Before I Tell You Their Stories
I want to say something about what a book actually is, because I think most people misunderstand it — even people who want one.
A book is not a marketing tool. It is not a lead magnet with a spine. It is not a business card you spent six months writing.
A book is a permanent record of what you know, what you’ve survived, and what you believe. It is the thing that exists in the world after you have stopped being in the room. It is the version of you that a stranger can find at midnight when they are sitting with the exact problem you spent thirty years learning to solve.
What happens after the book is different for every person. But in thirty years of working with authors — more than a hundred of them — I have never met one who regretted it. Not one. The form that ‘worth it’ takes changes. The regret never shows up.
Here are three people who can tell you exactly what happened after.
| The book is not the end of something. It is the beginning of everything the expertise was always supposed to open. |
| Peter Merrett: Multi-award-winning luxury hotelier • Australia’s 2024 Keynote Speaker of the Year • Founder, The House of Wonderful |
| For almost five years, Peter Merrett had been ‘trying to write a book.’That phrase — trying to write a book — is one I hear often, and it matters that we say it honestly. Trying is not writing. Trying is the book that lives in the gap between knowing it should exist and not having the structure to make it real. Peter had the wisdom. He had the stories. He had decades of working in luxury hospitality at the highest level, building experiences that created genuine wonder in the people who encountered them. He had a vision for how that philosophy of wonder could reach beyond hotels and into organisations, teams, and lives. What he didn’t have was the architecture to hold it all together on a page. Not yet. We worked through the Word Magic Method — from Book Validation, which clarified exactly what Wonderlicious was and who it was for, through the Storytelling Framework that gave five years of accumulated ideas somewhere to live. The manuscript was finished. The book became real. What happened next happened fast. Within months of publication, Peter was commanding double his previous speaking fees. Not because his expertise had changed — it hadn’t. The wisdom that was in the book had been in Peter the whole time. What changed was the world’s ability to recognise and calibrate it. A published book, beautifully produced, carrying his name and his philosophy, did something that years of speaking and hospitality accolades alone had not fully achieved: it made the expertise tangible, permanent, and unambiguous. Event planners — the people who book keynote speakers and live experiences for organisations across Australia and beyond — began treating him as a no-brainer. That is the word that matters. Not ‘interesting.’ Not ‘worth considering.’ A no-brainer. The book removed the friction of the decision. It answered the question of who Peter is before anyone had to ask it. New categories of work opened. Events and experiences that hadn’t existed for him before — because the book gave planners a framework for imagining what Peter could bring to their room. And a dual distribution deal, in Australia and North America, took Wonderlicious into world markets — carrying the philosophy of wonder to the audiences who need it most. Peter’s book: Wonderlicious • petermerrett.com |
Read more about Peter’s work: petermerrett.com
Peter’s story is a precise illustration of what I mean when I say a book is a business asset. For the full data on how published books change commercial outcomes for experts and leaders, read Your Book Is a Business Asset: Here’s the Data to Prove It.
| Nic Murdoch: IP Lawyer • Engineer • Author • Founder, Get Rich from the P.I.T.C.H. |
| Nic Murdoch already had the credentials. BEng. JD with First Class Honours. Master of IP. Fellow of the Institute of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys. Two decades of handling billions of dollars in deals across some of the most influential boardrooms in the world. What she didn’t yet have was the thing that would make all of that legible to every entrepreneur who needed it — not just the ones who could afford her billable hours. Nic came to the work knowing exactly what she wanted. She wanted to be seen as the foremost authority in her field. Not one of the foremost. The foremost. She had earned that position through thirty years of practice. The book was how she would claim it publicly, permanently, and at scale. Get Rich from the P.I.T.C.H. is her 5-step method for entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas — the guide she had spent decades wanting to write, the distillation of everything she knew about how ideas become protected, pitched, funded, and brought to market. It is, in her own framing, the survival guide for the entrepreneur who has something worth building and needs to know how to take it into the world without losing it. The book launched in March 2024 and became a #1 bestseller. It is available in twelve countries — the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and eight more markets across Europe and Asia. The breadth of distribution is not incidental. It reflects exactly what Nic set out to achieve: a platform that is global, not local. Authority that travels. She is now exactly what she came to become. The foremost authority. The person every entrepreneur with a brilliant, unprotected idea needs to find — and can, because the book makes finding her possible. Nic’s book: Get Rich from the P.I.T.C.H. • getrichfromthepitch.com |
Read more about Nic’s work: getrichfromthepitch.com
Nic’s story is the clearest illustration of how a book establishes thought leadership in a professional field. For the full picture of what ghostwriting and book coaching look like in practice for experts, read Book Coach vs. Ghostwriter: Which Do You Actually Need?
