No, not at all. In fact, I prefer working with authors who are still in the concept phase of their book.

The Frankendraft method I've developed came directly from working with authors who were still figuring out what their book was trying to say in the first place. Like an archaeologist carefully excavating a fossil, my approach is designed to help you discover the book that already exists in your subconscious—not force you to fit your ideas into a predetermined structure.

You know you're ready to start writing a book if you feel like there's a book inside of you. That persistent sense that you have something important to share—that's your signal.

That doesn't mean you have to go full tilt immediately. But there are things you need to start doing to capture your ideas as they occur to you. Keep a notebook handy. Record voice memos. Jot down the stories that keep coming up in client conversations or presentations.

The truth is, you're probably more ready than you think. If you've been working in your field long enough to feel you have insights worth sharing, you already have the raw material for a book. The expertise is there—it just needs to be extracted, organized, and refined into something your readers can access and apply.

Don't wait until you "know enough" or until you have everything figured out. Start capturing your ideas now, and let the book reveal itself to you as you work.

If you know that you have a book inside of you, but you're not quite ready to begin working with a professional like me to help get it out of you, it would be my pleasure to talk to you for a half-hour to help get you off to a good start.

You're the kind of author I prefer to work with.

A select few of my authors come to me saying, "Derek, I know what I want to write. I know how the book should flow. I know all the material. I just need you to interview me and turn my ideas into beautiful prose."

The vast majority know they have enough expertise to write a book and feel they want to—even have to—write one. They just don't know what that book is really about yet.

These are the projects I love. Using my Frankendraft method, my author and I discover together what that book is.

I have never failed. The Frankendraft method has never failed to extract a great book from an author who took the leap of faith to work with me without knowing exactly what their book would be.

In fact, it breaks my heart: by the time someone has a sales call with me, many decide not to work together—not because they don't have the money or time, but because they aren't confident they have a book inside them. They can't see the end from the beginning, so they're afraid to take that leap of faith.

Absolutely. One of the most valuable things I do for potential authors is help them evaluate whether their book idea has legs—and if so, what form it should take.

I offer both in-person and virtual Author Retreats specifically designed to test the premise of your book idea and figure out where you're going with it. These intensive sessions give us the focused time we need to explore your concept thoroughly.

During these retreats, we'll explore several critical questions together:

• Who is this book really for? Not just a demographic, but a specific person with a specific problem.

• What problem does it solve? Business readers don't buy books for entertainment—they're looking for solutions.

• What makes your approach unique? How does your perspective differ from what's already out there?

Sometimes an author comes to me with one book idea, and through our discovery process, we realize they actually have a different (and better) book hiding underneath. Other times, we find that their "one book" is actually two or three distinct books that shouldn't be forced together.

I'm not here to tell you that you don't have a book. I'm here to help you find the book that wants to be written—the one that will serve your readers and accomplish your goals.

That depends on you.

My best clients like to get their hands dirty. They see this as a collaboration.

Budget an average of two to three hours per week. Some weeks you'll be waiting for me to deliver content. Other weeks—like during the Author Retreat or read-throughs—we'll spend six, seven, or eight hours together every day for three days straight.

Number one: Jot down ideas as they occur to you.

Number two: Create a writing routine.

Your writing routine could be daily. It could be on weekends. It could be one specific day of the week. It could be for a specific time—the first 30 minutes whenever you wake up on a Saturday morning, or 15 minutes before you go to bed every night. The most important thing is establishing a time for you to write.

And what will you write about? You'll write about the things that occurred to you as you went through your day.

It will be hard for you to remember all of those things, which is why you need to jot those ideas down as they occur. I carry around a notebook that fits in my shirt pocket and a pen. I write down just enough of a bullet point so that when I later sit down to write, I can look at that note, quickly remember what I wanted to write about, and then actually do the writing.

You have to capture an idea when it occurs—it can be about anything—but then you need to be able to recall that idea later. And don't trust yourself to recall it.

How many times have we had a great idea in the shower or while driving that we weren't able to capture? We said, "Oh, I'll remember that. That's such a great idea. I'll remember it later." And then later you know that you had a great idea, but you can't quite remember what it was.

Write it down.

That's awesome.

The more time you've spent figuring out your ideas, the faster the project will go. Instead of spending so much time trying to figure out what you want to say in the first place, we get to spend our time more focused on how to say it and how to make it great.

