presentation is often remembered as a masterclass in product launches, demonstrating how a well-executed presentation, combined with groundbreaking technology, can leave a lasting impact on both an industry and the world.
Another Steve Jobs speech has become legendary. This was his June 12, 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, which has since become one of the most famous graduation addresses of all time. He delivered it after his cancer diagnosis and—for a time—successful treatment. In his speech, Jobs shared three personal stories that encapsulated his life lessons and offered wisdom to the graduating class. The speech was marked by its simplicity, authenticity, and profound insights into life, work, and the pursuit of passion. He concluded it with a powerful reminder: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”
Steve Jobs ended his speech with the words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” a motto he borrowed from the final issue of The Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture magazine he had admired in his youth. This phrase encapsulated the spirit of curiosity, innovation, and an unwavering desire to push the boundaries that characterized Jobs’s own life and career.
3. One-on-One
Without a doubt, the most powerful way to communicate an idea or feeling to someone is one-on-one, preferably face-to-face. Nothing better matches the connection you make with another human being than talking to them directly.
For entrepreneurs who are launching businesses, this comes naturally because the circle of stakeholders is very small and people are often working elbow-to-elbow in the office or shop. Pitches to investors are made in person so that each side can assess the other, and questions and answers can flow freely back and forth. But as the business grows and tasks are delegated to managers, it can be tempting for the boss to retreat into their office and maintain a “hands-off” policy.
This brings us to the practice of management by walking around.
In the mid-1960s, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the founders of Hewlett-Packard, pioneered an innovative management style that included “management by walking around,” or MBWA. This approach asserted that to ensure everyone from the bottom to the top of the company had the support to perform at their best, there was no substitute for personal involvement and one-on-one communication.
The concept involves managers leaving their offices and making unplanned, informal visits to employees in their work areas. This hands-on approach allows managers to engage directly with employees, understand ongoing operations, gather real-time feedback, and observe the work environment firsthand.
By moving around and being visible, managers make themselves more accessible to employees. This helps break down barriers, making it easier for staff to communicate concerns, share ideas, or ask questions. It encourages casual, spontaneous conversations, fostering a more open and communicative workplace culture. These interactions are often less intimidating than formal meetings, leading to more honest feedback and open dialogue.
Immediate presence allows managers to sense if the team member is losing sight of the vision of the enterprise. They can address problems as they arise, rather than waiting for issues to escalate or come up in scheduled meetings. This can lead to faster and more effective problem-solving.
Regular interaction with employees helps build trust and rapport. Managers who practice MBWA are often seen as more empathetic and supportive, leading to stronger employee engagement and satisfaction.
Of course, regularly walking around and engaging with employees takes time, which can be challenging for managers with already demanding schedules. It must be done with purpose. And if not done carefully, MBWA can be perceived as intrusive or as a form of micromanagement. It must be done consistently, as inconsistent application can lead to employees feeling neglected or create a sense of randomness in managerial attention.
The attitude of the manager should be, “I’m here to help you. Is there anything blocking you or preventing you from reaching your goal today?” The goal is to understand and gather insights, so the manager should focus on actively listening rather than dominating conversations. If issues or ideas are raised, ensure there is follow-through. The manager should acknowledge employee contributions and communicate any actions taken as a result.
Every leader should follow the Pareto Principle, also called the 80/20 rule, and spend 80 percent of their time listening to their team and 20 percent of their time talking. That’s really the essence of communication.
As Peter Nulty, the former editor of Fortune Magazine, said, “Of all the skills of leadership, listening is the most valuable—and one of the least understood. Most captains of industry listen only sometimes, and they remain ordinary leaders. But a few, the great ones, never stop listening. That’s how they get word before anyone else of unseen problems and opportunities.”