| Avril Henry: Internationally-acclaimed keynote speaker • Leadership consultant • Founder, GLAM • Champion of women’s rights in the Australian workplace • Champion of Maternity Leave in Australia |
| Avril Henry did not come to a Createcation to write the book she ended up writing. She came with a clear professional brief: a book about diversity, equity, and gender dynamics in the workplace. A subject she had spent decades mastering. A book that fit neatly within her existing brand as an internationally-acclaimed leadership speaker and the founder of the GLAM program — Great Leaders Are Made — Australia’s most successful leadership training program for women. A book that made complete, rational sense for where she was in her career. Her own story? Off the table. She had decided that. Until it wasn’t. Because in the space of a Createcation — in the specific conditions that deep creative work in community creates — something shifted. The story that Avril had decided was not for public consumption began to insist on being told. Avril Henry grew up white in apartheid South Africa. She fell in love with and married a Black man — an act that was not just socially transgressive but legally fraught in the South Africa of that era. They moved to the United Kingdom. They had children. And then, in the private interior of a marriage that looked, from outside, like the story of a woman who had already done the brave thing — she found herself in an abusive relationship. She left. She arrived eventually in Australia, where she built her career, found a loving partnership with David, and became one of the most respected voices in Australian leadership on the subjects of diversity, inclusion, and women’s rights. She championed maternity leave. She changed policy. All of that was the life Avril had allowed the world to see. The book she had decided not to write was the life underneath it. At the Createcation, she began to understand that the two stories were not separate. That the reason she could stand on stages and speak with the authority she carried about what women need, what organisations owe their people, and what genuine inclusion requires — was precisely because she had lived the thing. Not theorised it. Lived it. South Africa. The marriage. The children. The leaving. The arriving. The rebuilding. The book she ended up writing was that story. Lived experience offered as a map for others navigating their own impossible terrain.What happened after was not only professional — though it was that too. More stages. More authority. The credibility that comes specifically from having been willing to be seen, not just as an expert but as a human being who had walked through fire and kept walking. But what mattered most, I think, was something quieter. The courage it takes to put your actual story on the page — the story you had decided was off the table — and discover that it was the most important thing you ever did. That the wisdom the world needed from Avril Henry was not just the framework. It was the life. Avril’s work: avrilhenry.com |
Read more about Avril’s work: avrilhenry.com
What These Three Stories Have in Common
They are completely different people. Different industries, different countries, different books, different definitions of what ‘after’ means.
Peter needed structure to finish what he had been trying to do for five years. Nic needed a platform to claim the authority she had already earned. Avril needed permission — from herself, finally — to tell the whole story.
But in every case, the book did something that no other professional asset they possessed could do. It made the expertise permanent. It made the story findable. It made the person visible in the way that thirty years of living and working and surviving had earned — but that the world could not quite see until the book existed to show it.
That is what a book is. Not a marketing tool. The permanent record of what you actually know and who you actually are.
| Your story is not a distraction from your expertise. In every case I have seen, it is the source of it. |
I have worked with more than two hundred authors over thirty years. I have never met one who regretted the book. What I have met — far too many times — are people who waited. Who decided their story wasn’t ready, or wasn’t enough, or wasn’t quite the right moment. And who, years later, wished they had started when the thought first arrived.
If you are reading this and recognising yourself in any of these three stories — the expert who hasn’t finished, the authority who hasn’t claimed it, the person with the real story still kept off the table — that recognition is not an accident. It is the thought arriving. The question is what you do with it.
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Want More?
Your Book Is a Business Asset
Book Coach vs. Ghostwriter
The 90-Day Book
What Is a Createcation?
How Is My Story Worth a Book?
The Storykeeper Manifesto
Can I Write a Book If I’m Not a Writer?
| What happens after your book? Every Word Magic client finishes their complete draft manuscript in 90 days. The story of what comes after that starts with a free Validation Call — a conversation about your book, your timing, and whether this is your moment. writewordmagic.com • Book a free Validation Call |
