N° 4 · BOOK YOUR BYLINE · $50,000–$200,000
We build the business model, find the book inside your work, and write the manuscript for you.
Before anybody starts interviewing you for chapter one, we figure out what the book has to earn back.
Maybe one new client pays for the entire project. Maybe the book moves you into a category where the keynote fee changes. Maybe it gives a sales team something useful to put in a prospect’s hands six months before procurement gets involved. The math is different for every business, which is why we run the numbers first.
We build the Book Business Blueprint around those results. We choose the reader, decide what the book needs that reader to think or do, find the argument capable of carrying that outcome, and work out what belongs on the page.
After that, we disappear into your material.
Interviews, old presentations, client stories, abandoned drafts, voice notes, frameworks you can draw from memory. Some of the best material will be obvious. Some of it will be something you mention casually in the ninth Zoom call because you stopped thinking it was interesting a decade ago.
Eventually we know the work well enough to write the book from inside it.
THREE EDITIONS
Our house writes your book. We build the Book Business Blueprint first, then assign the project to one of our writers. Your writer conducts the interviews, builds the narrative with our editorial team, writes the manuscript, and takes it through the developmental edit. You provide the work, the thinking, the stories, and the judgment that made the book worth writing. We turn it into the book. You finish with a manuscript built around a business model we agreed on before chapter one existed.
APPLY FOR THE HOUSE EDITION →You work directly with me and Sue. She handles the interviews and the manuscript. I stay inside the business model, story architecture, positioning, voice, and the editorial decisions that can change the trajectory of the project.
APPLY FOR THE PRODUCER’S EDITION →I take the book personally. I build the business model with you, conduct the interviews, shape the architecture, and write the manuscript, with special attention paid to the larger IP around the book as we craft it, so the manuscript becomes the source material for whatever should follow. I accept very few of these because there is no sensible way to do this work at volume.
APPLY FOR THE SIGNATURE EDITION →What the book becomes next. A year of interviews and editorial work produces far more than eighty thousand words. There are ideas that belong in talks. Stories that are better in email. Frameworks that can become tools, media, products, or years of useful content.
I’ve spent most of my career figuring out what stories want to become next. Some books turn out to be the first room of a much larger estate: a method that wants to be a course, a story that wants to be a stage, a body of work that wants a map. Turning a book into that is a different discipline. I run a company built for exactly that. If a Where the X Goes engagement is appropriate, the introduction is a hallway, not a handoff.
The application gives me enough to do my homework before we talk. If there’s a useful conversation to have, we can start with the book instead of spending twenty minutes exchanging biographies.