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Best Selling Business and Leadership Books Often Tell Stories

Posted on December 10, 2023 by Thomas Hauck

 If you’re thinking about writing a business book (or hiring a ghostwriter to do it for you), you might assume that you want either expository writing or persuasive writing. Expository writing is when you explain a concept or share information, such as, “There are many types of funding available, including angel investors.” Persuasive writing is when you try to convince the reader of your point of view using facts, such as, “Surveys show that consumers strongly prefer products with a free return policy, which you should strive to institute in your marketing plan.” You then back up your claim with a real-life example, such as a verified success story from a well-known entrepreneur.

These are both valid and useful approaches. But as a professional ghostwriter of many best-selling business books, I can tell you that some of the most successful management and leadership books are built around narrative and creative writing, particularly in the form of fictional stories. Fables, if you will. This is because for thousands of years, stories have been recognized as the most effective way to teach somebody something. Think about Aesop’s fables, or stories from the Bible that provide moral instruction. One of today’s most successful business books is Who Moved My Cheese?, a short fable about the way people react to major change in their work and life, featuring two mice and two “Littlepeople” as they hunt for their missing cheese.

If you’re going to write a fable that teaches a lesson, you can populate your story with either humans or animals – or even a combination of both.

Human Stories

I’ve ghostwritten many business and leadership books that feature fictional human characters confronted with a challenge, and which explore how they respond and rise above it (or not). The story might revolve around a manager who gets promoted to a leadership position, and he or she feels they’re not prepared to take on the responsibility. Other stories involve an office facing a crisis, such as a sales slump or a threat from a competitor, and how different people in the office respond. One manager wants to try to increase sales, another advocates for a new product, a third says they should sell out to the competitor, and so on. Having a cast of conflicting characters allows the author to work through various scenarios and solutions in an entertaining way.

The very first fictional business book I ever helped develop was in 2009, and it was called Dangerous Law Practice Myths, Lies, and Stupidity, by Judd Kessler and others. Mr. Kessler was in the business of selling law firm software, and the book took the form of a series of short stories revealing common law practice mistakes in their operations and how the proper software would prevent them. It’s a fun and easy-to-read book, and after nearly 15 years it’s ranked #75 in Amazon’s Law Office Marketing & Advertising (Books) category. Not bad!

Animal Stories

If you take your crisis or conflict out of the human realm and make your characters animals, you can often get more freedom to explore your topic. A terrific example of this is The Path to Leadership by my valued client, Ronnell Crittendon. Here, a young lion named Maximus is disappointed when the Council passes over him and names another lion to lead the pride. Maximus goes away to sulk, and meets Busy Beetle, who has no time for Maximus’s whining. Busy Beetle urges Maximus to embark on a journey to see Ancient Raven, and along the way Maximus learns many valuable lessons about life and leadership.

Another highly recommended animal leadership book is simply called The Bee Book: A Tale of Leadership and Change. My clients Paul Rigby and Craig Smith have turned their little fable into a best-selling book and a global business enterprise. Here, a hive of bees is faced with a catastrophic change in their environment: Farmer John has plowed under the vast field of wildflowers on which the hive depends. Nothing but barren dirt remains. If they are to survive, the bees in the Sola hive need to take quick action. But are they capable of adapting to the challenges presented, or will they be stuck in a world of paralysis and complacency? The main characters – Buzz, Stripes, Hover, Greybee, Queen Luna, Queen Sola, Mr. Wingit, Zippy, and others – represent typical employees in any organization, with a variety of attitudes and responses to the challenge. Like Who Moved My Cheese?, The Bee Book is short – you can read it cover to cover in about an hour – and it’s written in language that anyone can understand. But its simple lessons lend themselves well to group discussions and to learning.

There are many more! And by the way (not to sound snarky), but you cannot get a fictional business book – especially one featuring animals – from Chat GPT or any other AI algorithm. A fable is just not in their training to produce. If you want to use AI to write boring blog posts and other internet SEO filler, that’s fine – but authors who want to make a difference and impact their readers always hire a professional ghostwriter or editor.