In politics, an axiom drilled into the head of every candidate for office is that when you’re in a debate or answering questions from the press, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Attributed to President Ronald Reagan, this means that explaining is essentially a defensive act done by a candidate who has been asked to clarify a position, previous statement, or misdeed. It’s a distraction from what the candidate wants to talk about, which is a broad-brush description of how they will make the lives of voters better. Politicians should be sketch artists, deftly describing a better future state without getting bogged down in details. This is why candidates who are “policy wonks” often do not get elected. They spend too much time explaining, which is an intellectual act, as opposed to inspiring, which is emotional.
Authors of Genre Fiction Love to Explain
In genre fiction, unlike politics, explaining is highly prized. We’ve all read thrillers, horror novels, and other genre novels in which the author devotes paragraphs and even pages to describing a character, place, or event in meticulous detail, while the plot is put on hold. This seems especially ironic because genre fiction tends to rely heavily on plot, so why would you deliberately make it grind to a halt so that you can take a detour into the past life of the character or describe the geography of a town?
When authors do this, they’re basically hijacking their own story to intercede and provide an “information dump” to the reader that, in all likelihood, the reader doesn’t need. Instead of limiting the information presented to the reader to that which the characters themselves experience, the author steps outside the story and becomes the omniscient source who knows everything. For some reason, information dumps are very common in genre fiction.
The most highly skilled genre writers, such as James Patterson, avoid this by deftly weaving background information into the forward-moving scene so that the action never stops. A phrase here, a phrase there, and soon the picture is complete.
A good way to describe this balancing act would be to compare a novel to a film. Generally, film directors stay behind the camera and record the actors going through their scenes. The result is that the audience knows only what the actors experience or tell each other in real time. A few films have used voiceovers in which a disembodied voice speaks directly to the audience and explains various aspects of the story. Classic films that use a voiceover include The Shawshank Redemption (Morgan Freeman doing the v/o job), Goodfellas (Ray Liotta), and Memento (Guy Pearce). But these are the exceptions, and the voiceovers are all characters in the movie, not an anonymous god-like narrator. And movie directors sometimes show us scenes that one group of characters cannot see or know, such as in the use of multiple points of view.
Literary Fiction = No Explaining, Please
One of the hallmarks of literary fiction is the discipline the author imposes upon themself to show the reader only what the characters are directly experiencing themselves. The author stands in the background, directing our attention to what they wants us to see. They are the unseen hand. They don’t stop the action to pull you aside and say, “Here’s a bunch of stuff I think you need to know.”
But there are limits to how literally you can take this approach. For example, in The Hours, a Pulitzer Prize winner, author Michael Cunningham begins the “Mrs. Dalloway” chapter thusly:
“There are still the flowers to buy. Clarissa feigns exasperation (though she loves doing errands like this), leaves Sally cleaning the bathroom, and runs out, promising to be back in half an hour.
“It is New York City. It is the end of the twentieth century.”
This is an information dump—deftly handled, but nonetheless it’s the author giving us information they thinks we need to know right off the bat. This includes the name of the protagonist: Clarissa, as the author tells us. In New York City. And the author also tosses in a tidbit about the protagonist, parenthetically: “…(though she loves doing errands like this)…” How do we know this except the author takes us aside and tells us?
In this case, Cunningham’s reasoning may be that because the book comprises the stories of three women from different eras, they must be clear from the first sentence whom they’re talking about.
In any case, the language counts. A skilled author like Michael Cunningham—and James Patterson, in his own way—knows how to deliver information in a way that’s effervescent, bright, delicious, and stimulating. Which brings us around to the real Golden Rule of writing: “Do whatever the hell you want—just don’t be boring.”
Every business or management book seeks to solve a problem for the entrepreneur, corporate leader, or manager who picks it up. The reader faces a challenge—say, stagnant revenues, lack of innovation, employee disengagement—and looks to the author for answers. The author is like an expert consultant, accessible through their printed book, ebook, or audiobook at a relatively cheap price.