Regardless of where you are on your book journey, we still go through the entire five-step Frankendraft method, and my fee remains the same. The benefit you have from having written is that we get to move further, faster.

If you need to stop:

No worries. Life happens.

I was working with a commercial real estate investor when we danced with a recession at the end of COVID and interest rates went up—which meant all the interest rates on his loans went up, which crunched his cash flow.

I've had authors whose circumstances changed in other ways: a parent's health declined, a business crisis hit. I had a project where the author needed to pause for about six months because they had to do another round of VC fundraising. Six months later they came back and we resumed.

I structure my agreements so payments are made monthly. This keeps us at equal equity throughout the project. If we're four months in and you need to pause or stop, you've paid for four months of work and received four months of work. We're at equity.

Most of my agreements include a clause: after completing the Author Retreat, either party may end the project at any time for any reason. I deliver everything I've created to you, and I retain all payments made.

I've never had to invoke that clause except once. That author is the reason I put that clause in there—the one client I ever fired. I feel decently certain he wanted me to fire him but didn't want to be the one to break the contract. Maybe I don't even need it in there, but having it gives me a little peace of mind in case I have another author who seems like a great person but, for whatever reason, changes their mind down the road or if I find out they're not quite what they seemed.

Some people will always assume the worst, no matter what you do. What I encourage my authors to do is focus on the people they're trying to help.

Right now, people need to know what you know. They're looking for the knowledge you've amassed, and they're looking to hear it the way you tell it.

Consider Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel and Lean on Me by Bill Withers. Both songs convey the same essential message about being there for someone in their time of need—but they do so quite differently. Fans of one might prefer it over the other, even though the core message is the same. The message might be identical, but the voice is different.

Not only are there people who need to know what you know—they can only receive it the way you convey it.

Focus on the people who want and welcome your words. Don't worry about those who doubt you or want to believe you're a fraud. That says far more about them than it ever will about you.

You could spend your lifetime trying to convince every single person of your integrity and worth. You will die without succeeding. Some people are so far gone into skepticism and cynicism that they can never be reached.

Those people aren't your readers. They're not your customers or clients. They're not your friends. They're not worthy of your time and attention.

You don't have to hate them, but you don't have to waste your time on them either.

Here's another way to think about it:

If you explain your concept to a friend and they say, "Have you thought about saying it like this?"—and you take their advice—did you have help writing the book?

If you write an entire manuscript and approach me for manuscript consultation, and I show you ways to improve it, sand down the rough edges, knock off the mud—did you write the book on your own, or did you have help?

I make a distinction between an author and a writer. The author is the originator—they have the ideas. The writer is the writer-downer of ideas.

Plenty of authors are writers. John Grisham thinks up his stories and writes them too. Even John Grisham has editors.

Again, I’ll say that some people will always assume the worst, no matter what you do.

But every single one of my authors—without reservation—has had the opposite problem. I don't wrestle with their ego and vanity. I wrestle with getting them to allow me to present their impressive achievements and brilliance to the world the way I see them.

My authors don't want their book to be the "so-and-so show." They want to help others, but they don't want to do it in a way that proves themselves. They don't have a need to flaunt.

That's what ego and vanity really are: disguised low self-esteem. People who have to be the smartest person in the room are trying to convince themselves more than anyone else.

People who have truly achieved things have encountered enough failures, setbacks, and mistakes to be humble about what they've accomplished. They have quiet confidence in what they know, humility to recognize the limits of their expertise, and assurance in what falls within it.

Sure, for plenty of people, writing a book is a vanity project. But if you're reading this, that's probably not true for you.

Depends on who you ask.

My ghostwriting mentor defines a ghostwriter as someone who takes an author's existing manuscript and turns it into a great one.

My client I've done three ghostwriting projects with doesn't even call me his ghostwriter—he calls me his co-writer. Our relationship is such that one plus one makes three, as Stephen Covey said. The sum of our efforts is greater than our individual contributions.

I like to think of myself as a catalyst. My authors have awesome ingredients for some kind of fantastic alchemy. They simply need a catalyst to spark the reaction.

Some ghostwriters take your manuscript, disappear for three months, and come back with something polished. Their clients are happy with that.

Some ghostwriting companies interview you, write the rough manuscript, run through a couple of revisions, and that's that. For the right authors and projects, that's exactly what they need.