Thomas Hauck, ghostwriter and author, reads The Bee Book.
Posted in Advice on Hiring a Ghostwriter, Books Developed by Thomas Hauck, Business Books, Essays | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

If Paperback Books Didn’t Exist, We’d Invent Them

Posted on December 6, 2023 by Thomas Hauck

On November 19, 2007, Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, personally introduced the Kindle e-reader at a gala event in New York City. Despite its bulky appearance, the device was heralded as a disruptive technology that could wipe out the need for old-fashioned printed books, both hardcover and paperback. It came with 90,000 titles already available, and the initial inventory sold out in six hours. A few years later, Amazon launched Android and iOS versions.

Today, Amazon has sold about 500 million Kindle devices and has a reported 3 million Kindle Unlimited subscribers. In 2020, consumers spent over $400 million on e-books. By any measure, the Kindle and other e-readers have become ubiquitous in the marketplace and American homes and offices.

Readers Are Buying More Print Books Than Ever

You might think that the Kindle would have wiped out physical printed books, the way the word processor wiped out the typewriter. But this has not happened. According to Statista, sales of print books have held steady and have even grown in the past decade. In 2008 they reached a peak of 778 million units, and then (predictably, perhaps) declined until 2012, reaching a low point of 591 units. But then something interesting happened. Like vinyl records, print books came surging back, and in 2021 hit a peak of 843.1 million units sold! The dominant form was the good ol’ trade paperback, which accounted for 60 percent of all sales.

Take a Walk on the Beach and You’ll See Why

I’m fortunate to live in Gloucester, Massachusetts, within walking distance of several beautiful public beaches. This summer, during my usual ramblings, I saw many people, whether lying on their towels or sitting on folding chairs, reading books. These were invariably printed paperback or even hardcover books, both fiction and non-fiction. Of course, this made perfect sense. You can throw a paperback book in your beach bag without worrying about whether it’s sufficiently charged. You can read it in the brightest sunlight. You can toss it on the sand and then just shake it off. If it gets wet, just let it dry in the sun.

Printed books have other advantages. You can flip through the pages easily. You can write in it. You can take a paperback and fold it to cram it in your pocket or bag. Back in 1939, the aptly named Pocket Books – now owned by Simon & Schuster – produced the first mass-market, pocket-sized paperback books in the United States, and revolutionized the publishing industry.

And there’s one other important feature of printed books: They feel good in your hand. They deliver a pleasurable visual and tactile experience. They have heft and a physical presence that seems to connect you with the story.

So if we didn’t have the humble but noble paperback book – the bringer of dreams and stories, the door to new worlds and magical experiences – we’d surely have to invent it!

Thomas Hauck, avid reader of paperback books
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Great Books Allow – And Even Invite – Repeated Readings

Posted on November 28, 2023 by Thomas Hauck

When I read a book, and I like it, I’m inclined to read it again. And again. Just like you’d listen to a favorite record over and over, until the grooves are so worn you have to buy another copy.

I hear about people who say they read a book a day, or every two days, and their library shelf groans under the weight of all the tomes they’ve collected. Perhaps I’m not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but I just don’t see how anyone could truly understand and absorb any good book in just one reading.

My all-time favorite book? It’s Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. It’s about 75,000 words and takes me about four hours to read. Regarding this book, I’ve developed an odd habit: whenever I fly in an airplane, which is only about twice a year, I bring my tattered Dover Thrift Edition (1994) along and, once airborne, open it to any random page and start reading. Over the years, I’ve probably read it cover to cover fifty times. Why? To me, aside from The Odyssey, it’s the greatest thriller ever written, and it tackles the most profound themes of human existence. It makes me think about parents and children, about God’s obligation to his human creations (personally, I’m thoroughly agnostic), and about revenge and justice. A great book hits you on two levels: It’s a pleasure to read and it gives you something to think about.