Writing—or in my case, ghostwriting—a business book takes discipline and knowledge of the genre. Businesspeople are busy and they don’t have time to read at a leisurely pace, as if they were lounging on the beach on a hot summer day. To keep their attention, you need to be concise and pack every page with actionable information.
I said that every business book solves a problem. To be more precise, the overarching challenge will usually consist of many smaller problems combining together. One small problem can cascade into another, until all the ripples combine into one mighty tsunami.
To be effective, a non-fiction business book must follow my 1-2-3 Formula for Success. Here it is.
1. State the problem. This may seem obvious, but surprisingly, many ghostwriters and authors don’t understand the importance of clearly outlining the challenge to be overcome. The reader has to know they have chosen the right book! They want answers to their problem, not a bunch of platitudes that could apply to anyone.
This step has another important qualification to it: The statement of the problem needs to be very brief. It needs to be just detailed enough to make the reader interested, but not so long as to become boring. I’ve seen too many business books that drone on about the problem and every possible aspect of it, when the reader knows all too well what their difficulty is, and just wants answers! So keep this first section short and concise. Describing a problem is easy, but solving it is the hard part, which makes the solution valuable.
2. State your solution. You’re the expert! Reveal, in your own words, how the reader can solve their problem. It may be changing the company culture, offering better compensation, renewing the focus on excellence, spearheading product or service innovation, changing the attitude of the leaders—as the author, this is your job to define. It’s what the reader is paying for. Make your solution simple, clear, and actionable.
3. Offer proof in the form of third-party validation. In step #2, you were basically telling the reader what to do to solve their problem. But there’s no reason why the reader should believe you. To bolster your case, you need to cite a reliable, third-party source. It could be a true story from your own career—for example, this approach worked very well for Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, both ex-Navy SEALs, who wrote, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. The book was based on their shared experience patrolling the dangerous streets of Ramadi, Iraq, which they translated to business applications.
Lacking your own real-life stories, you can use your own proprietary research (your old college papers or grad school thesis can sometimes find new life!) or cite case studies of other companies. If you can’t find a juicy tidbit on your own, you should be able to find newspaper or journal articles that are reliable. No matter how you do it, you need to find stories, either on the free internet or through a subscription platform such as JSTOR or Oxford Academic, that will credibly validate your solution.
Those are the three steps: Describe the problem, offer the solution, and validate it with evidence. You do this over and over again throughout your book until the mosaic comes together into a clear picture. This is what Willink and Babin did. The overarching theme of the Extreme Ownership book was that you could boost organizational outcomes and meet goals by taking personal responsibility whenever possible. Each story addressed a facet of this problem and added a piece to the overall solution.
I’ve been ghostwriting and editing non-fiction books and novels since late 2007. As you’ll recall, that was the beginning of the Great Recession. It lingered for years, wreaking havoc on our national economy and way of life. The US gross domestic product fell by 4.3 percent, making it the deepest recession since World War II. The GDP decline wasn’t reversed until more than three years after the calamity first entered our lives.
The unemployment rate more than doubled, soaring to 10 percent in October 2009. Home prices plummeted roughly 30 percent and foreclosures were rampant. Retirement funds took a hit as the S&P 500 index fell by 57 percent between 2007 and 2009, and didn’t fully recover until 2013.
What a time to launch a business as a sole proprietor!
Luckily I found clients, and I ghostwrote a lot of books on one subject in particular: How to get a job. I wrote books on how to prepare for a job interview, how to dress for success, how to network. I wrote one about how to get a job teaching English in South Korea. There was another about how to learn public speaking.
Some career books taught readers how to ditch their horrible jobs and make money on the internet. I ghostwrote and edited books on how to retire and structure your financial portfolio for lasting income. More than one book revealed how to buy a sailboat and cruise around the Caribbean for nine months out of the year, taking refuge on land only during hurricane season.
There was another self-help category that (sadly) was very big: How to avoid foreclosure on your house, and how to take advantage of Federal programs to ease the process. Millions of homes were under foreclosure and real estate agents wanted to write these books to enhance their professional standing. On the flip side, I wrote books about how to invest in distressed and foreclosed properties. One person’s disaster could become an opportunity for someone else.
