I recently took a call from a potential client who inquired about my services. He wanted to write a book of non-sectarian daily affirmations for children. It was a good idea, because these days, kids need all the self-confidence and reassurance they can get.

I’m a ghostwriter, and my job is to write books for my clients. Specifically, I deliver a Word document that contains the text of the book. It might be 20,000 words or 80,000 words, but the idea is that the text is something original and presents a new solution to the reader’s problem. This means that the primary value of the book is in its text. The package–the cover and interior designer–is just that, the package. It’s a nice vehicle to deliver the text.

In this case, I told my friend that unless the book of daily affirmations was something amazingly original, the text itself would be fairly generic. The market is saturated with hundreds of books of daily affirmations, and they’re all pretty much the same. Be happy, be grateful, love thy neighbor, enjoy the sunshine, and so on. Therefore the value of the book must lie not in its text but in the package–the cover and the interior design. That’s what will differentiate the book from the hundreds of others on the market. People will buy it and cherish it because of the artwork and design.

So I told my prospective client that while I was happy to help him, his focus–and his budget–needed to be on the book design. The text was the easy part. The book needed a concept, something that would make it stand out from the crowd. Into this concept you’d then plug in the text.