Other perennial favorites include the aforementioned The Odyssey (especially the final scenes after Odysseus returns to Ithaca and plots his conquest of the Suitors), an edition of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights by Geraldine McCaughrean, Cannery Row and The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway), Resurrection (Tolstoy), The Big Sleep (Chandler), and a couple of Stephen King novels.

I’ve re-read The Goldfinch (Tartt), Gone Girl (Flynn), The Tiger’s Wife (Obreht), Underground Railroad (Whitehead). Right now I’m reading The Hours by Michael Cunningham. There are many more, but you get the idea. These books stand up to repeated readings and even offer more each time. And perhaps most importantly, they do not yield all their secrets with the first reading – or even the fifth.

Thomas Hauck – Book Reader
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In Defense of “Take Action” Instead of “Act”

Posted on November 26, 2023 by Thomas Hauck

AI-powered grammar checkers and proofreaders such as Grammarly have become ubiquitous. To be fair, for the routine review of typos, spelling errors, and other obvious writing defects, these tools can be useful.

Once in a while, a valued client will take a piece I’ve edited or ghostwritten and run it through Grammarly. This is to check up on my work, I suppose. Because I have confidence in the quality of the manuscripts I deliver, I have no problem with that. But there’s one annoying change that Grammarly always insists upon. If you say something like, “When your plan is complete, the next step is to take action,” the algorithm will always demand that you change the idiom “take action” to “act.” It wants you to say, “When your plan is complete, the next step is to act.” There are no exceptions.

I don’t like this. First of all, “act” sounds inelegant and abrupt. As the final word in the sentence, it feels incomplete, like someone snipped away the last phrase. But more importantly, the verb “to act” has many meanings. One of the most widely used is “to perform dramatically,” such as, “I want to act in the play, and I hope the director will cast me as Hamlet.” It also means to behave in a certain way, often with a lack of sincerity, such as, “He always seems to act friendly, even when he’s spreading the most vile gossip.” And there’s the usage currently in vogue with harried parents: “When Jimmy eats too much sugary food, he starts to act out.”

That Split-Second Pause of Confusion

Personally, I believe the author should strive to make the reading experience as seamless and smooth as possible. (Not all authors share this view! Many of the more literary sort delight in making the reader navigate an obstacle course of dense and tangled syntax.) When I read something like, “When the situation becomes dangerous, it’s time to act,” I involuntarily stop and scratch my head. It’s time to act? What exactly does that mean?

That split-second pause of confusion is not what you want. It puts the brakes on your reader and introduces tension.

I believe that the idiom “take action” is quite useful. It has only one meaning: It’s time to do something, and to go from being passive to being kinetic. It means to change the current situation and get a different result. I’ll admit the verb “take” is imprecise. Maybe it should be more exact, such as “initiate action.” But that sounds too formal, like military jargon. And that’s what an idiom is: It may not stand up to close scrutiny, but it works because we all agree it works.

Somewhere, at some time, the person teaching the Grammarly AI algorithm instructed it to reject “to take action” and replace it with “to act.” Sorry – this human editor begs to differ, and when I see such a change, I take action!

Thomas Hauck, best-selling ghostwriter and book developer
Thomas Hauck, professional book developer and ghostwriter – and human editor.
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The Significant Limitations of Chat GPT

Posted on November 14, 2023 by Thomas Hauck

Today, I signed up with Chat GPT at OpenAI.com. I wanted to learn about it and, if possible, use it to enhance my own work.

I quickly discovered two things.

  1. Its ability to write with flawless grammar is astonishing. Every sentence is correctly composed. A line editor or proofreader would find very little work with a Chat GPT document. You can definitely call its style pedantic. Boring, even.
  2. Its research skills are actually very limited. I gave it several prompts of subjects that I know quite a lot about, and its responses were thin and repetitive. It says in 500 words what a good human author could say in 100 words. If I hired Chat GPT as a research assistant, I’d fire them very quickly!