My authors are subject matter experts with a wealth of ideas, insights, and advice. They need someone to help them figure out how to turn that into a great book. I work upstream from many ghostwriters—starting at concept, figuring out what they really want to say, creating the rough draft, and then turning it into something great.

What a ghostwriter is NOT:

A ghostwriter is not someone who writes a book and then gets paid for someone else to take credit. That's fraud.

Professional ghostwriters—the kind of colleagues and peers I have—are people of incredible integrity. I would not only trust Tony Robino, Sally Collings, John Kador, Latham Shinder, Claudia Suzanne, and John David Mann with my life, but I would entrust them with my children's lives, which are considerably more precious to me.

Believe it or not, at the end of working with me, my authors generally don't feel like the number one thing they're walking away with is their book.

As a woman at a DevOps conference said: the outcome is more important than the output.

The output may be a book, but the outcome is clarity.

Greg Short said that before we collaborated on The Billion Dollar Paperclip, he was an expert in his field. After writing the book, he was an expert plus one. Not only did he have his expertise, but he also had superior, more effective ways of communicating it, thinking about it, and translating it into words, metaphors, analogies, and messages that other people could receive.

With one author, identifying their one reader helped us discover that their best clients all shared a certain characteristic. It redefined their entire business market—something you had to step back to see.

More than once, working with me caused an author to rethink their business process. I worked with one group of consultants where their advice, their approach to the system they shared with their clients, had developed organically over time. But I noticed an apparent contradiction between two different things. When I brought it up to them, I said, "I don't understand how both of these things can be true. Can you tell me what I'm missing?"

As it turned out, one piece of information, one step, was something they'd created in the early stages of their consultancy. The contradictory piece was something they'd arrived at, I don't know, 16 or 17 years later.

Seeing that contradiction made them realize they'd never revisited many of the basic assumptions their business was based on. We paused the project for about three months while they redesigned their entire course and deliverables.

I don't bill myself as a business consultant—I'm not. But I am someone paid to make my clients explain things because I'm completely ignorant. That's actually the advantage of working with someone like me.

My ignorance is my superpower. It forces me to say, "I don't understand why you did that," or "I don't know what that means," or "Can you explain to me why that's important? From the outside looking in, it doesn't seem like it is, but it sounds like it's significant."

I'm genetically encoded to be curious. I love business and entrepreneurship. I love efficiency and effectiveness. I'm genuinely interested in learning how my authors have found ways to do things better, to question an industry's foundational beliefs.

With my Swedes in Redesigning Capex Strategy, they work with companies that make huge infrastructure investments. Their clients are the companies that open a new mill with hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs. They advise executives on how to spend their capital investment dollars: whether to expand a mill, shift production from one site to another, build new industrial production facilities, consolidate.

The problem is that these industries—steel, pulp and paper, energy—are using the same approach to capital investment that their grandfathers used in the '50s. For an individual site, that 1950s approach might be sufficient, but when you're working with dozens, hundreds, thousands of production assets scattered across a region, a country, a continent, or the world, it doesn't work.

Companies are making decisions that end up costing their countries' economies billions in the long term. Whereas my authors' approach to capital investment not only prevents that kind of waste but significantly increases cash flow so that they're making 120, 150, 180, 200% of the net cash they were doing it the old way.

And as an incredibly gratifying benefit, these companies are able to increase output using fewer inputs at a far better price. They're doing more with less, which is the story of human progress.

If every industrial production company in the world would change, CO2 emissions would drop, water usage would drop, power consumption would drop. The sustainability gains would be off the charts. Carbon footprints would be reduced to a fraction. And instead of those cuts meaning sacrifices in production, production actually increases.

With less water, less power, less raw material, you're able to make not only more, but better quality output.

For plenty of people, doing the grunt work of trying to figure out what investment strategy will maximize company cash flow might seem boring. But I find it fascinating. I'm genuinely interested in listening to this.

Working together, we don't just create a book. We create clarity—and that clarity transforms everything.

Short answer: there are no industry-defined standards for these terms.

I call myself a ghostwriter because it's easiest to market. If you found me through an organic Google search, you probably typed "ghostwriter."

My mentor, the inestimable Claudia Suzanne, wouldn't define what I do as ghostwriting. For her, ghostwriting begins with an author who already has a manuscript—the ghostwriter spins straw into gold, taking that rough draft and turning it into a polished, gleaming version of itself.

I usually start with authors at the concept stage.