The Shift to Success Books
As the economy improved and the unemployment rate fell to historic lows by 2019, I was no longer asked to write books on how to get a job or how to avoid foreclosure. The market for such books had dried up because everyone had a job and the housing market had recovered. The market shifted to books about leadership and how to manage employees. I wrote books about scrum and lean manufacturing, and employee harassment, and how to communicate effectively. A consistent topic has been innovation, and how to make it a vital part of your company’s everyday activities.
This trend has continued to this day. The focus is on how to be happy at work, how to lower your stress on the job, and how to climb the ladder of success. How to become influential, both in your industry and in your community, is another popular subject.
Medical and health books are consistently in demand. I recently ghostwrote a book that shows you how to start a program of intermittent fasting. I’ve been asked to write books about the Paleo diet and other diets that help you become, and stay, more healthy. Chronic pain and lifestyle diseases are big self-help topics, as well as stress and depression.
A new subject is artificial intelligence. In the past two years I’ve ghostwritten several books about the use of AI in the healthcare industry and for the delivery of government services. These books are challenging because they can quickly become dated!
About ten percent of my business is fiction ghostwriting. More people than you might imagine want to put their name on a novel and are happy to pay me to write it for them. They’re mostly thrillers, but one of my favorite projects was ghostwriting a 90,000-word historical novel that traced three generations of a family during the 20th century, from Paris to Boston to Los Angeles.
Artificial Intelligence Enters the Scene
I’m not feeling any competition from ChatGPT and other tools that allow people to quickly and cheaply write something they can call a “book.” I see many job listings on sites like Upwork placed by people who want a 30,000-word self-help book written for $500 or less. My instinct tells me that these people wouldn’t have been my clients anyway, and that they represent an expansion of the marketplace into new people who see a new opportunity. The serious clients who would hire me to write their manuscript are still there, and they’re not interested in putting their name on a generic, boring book that no one will read. And they also know a secret: Once you put a book up for sale on Amazon, and it has an ISBN number, it never goes away. So if you publish a cheap and quick Chat GPT book just to have your name out there, you’re going to be stuck with it forever, even after you come to your senses and take it off the market. It will be marked “out of print,” but it will linger there like an unwelcome houseguest.
Publishing on Amazon is forever. When you take your shot, make sure it’s your very best!
While I write fiction under my own name, I make a living as a ghostwriter. I get paid to write books for my valued clients. All kinds of books: novels and non-fiction topics including self-help, business, healthcare, nutrition, and public policy. I write and my clients send me money. In the past twenty years I’ve written at least one hundred books. I don’t know for certain because I’ve lost count, but five per year is a ballpark estimate.
As for the publication success of the manuscripts I deliver, I don’t know what happens to most of them. Every once in a while I search for my literary children on Amazon. Some never appear. Others hit best-seller status and get hundreds of five-star reviews. It makes no difference to me.
I’m always interested in discussions among my fellow scribes about writer’s block. This malady seems very common, and wise people write endless essays and advice columns offering tips and suggestions on how to overcome this terrible affliction. I won’t go into all the various tricks and techniques. Suffice to say there are a lot of them!
Erica Jong offered some pretty good insight into writer’s block: “All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.”
It’s interesting that when you’re a mercenary like me, you know you will have at least one keenly interested reader: your client. When your client is happy with your writing, they’ll keep paying you. If they get bored or disillusioned, or you fail to deliver, they’ll stop paying you. It’s a very simple transaction.
The books I write for my clients do not bear my name. I’m as anonymous as the guy who made the paper on which the book is printed. In a peculiar way, this eliminates the psychological problem highlighted by Erica Jong. This anonymity, combined with the pressure to deliver and get paid, wipes away the fear of being judged by the marketplace. I’m insulated from its ego-damaging effects.