In one prompt, I asked Chat GPT to write about a very specific subject – the use of lithium to treat Alzheimer’s disease. I asked it to provide citations of its sources. This is what Chat GPT wrote to me:

“I don’t have direct access to external sources or the internet to provide citations or specific sources. The information provided in my responses is based on my training data, which includes a wide range of general knowledge up until January 2022. If you have specific questions or need information on a particular topic, please feel free to ask, and I’ll do my best to provide accurate and informative responses based on the knowledge within my training data.”

Chat GPT Can’t Go Online. Its Knowledge Ends at January 2022!

Chat GPT doesn’t have access to the internet! I thought this was astonishing. I assumed that was the whole point of Chat GPT – it would go online and ferret out information about your subject, like a Google search would. Instead, it has only its training data, which ends at January 2022. So for fun, I asked it about the 2023 Super Bowl game. It replied:

“I’m sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or events that occurred after my last knowledge update in January 2022. Therefore, I cannot provide specific details about the 2023 Super Bowl game or any events that have taken place since then.

“To learn about the 2023 Super Bowl game, I recommend checking the latest news sources, sports websites, or official NFL sources for up-to-date information on the teams, players, and game outcomes. You can also consider searching for articles, videos, or social media updates to get the most recent and accurate information about the game and any related events.”

Pretty weak sauce, I’d say! Chat GPT is looking more like Rip Van Winkle. If you want to take a walk down memory lane, it might be helpful; but as for current events and knowledge? Fuggetaboutit!

Thomas Hauck, ghostwriter
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The Secret to a Great Opening Sentence in Your Novel

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Thomas Hauck

“Call me Ishmael.”

Thus reads one of the most famous – and, by writers of fiction, envied – opening sentences in Western literature. It launches Moby-Dick, and those three words are memorable because they provide information about the protagonist. The reader learns that Ishmael is apparently not his real name, and the would-be sailor identifies with the biblical character who is perhaps best known for wandering in the desert and nearly dying of thirst before his miraculous rescue. Herman Melville’s protagonist similarly wanders the seas, and as we learn at the end of the book, his miraculous rescue comes after his ship is sunk by the angry whale. If you’re familiar with Bible characters (as most of Melville’s readers in 1851 would have been), the author is giving a hint of the ending of the book.

Grab That Reader Before She Gets Away!

It’s an axiom that if you’re a relatively unknown author, readers – particularly literary agents, who guard the gates to the big publishers – want to get “hooked” on your book on the first page. No, make that the first paragraph! Busy editors and agents have little time, and if they read the opening lines of your manuscript and aren’t captivated, your query will be declined as fast as the agent can hit “delete” on her keyboard.

Of course, if you’re a well-established, big-name author, the agent or editor will assume literary competence; and if you choose to start your book slowly, he or she will be inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and keep reading.

This puts tremendous pressure on the non-famous writer to come up with a brilliant opening line that will convince the reader to keep reading what is most assuredly an unknown story. Reading takes time, and time is money. Editors, agents, and ordinary readers must decide quickly whether they’re ready to invest their precious time in reading your book.

The Secret: A Very Small Story

Here’s the opening sentence of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: “When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.” It tells a little story, and it’s very small in scope – just the protagonist waking up to find the person who normally sleeps in the bed is not there.

Here’s Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck: “Lee Chong’s grocery, while not a model of neatness, was a miracle of supply.” Lee Chong’s sounds like an interesting place!

The Outsider, by Albert Camus: “Mother died today.” Blunt and to the point, but emotionally detached. Why?

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith: “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” Curious behavior!

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by JK Rowling: “Mr and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you.” Why shouldn’t they be “normal”?

Of course, the longer your opening sentence, the more information you can provide. Here’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou: “When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed-‘To Whom It May Concern’-that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson, Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.” Two children, not even of school age, sent across the country without an adult?

Remember that readers have been primed by the book’s cover and reviews to know what to expect. For example, kids who bought Harry Potter already knew the book was about a “not normal” boy wizard, so the question of being “normal” was important. Agents know nothing except your short query or pitch. Therefore, they’re less inclined to extend credit to you.