Whether you call me a ghostwriter, co-author, collaborator, book doctor, or developmental editor, what matters is this: I help business experts who know they need to write a book actually write that book—from vague concept to finished manuscript.

I recommend planning for twelve months.

Some projects finish faster. Some take longer. But twelve months gives you breathing room to do it right without rushing the creative process or sacrificing quality.

No.

The longer answer: that's the wrong question.

It presupposes that the point of writing a book is to sell as many copies as possible. If that's your goal, fine. But the authors I attract write their books because they want to help someone else. They believe they have information that can make people's lives better.

Read Love Your Clients. It's about helping financial advisors change the way they approach their clients so that it makes not only their clients' lives better but also enhances the financial advisor's business practice.

Neuroselling is about how B2B salespeople can be more authentic, vulnerable, confident, and better connect with their customers and potential customers while having integrity. It shows how the tricks of pushy salespeople are ineffective at best and harmful at worst.

The Introvert's Edge is about helping introverted business owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers, service providers—really anybody in any aspect of sales and marketing, but especially entrepreneurs and small business owners—to use their introversion as an advantage, as their superpower. Instead of being ashamed or embarrassed or frustrated by their introversion, it gives them a system that makes their introversion an asset. On a personal level, instead of being embarrassed at being an introvert or ashamed, they can be proud of their introversion, proud of who they are and how they're built, confident in seeing introversion as their superpower, not their handicap.

Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge is about perpetuating the legacy of Edward Deming—to show how he arrived at each of the four components of his gift to the world, which is the System of Profound Knowledge, and to gain an appreciation for why those components are so critical and why all four of them must work in conjunction to improve any system—literally, universally, any system.

Your book's success isn't measured in sales—it's measured in impact.

That said, several of my clients' books have sold tens of thousands of copies. Matthew Pollard measures units sold of The Introvert's Edge in the six figures, not including sales of The Introvert’s Edge to Networking.

If you work with a professional ghostwriter, yes—your book should absolutely sound as if you had written it.

I've had some authors joke that they don't like the way they speak or the way they sound. I tell them that every page of their book should sound like them giving a polished presentation on their very best day. It's your voice, your stories, your insights—just refined and structured so your readers can absorb them.

The highest compliment I ever received as a ghostwriter came from Dr. Karin Stumpf's husband, who was not only her partner in life but also in business. After reading her manuscript for the first time, he said, "Oh my god, this sounds just like you!"

That's the goal: authentic voice, polished delivery. Your personality should shine through. Your humor, your values, your way of explaining things—all of it stays intact. I'm not here to make you sound like someone else or to impose my voice onto your ideas. I'm here to help you communicate what you already know in the clearest, most compelling way possible.

When your clients, colleagues, or friends read your book, they should hear you in every paragraph.

You do.

While some ghostwriters negotiate holding the rights to your manuscript until they are paid in full, because of the way I structure my projects, you own anything that I create on your behalf the moment it is created. Forever. In perpetuity. Until the cows come home.

There are basically two models for compensating ghostwriters and collaborators.

In the old model (pre-2007 when the Kindle was released and marked a major shift in the publishing industry), ghostwriters were paid by the publisher. They typically received one-half to all of the author’s royalty advance and then received one-half of the author’s royalties. The author never paid the ghostwriter. Everything was covered from sales of the book itself.

While you’ll still find this arrangement in plenty of instances, it’s much more common for the author to pay the ghostwriter directly. Some charge by the word or the page, some by the project. Often, the payments are tied to certain project milestones. It’s normal to still find ghostwriters who charge 50% upfront and 50% upon completion.

My client-authors typically don’t care how many books they sell. While we all want to be New York Times bestselling authors, that’s not at the top of their priority list. They measure their return-on-book-creation investment by what their business book catalyzes. With Redesigning Capex Strategy, for example, the moment Fredrik and Daniel landed one new client because of someone reading their book, the entire project more than paid for itself. Something similar for Neuroselling: One new client engagement for Jeff Bloomfield saw a serious ROI for his company.

Because my authors don’t focus on generating revenue from their book’s sales, they’re not focused on generating book royalties. As such, it doesn’t make sense for me to use the old business model of getting paid according to book sales. My business model is to charge an all-inclusive flat fee, spread out over twelve monthly invoices.

This lets my client-author and me stay at parity, where we both feel that the total amount of money invested in the project is always on par with the total amount of work invested in the project.