BOOK YOUR BREAKTHROUGH · THE JANUARY COHORT · $5,000
Twelve weeks. A complete first draft. Every word yours.
Plenty of books spend years being almost started. You get twenty pages down, disappear into the business for a while, come back, reread everything, move half of it around, and decide the opening needs another pass. Then life happens again. Do that enough times and eventually the project has more filenames than chapters.
Breakthrough puts the book on a calendar.
Before the cohort begins, you build the Book Business Blueprint. By week one, the book already knows who it is for, what it has to do, and how it earns its keep. The next twelve weeks are for writing the thing.
THE SHAPE OF THE TWELVE WEEKS
You arrive knowing what book you’re writing and what it has to do. The same architecture that sits underneath our $50,000 engagements, included in the seat.
By the end of week three, you know where your voice gets wooden, which chapters are carrying too much, and which parts of the outline were lying to you.
This is where manuscripts can erode fast. Arguments repeat. Chapters swell. New ideas try to move in without paying rent. We catch the drift before it turns into thirty pages you have to undo later.
By now you can see the ending from where you’re standing. The holes are obvious. The missing story has a name. The chapter you’ve been avoiding finally has nowhere left to hide.
The whole manuscript exists. It will need editing, because of course it will. But it also has a beginning, a middle, an end, and your name on every sentence.
The room meets at 12:00 Eastern for ninety minutes, live and recorded, so missing one Monday doesn’t cost you the week. Mondays are for teaching, manuscript problems, and hot seats: real pages from the room, worked on in front of everybody.
Between sessions, you write. Pages are due every week, and disappearing gets harder when sixteen other people know what chapter you owe them. The Cohort gives you the room, the deadline, and live help when the manuscript gets stuck. Studio adds an editor assigned to your book, with formal manuscript reads at scheduled checkpoints.
Seventeen seats, enforced. Small enough that we know which book you’re writing and notice when you disappear. Large enough that somebody else in the room is usually wrestling with the problem you’re about to have next.
The seats are for the consultant, the coach, the founder, the expert with a real business and a book that has been almost started for years. If you’re writing a novel, or a memoir for its own sake, this room isn’t built for you.
I’ve spent most of my adult life turning blank documents into finished things: novels, business books, sales letters, screenplays, and books with somebody else’s name on the cover. I’ve seen enough manuscripts go sideways to recognize the wobble early.
Sue has spent a decade finding the book inside the pages an author is already too close to see clearly.
We built the Book Your Business OS together. For twelve Mondays, we use it on yours.
You can pay us $50,000 to write the book for you. Some people should. That’s what Byline is for.
Breakthrough is for the person who wants to be the author and knows another year of squeezing the manuscript into leftover hours probably ends with another half-finished draft.
The seat is $5,000. The Blueprint is included. For twelve weeks, the book has a place on the calendar that belongs to it.
THE FIRST MONDAY GUARANTEE
Complete the Blueprint and join us for the first Monday. If you leave without a clear path to a finished draft over the next eleven weeks, tell us. We refund the full $5,000 and you keep the Blueprint.
How much time should I expect to spend writing each week?
Plan on the ninety-minute Monday session and about five focused hours of writing during the rest of the week. Most of these books land somewhere north of 40,000 words, so you’re generally looking at a few thousand new words a week. Enough to require an appointment with yourself. Still possible alongside a real business.
How much feedback do my pages actually get?
Every Monday includes live manuscript problem-solving and hot seats using pages from the room. We’ll know your book, and when something starts going wrong, we can get into it with you. If you want an editor assigned to the manuscript, reading every word at formal checkpoints, that’s Studio at $10,000.
My idea is still rough. Is it too early?
No. Rough is useful here. The Blueprint is where we find out whether the idea can carry a book, what belongs inside it, and what the business needs the finished thing to do. Much cheaper to discover a weak premise in a workbook than after you’ve spent six months making it eloquent.
I’ve already started writing. Do I start over?
Bring it. Sometimes the pages are already pointed in the right direction and need a stronger structure underneath them. Sometimes twenty good pages are attached to the wrong book. We figure that out before week one.
What happens if I miss a week?
The session is recorded and the deadline still stands. Miss two in a row and you’ll hear from us.
Are the sessions recorded?
All twelve. The recordings are yours. Come live whenever you can, especially when your book needs something from the room.
You probably already know whether you have a book. The question is whether January 11 becomes another date that passes while you’re still going to write it someday.
Twelve Mondays later is April 5. You can arrive there with the same folder of notes you have now, or with the draft.
Still deciding how much help you want around the book? The Breakthrough page shows all three versions.