In old-fashioned storytelling, you hit the ground running, so to speak, such as the opening line of The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept, I dreamed a dream.”

And here’s the first sentence of A Night to Remember by Walter Lord: “High in the crow’s nest of the New White Star Liner Titanic, Lookout Frederick Fleet peered into a dazzling night.” To use the language of filmmaking, the author (or director) opens with a close-up shot of someone doing some small thing, and then the camera pulls back to provide the establishing shot and the larger context.

This is much easier to do than trying to overwhelm the reader with your grand vision! With your opening sentence and paragraph, your goal is to show the reader somebody (human or animal) doing some small or easily understood thing, and then gradually pulling the camera back to show more.

In my next installment, I’ll discuss what follows the opening sentence – the first few pages of your book.

Thomas Hauck, best-selling ghostwriter and book developer
Thomas Hauck, professional book developer and ghostwriter
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How Long Should My Non-Fiction Book Be? Pages? Word Count?

Posted on November 6, 2023 by Thomas Hauck

One of the most frequent questions my valued clients ask me is how long their book should be. This is a complex question, and the answer depends on many factors. The bottom line is this: It should be exactly as long as it takes to tell your story. Not one word more or less.

Okay, that was the easy answer. Here are the variables that will influence your decision. For our purposes, we’rev talking only about non-fiction self-help books. Novels are a different story.

Word Count

In terms of readinng and writing a book, the first consideration is the word count. This is exactly what it sounds like: the number of words in your book. This determines how long it will take someone to read your book. Assuming the complexity is the same in both books, it will take you twice as long to read a 60,000-word book as a 30,000-word book. For a busy executive, that could make a big difference.

People read at vastly different speeds, but research suggests that 250 words per minute, or 15,000 words per hour, is about average. That would be two hours for a 30,000-word book, and four hours for 60,000 words.

Many business books are what I call “airplane books.” You get on the flight, settle in, read the book, and by the time you land you’re done. Unless you’re flying from New York to Los Angeles, this means you’re not going to be reading a 120,000-word Tolstoy novel in one sitting. Most business books come in at 30,000 to 60,000 words. Some are longer, some shorter.

Page Count

In a typical paperback book, you’re going to get 30 lines per page of 10 words each = 300 words per page. So 60,000 words would be about 200 pages. But you can manipulate this up or down by the size of the margins, the font, the line spacing, and if you leave blank pages between chapters. The thickness of a physical book is also influenced by the choice of paper. Cream paper, which looks and feels nicer, is thicker than white paper.

This is why in terms of the price for ghostwriting or editing, the page count is totally irrelevant. Any editor or ghostwriter who charges by the page is either a fool or a charlatan, because the number of words on a page can vary dramatically.

In ebooks, there are no pages, just a long scroll. No page count.

Your Budget

If you write your book yourself, it costs you nothing but time, and you can make your book as long or short as you wish.

If you hire a ghostwriter and/or editor, then the more words you want, the higher the price. It’s all about the word count! Never pay a ghostwriter or editor by the page!

Set your budget for your project. You’ll need a ghostwriter, a book designer for the interior (this could be very simple), a cover (must be very good – not cheap looking!), and a marketing budget. Beware of “package deals” from hybrid or subsidy book publishers. They are in business to make a profit and you’re going to be paying for managers who don’t actually do anything to add value to your book. If you can, act as your own project manager. You’ll have more control and you’ll save money, and you’ll also keep every penny you earn from book sales. (Hybrid publishers take a big chunk of your gross sales income and give you the scraps).

How Much You Want to Say

Here’s one more factor. In a self-help book, the goal is often to encourage the reader to contact you for more information or to engage your professional services. The book is like an advertisement for your business. That’s why it’s often not wise to tell your reader everything. Tell them just enough to deliver a solid value, but leave the door open for more. Deliver useful information while not being encyclopedic.

The bottom line is this: Your book must deliver value, not be boring, and be neither too long nor too brief. If you need help, consult a professional ghostwriter, book developer, or editor, and make a plan. Happy writing!

