A COMPLETE MANUSCRIPT IN 90 DAYSEVERY WORD UNDER NDA — YOUR NAME ON THE COVER, MINE BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Book sales will not make you money. The book will. It is what gets you booked, what puts your fee up, and what they buy on the way out. Nobody hands you the running order, so 2 people who have spent decades doing this are going to, over lunch, for free.
Tara Berthier and I met over 20 years ago.
Since then she has built a career making speakers bookable and I have built one making books with my name nowhere near them. We have swapped clients, compared notes and complained about this industry across several continents’ worth of coffee. Never once got in a room on purpose.
October 14th is the first time.
Think of it as brunch with your 2 most brutally honest friends. You bring the caffeine, we bring the decades, nobody bills anybody. A speaker strategist and a ghostwriter is the most complementary pairing anyone has managed outside peanut butter and chocolate. She works out what you should be saying from a stage. I turn it into the book that gets you onto the stage in the first place. Same person, same material, 2 halves of a job that almost never get done in the same room.
That’s the hour. Bring a sandwich.
Most books don’t hit a list. I have put 4 there and I still would not promise you a 5th. Anybody who does is selling you the promise, which is a far easier thing to make than a book.
What 2 people with nothing left to prove can tell you is exactly how the books that did change somebody’s business got built, and in what order. That part is teachable. That part is the whole hour.
We don’t pull punches and we don’t sugarcoat. You have both been warned and invited.
Book sales will not make you money.
Odd thing for a ghostwriter to lead with. It is also the thing you would rather hear now than 60,000 words from now.
WordsRated puts it at 90% of self-published books selling fewer than 100 copies, with the average landing around 250. Those numbers have barely moved in years.
Here is what they are really measuring. Royalties. A number that was never going to change anybody’s life, on books that went out with no plan for what they were for.
Your book is not the product. It is the key that unlocks doors you didn’t even know existed. Speaking. Courses. Workshops. Consulting. Licensing. Rooms with a door policy you were previously on the wrong side of.
The biggest of those doors is a stage, and it isn’t close. It isn’t in the same f*cking postcode. Here is the part that gets missed though: on that stage, the book is doing all the work. It is the reason the event planner picked you over the other 8 people pitching. It is the reason your fee has a 4 in front of it. It is the thing 40 people queue up to buy on the way out, at full price, with a pen in your hand.
Get the book right and the stage pays. Get it wrong and you are a very well-prepared speaker with nothing to sell.
Most people write the book first and then go hunting for a stage. A year of genuinely good work on a topic nobody was booking. Not a character flaw. Nobody gave them the running order.
Everybody else gets the order right and still gets got. They turn up with an 18-minute talk in a Google Doc and announce, this is my book.
Sweetie. It’s 18 minutes.
I say that with love, because the premise is usually perfect and that’s the hard part already done. A book needs 100x more than that to stand up, and what kills on a stage behaves like a completely different animal on a page. Different craft. Same brilliant material.
Do speakers hate writing their books? Some of them, hand on heart, yes. I have met plenty who call it the worst 12 months of their working life, and they are not being dramatic. Every one of them did it alone, or beside somebody who never once asked what the book was actually for.
That is not how it goes with me. My people come back and write a second one. Draw your own conclusions.
The 2 questions every event planner is silently asking while they skim your bio — what problem do you solve, and why on earth are you the one to solve it. Also how to avoid being the 9th person this quarter pitching a talk about burnout.
What changes about a book when it has a job. The job is selling from the back of the room, and it changes everything from the structure down to the first line. Most books are built for a shelf. Yours needs building for a stage.
You cannot protect a method. You can protect the words and the stories wrapped around it, which is what makes a book the timestamp saying this was mine first. I have taught my own methodology for 10 years without publishing it, so technically anybody could rename it and sell it back to me by Friday. I am my own cautionary tale. You’ll get the whole story.
Both of us, live, no script. Bring the question you have been too polite to ask a publisher. Tara will answer it faster than I will.
60 minutes, ending on time, because I have a run to get to and Tara has dinner.
All of it is fixable in the right order. That’s the entire hour.
Tara takes people from “I think I might have something to say” to booked and paid. Topic, positioning, messaging, bio, the keynote itself, representation, and the actual business behind a speaking career.
She knows what the market is asking for this year because she’s in it every day. She will also tell you your website is shit, and she will be right. Her most-booked speakers all have one thing in common. They have a book.
4x NYT bestselling ghostwriter & book coach. 30 years, 200+ authors, 12 countries.
I got my first NYT bestseller at 15 and was paid in dog food. Actual dog food. It taught me more about intellectual property than every lawyer since. I write business books, memoir, and the messy brilliant place where those 2 things collide.
Lunch in Toronto. First coffee in Victoria. Wine o’clock wherever Tara is. Come as you are.
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Wednesday, October 14th. Bring lunch. Bring the caffeine. Bring the 18 minutes.
The Bestseller Blueprint is the advice I would give you… if you asked. Okay, even if you didn’t… but you should.
Six parts, about forty minutes. Whether the book is worth writing, where AI quietly costs you the copyright to your own book, which publishing door to walk through and what each one really costs in 2026, and what happens to the book after launch week.
Every number in it is sourced. Where the honest answer is that nobody knows, I say so.
The newsletter is publishing, what I’m actually working on, and the bits nobody says out loud. No six-part win-back sequence if you leave.