Writer’s Block Is Not an Option
To hit my income goal, I need to write 2,500 words per day. If I don’t deliver, I don’t get paid. This is a powerful incentive to get the job done. For me, writer’s block is an unimaginable luxury. I have a blank page in front of me and I need to fill it with professional quality, nutritious writing. I get paid to solve creative problems for my client, not surrender to them.
In a sense, I’m at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from Erica Jong. She advises to write for no one, but do it solely for the pleasure of writing. Write because it’s fun and keeps you busy. This will give you psychological freedom, and she’s right about that. At the other end of the spectrum, you can write as if failure to deliver means you will not eat or pay your rent. That has a powerful clarifying effect and gives you another form of freedom, which can lead you to write more books than you ever imagined you could.
Of course, the big caveat is that my client chooses the subject. If my client wants a self-help book about eating disorders, that’s what I write. If my client wants a thriller about the president of the United States getting AIDS while in office, that’s what I write. Right now, I’m writing two books. One is all about human skin and the other is a legal/medical novel about an alcoholic lawyer. I work on one and then the other, back and forth. Writer’s block is not an option!
Unless you’re getting paid to write, my best advice is to write whatever the hell you want. Just have fun. When you’re bored, stop. Put your writing away. If you want to try and get your story or novel published, let it sit for a few months. Don’t think about it. Then pull it out and look at it.
You might just say, “Hey—this is pretty good! But I have some ideas to make it better…”
As a professional ghostwriter of self-help and business books, an important part of my job is to help my valued client identify the problem they intend to solve for their reader, as well as its solution. The problem and solution need to be very specific. This is the first rule of self-help books.
The second rule is to define the pool of potential readers (the market). It’s possible that the problem may be shared by millions of people, such as how to lose unwanted pounds and feel healthy, or how to make your business more profitable by hiring the right people and training them properly. On the other hand, the problem may be shared by a small number of people, such as how to prevent tennis elbow or how to buy commercial real estate in New York.
Many authors try to cast their net too wide. They think that by addressing multiple problems or vague problems, they will attract more readers and sell more books. In fact, the opposite is usually true. A potential reader is going to pay money and invest many hours of their time reading a book only if it addresses their specific problem or aspiration. Books are like conversations. If you talk to your friend about a problem they’re having and you wander off-topic, or even worse, start talking about your own problem, their eyes will glaze over and they’ll soon excuse themselves.
For example, I regularly have business clients who want to write a book about, say, how to hire the best person for a job, and how to keep them happy so they’ll be engaged and stick around longer, rather than seeking a better opportunity elsewhere. Employee turnover is a significant problem these days, especially in a strong economy with low unemployment, giving labor more leverage over management. So far, so good.
But some authors suggest that their book should be written for both the manager and the employee, and that somehow it should appeal to both the person being paid and the person signing the paycheck. The reasoning is that the potential market will include more people and therefore they could sell more books.
I must gently tell them that this is impossible. No employee wants to read a book written for managers, and no manager wants to read a book that provides career advice to employees. You must choose one or the other. It’s far better to be the expert in a small market than to be a jack-of-all-trades in a big market and end up with nothing.
The solution could be to write two books—one aimed employees and one aimed at managers.
The Exceptions Prove the Rule
Of course there are exceptions—those magical books that somehow get a big, diverse audience to focus on a common problem. A good example is The Goal, a business novel centered on management principles. It was co-authored by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who is known for his Theory of Constraints, and Jeff Cox, a writer with several management-focused novels to his credit. First released in 1984, it presents a practical case study on operations management, particularly focusing on identifying and resolving bottlenecks using the Theory of Constraints. To date it has sold an estimated five million copies.