Thomas Hauck, best-selling ghostwriter and book developer
Thomas Hauck, professional book developer and ghostwriter
Posted in Advice on Hiring a Ghostwriter, Business Books, Grammar and Writing Skills, Self-Help Books | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

ChatGPT Hit With Plagiarism Lawsuits

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Thomas Hauck

Are you considering using an AI algorithm such as ChatGPT to write a book? If so, there are many reasons not to do this, and to instead hire a professional ghostwriter.

One key reason is that the quality of your book will be poor. As the product of an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, your book will be nothing more than a rehash of the most common junk on the internet, and AI algorithms are notorious for being unable to discern between fact and fiction. There’s even a name for this terrible weakness: “AI hallucination” is a phenomenon wherein a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool perceives patterns or objects that are inaccurate, creating outputs that are nonsensical or false.

Do you want your digital ghostwriter to be susceptible to AI hallucination? Certainly not!

Lawsuits Against ChatGPT Are Mounting

If that weren’t enough, human authors are starting to take legal action, charging OpenAI with plagiarism. George R. R. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones book series, is among a group of 17 authors who have charged ChatGPT, a product of OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed company, with using their copyrighted novels to train the popular AI chatbot.

The collective lawsuit was filed by the Authors Guild, representing 17 authors, including Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, and George R. R. Martin. In the lawsuit, the authors allege that OpenAI copied their works “wholesale, unauthorized, or without compensation” and used them to train ChatGPT. The company allegedly trained ChatGPT on a dataset that included text illicitly uploaded from authors’ books to the internet, rather than using publicly available data, and that the authors are owed a licensing fee.

The lawsuit charges that the use of AI chatbots allows companies to create materials that “represent, mimic, summarize, or otherwise communicate” the works of authors. “These algorithms lie at the heart of Defendants’ massive commercial enterprise, and at the center of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale.”

The case has garnered significant attention within the tech industry and intellectual property circles, as it raises fundamental questions about the ownership and originality of AI-generated content. ChatGPT harms the market for authors, say the plaintiffs, as it can mimic, summarize, or paraphrase their work, which amounts to copyright infringement.

The complete list of plaintiffs includes David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor Lavalle, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail.

The New York Times Vs. OpenAI

The New York Times has taken action. In August 2023, the NYT blocked OpenAI’s web crawler, meaning that OpenAI can’t use content from the publication to train its AI models. That means that if you use OpenAI to research or write your book, it cannot access the pre-eminent American newspaper.

NPR has reported The New York Times may be considering legal action against OpenAI for intellectual property rights violations. If it did sue, the NYT would be joining others including Matthew Butterick, a programmer and lawyer who alleges the company’s data scraping practices amount to software piracy, as well as Sarah Silverman and two other authors who sued the company in July 2023 over its use of Books3, a dataset used to train ChatGPT that may have thousands of copyrighted works.

So if you’re considering using OpenAI to ghostwrite your novel or non-fiction book, you might want to think about the possible legal ramifications.

Thomas Hauck, professional book developer, ghostwriter, and editor
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Top 5 Reasons Why Thomas Hauck Should Be Your Ghostwriter

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Thomas Hauck

Okay, it’s time for some shameless self-promotion! There are many reasons why you should hire a professional ghostwriter for your novel or non-fiction book, and many more reasons why that person should be me. But after much thought, to fit them into one post, I’ve narrowed down the reasons to the top five.

1. My Expertise

The job of the book developer or ghostwriter is multi-faceted. There are, of course, the mechanical skills of writing, including sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, and all the rest. But every book is based on an idea or a series of ideas. At Thomas Hauck Book Development, when you’re my valued client, I work closely with you to ensure that your ideas are conveyed to your readers in a way that’s professional, clear, easy to grasp, and entertaining. I never use any AI software such as ChatGPT because they only make your book generic, boring, and lacking in value to the reader. Also, there are an increasing number of plagiarism cases being filed against AI writing platforms – and you don’t want to get mixed up in those!