In terms of approach, The Goal unfolds as a fictional narrative, a style common to a few blockbuster business books. The protagonist, Alex Rogo, oversees a struggling manufacturing plant. Bill Peach, a senior executive, challenges Alex to transform his failing plant into a profitable and reliable operation within three months. Assisting Alex is Jonah, a physicist believed to be a stand-in for Goldratt, who guides him through various fundamental business concepts via phone calls and brief meetings. Alongside the business challenges, the novel also explores Alex’s personal life, particularly his marital issues.
In 2011, Time magazine recognized The Goal as one of the top 25 most pivotal business management books.
Books like The Goal, which take a more literary or artistic approach to problem-solving, are risky because a publisher cannot predict how many copies might be sold. Such a book could be a total flop, or it could—in very rare cases—be a big success. In fact, the publisher of The Goal is The North River Press, tiny company that appears to be owned by none other than Eliyahu M. Goldratt. My guess is that Mr. Goldratt couldn’t get a traditional publishing deal because editors thought his book wouldn’t sell, so he published it himself. His gamble paid off.
As I tell my valued clients, when you self-publish your book, you can break all the rules and do whatever you want!
If you read “how to” guides on writing novels, they all agree that your story should open with some sort of action that represents a change for your protagonist. The scene should be dynamic, not static. There should be a present state moving into a different future state. Depending on the genre of your novel, your dynamic scene can be any scale, from small and subtle to big and vivid. To use the language of film, you can start with a tight, intimate shot and gradually pull back to show the larger scene, or you can start big, with a wide shot full of action, and move in closer. Either way can work, as long as there is motion. While there must be dynamism, it can be as gentle as a summer breeze or as violent as a hurricane.
The Small Opening
I’m a big fan of Ian Fleming and the James Bond books. If you haven’t read them, it might surprise you to know that while the Bond movies all start with maximum dynamism, in the form of a violent fight and chase scene, all of the original novels begin very quietly, with a subtle close-up shot. For example, the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, begins with James Bond in the casino at three in the morning. He’s burned out, so he quits playing roulette and strolls over to watch his nemesis, Le Chiffre, play baccarat. After a few minutes he goes up to his room to go to sleep. After this very understated dynamic scene, Fleming unloads a few pages of description and backstory before continuing the slowly unfolding action.
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, also starts out small, with Katniss Everdeen waking up in the morning and thinking about her sister, Prim. But Collins drops a hint of foreboding when she casually mentions that today is the “day of reaping.” In any case, Katniss then goes out hunting in the woods, a routine activity.
Literary novels tend to open with scenes that are deliberately innocuous, mundane, and almost boring. Here’s the second paragraph from Dear Edward: A Novel, by Ann Napolitano. We’re at Newark Airport: “When the Adler family reaches the front of the line, they load their computers and shoes into trays. Bruce Adler removes his belt, rolls it up, and slots it neatly beside his brown loafers in a grey plastic bin. His sons are messier, throwing sneakers on top of laptops and wallets. Laces hang over the side of their shared tray, and Bruce can’t stop himself from tucking the loose strands inside.” It’s dynamic—the family is on the move—but gentle, easygoing. No murders here!
The Big Opening
According to the contemporary formula, thrillers must leap from the gate, fast and furious. Dan Brown’s best seller The Da Vinci Code opens big, with a prologue designed to snap the reader to attention: “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Carravagio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-three-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas….” In vivid (many would say cartoonish) prose, the bad guy shoots him. But there is a deep mystery to solve!
One more big opening: The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum. The story begins thusly: “The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind.” Wow! And on the deck of this vessel struggling to stay afloat under the weight of its adjectives, two men are engaged in mortal combat. Now that’s dramatic and, as they say in the thriller business, “pulse-pounding.”
The Exceptions
Of course, you can’t have rules without also celebrating the successful exceptions. Consider Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This iconic novel that launched a literary empire begins with a description: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense….”
Here, author J.K. Rowling has decided to introduce the setting before getting into the action. Risky, but it worked.
So what’s the answer? It comes in two parts. 1) No matter what you do, don’t be boring. 2) Deliver what you promise. Keep your reader happy and engaged!