2. Depth of Experience

I started my writing career at my high school newspaper, and I’ve been a writer ever since. In 2007, I became a full-time, professional book writer, developer, and editor. It’s all I do, every day. I’ve ghostwritten, edited, or developed nearly 500 books in all genres, both fiction and non-fiction. (Full disclosure: I’ve never done a book of poetry.) Few writers of any genre have more experience than I do.

I’ve also had extensive experience in the publishing industry, dealing with literary agents and publishing house editors. It’s my job to ensure my author client is successful with his or her publishing partners, and that everyone is always on the same page, with the goal of publishing a successful, profitable book.

3. Passion for Learning

To be a successful ghostwriter, while you need to be generally well-informed, you absolutely must have a passion for learning about new topics and researching them. From behind my desk at Thomas Hauck Book Development, I’ve built my career on being able to learn about my clients’ subjects and write about them with authority. From retirement accounts to oil rigs, protein supplements to international banking, I’m ready to help you become the thought leader in your field.

4. Easygoing Personality

There are many experiences in life that are stressful, and writing a book should not be one of them! My business model is based on a no-pressure, pay-as-you-go model. Some clients want their books written ASAP, while others take a leisrurely pace. It’s all good! I’m always available for questions and planning sessions. I usually write in milestones or sections of 5,000 words each, and there are never any surprises. We have an outline, which is the game plan, but it’s flexible. There are never any reasons to worry. Your 100% happiness is my goal!

5. Dependability

Your book is important to you. It may represent a significant investment of your time and money. Too many times I hear clients tell me their previous ghostwriter or editor didn’t deliver, or was out of touch, or missed a deadline. To me, that’s crazy! I happen to love my work, and when I wake up each morning, I feel lucky that I’m able to spend the day writing or editing a book that may change someone’s life. It’s both an honor and a privilege to serve you, and you can depend on Thomas Hauck Book Development to deliver a manuscript that’s ready to publish!

I look forward to serving you!

Thomas Hauck, professional book developer, ghostwriter, and editor
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“The Power of Strategic Influence” by Gary C. Laney

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Thomas Hauck

My valued client Gary C. Laney is experiencing tremendous success with his breakout book, The Power of Strategic Influence: 10 Success Factors of Highly Influential Leaders. With a foreword by Kevin Harrington, who rocketed to fame through his role as an original Shark on the TV show Shark Tank, Gary’s book presents a powerful, step-by-step formula for developing and excercising personal influence in business and the community.

A Book with a Powerful Message

When you think about it, having personal influence over others is the true key to success. Imagine two inventors. Each has an innovative new invention that could change the lives of millions of people.

John Inventor is a shy, retiring type of person with a limited circle of friends and colleagues, and doesn’t understand the dynamics of personal influence. He’s passive, and just thinks that “things will take their course.” When he’s ready with his invention, he doesn’t have a clue as to how to leverage its possibilities.

Mary Inventor is an outgoing, confident person who, through her involvement in her community and industry, has built a wide circle of friends, colleagues, and strategic partners. When she’s ready to promote her invention and seek investors and distributors, she hits the ground running.

Who will be more successful? Mary, of course!

One of the key points that Gary makes in his book – his guided tutorial, really – is that you build your strategic influence by helping other people solve their problems. It’s not a self-centered way of life, where you strut about, telling people what to do; to the contrary, it’s all about giving to others and forming lasting bonds of trust.

Interviews with Leading Influencers

But you don’t have to just take Gary’s word for it! Included are his exclusive interviews with 12 game-changing CEOs and entrepreneurs who have, over time, built their own circles of influence. Like the avatar of The Power of Strategic Influence, who arrives in a strange city with no connections and no prior knowledge of the people who live there, these dozen leaders started out with nothing and, through steady networking and the forming of strategic partnerships, achieved enviable success. They blazed a trail that you can follow!

“The Power of Strategic Influence” by Gary C. Laney

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