Reader First Philosophy, Working with a Ghost Writer with AJ Harper
Anjanette “AJ” Harper has ghostwritten over 100 books (!) and is the writing partner for Mike Michalowicz, and together they’ve written six books, including Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, Fix This Next, and their latest, Get Different. After all that, she finally decided to write her own book, Write a Must-Read: Craft a Book That Changes Lives—Including Your Own.
AJ is an editor and publishing strategist who helps authors write foundational books that enable them to build readership, grow their brand and make a significant impact on the world. As ghostwriter and as developmental editor, she has worked with newbies to New York Times bestselling authors with millions of books sold. Through her workshops and editing retreats, AJ empowers authors with insider publishing knowledge and guides them through the book development, writing, and editing process.
In this episode, Josh and AJ talk about how she got connected to Mike Michalowicz and became his ghostwriter and now writing partner, her course, and why she decided to finally write her own book. Also, a bit of banter about ideal audience and memoir writing.
AJ’s Links:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Josh Steimle: Today my guest is AJ Harper. AJ is the writing partner for Mike Michalowicz, and together they’ve written six books, including Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, Fix This Next, and their latest, Get Different. AJ is an editor and publishing strategist who helps authors write foundational books that enable them to build readership, grow their brand and make a significant impact on the world. As ghostwriter and as developmental editor, she has worked with newbies to New York Times bestselling authors with millions of books sold. Through her workshops and editing retreats, AJ empowers authors with insider publishing knowledge and guides them through the book development, writing, and editing process.
But that’s not all, in addition to writing books for 50-60 other people, AJ is now also the author of her own book, Write a Must-Read: Craft a Book That Changes Lives—Including Your Own. And this is brand new. By the time you listen to this, it will be out there. So go grab it if you want a book on how to write a book.
AJ, welcome to the show!
AJ Harper: Thanks. I'm so excited to be here.
Josh Steimle: All right. So how many books have you actually helped other people write? Cause I know it's a ton.
AJ Harper: I feel bad saying this because someone once said to me, don't say countless, but figure it out. But I actually can't tell you the number. I've been doing this for almost 18 years.
And so, I don't even know. It's maybe a little under a hundred, but I'm not sure the exact number.
Josh Steimle: So when I said 50-60, that’s low balling it.
AJ Harper: Wait, if you actually say helped people write, that's hundreds, but actually wrote it, as a ghost writer. Or yeah, this is hard. This is hard. You started with a hard question. I don't know what the number is. A lot.
Josh Steimle: It’s supposed to be easy right from the get go.
AJ Harper: Cause you know what it's like when you're a ghost writer, which I'm not anymore, but when you're a ghost writer, you're just next, next, next. And you just don't keep track or I don't. Someday I'll sit down and figure it out, but lots. How about lots?
Josh Steimle: Lots, dozens, tens, over a hundred, perhaps. So that's amazing.
At what point did you know that you liked writing this much, that you could crank out a hundred books for other people? You must really like writing.
AJ Harper: I love writing. I've always loved writing. I'm one of those weirdos who always knew what I wanted to do from a very young age and then went out and did it. But the difference is I started as a playwright. And I write about that in my book. That gave me a unique skillset that I didn't expect to have, which is to be able to assume the voice of someone else, because I knew how to write characters. So when I started ghost writing books, that was easy for me to become someone else. And that's why I ended up writing a lot of books. But I didn't set out to do that part. Honestly, I just wanted to make a living from writing. And playwriting pays just like a little bit more than poetry, so that wasn't going to work for me. I had to have something to pay the bills. And so I started writing, doing freelance and very shortly picking up ghost writing assignments for books.
Josh Steimle: Now, with your background as a playwright, have you ghostwritten fiction books as well as nonfiction? Because I know you've done non-fiction but have you done fiction?
AJ Harper: You know, I draw a moral line there. I don't sit in judgment of other people, but for me, the distinction with ghost writing fiction versus nonfiction is when I'm ghost writing a non-fiction book, those are not my ideas. Those are not my stories. Yes, I'm helping shape it, bring it forth, refine, right? Make it work. But it ultimately,wasn't my idea. It's not my intellectual property. Fiction though, you're messing around in some creative juices there that I don't know. It feels like that's your book then, so I never did that. That was my line.
Josh Steimle: Got it. Well, that's a lot of non-fiction. So how did you get paired up with Mike Michalowicz? So Mike is one of my favorite authors. I love Profit First. I love his other books. How did you connect with him and start working with him?
AJ Harper: Well do you remember E-Lance back in the day? And I think it became Upwork.
Josh Steimle: I do. Yep. Contractor network.
AJ Harper: Yeah. So I started there as a freelancer with no experience with that type of work at all, just plays. So trying to get gigs when you only have plays, is interesting. But I did that for a while. And even when I didn't need to do it anymore, it was fun to go look at all the bids. It was a distracting, fun thing to do. So I had stopped working on there, but there was one day I was avoiding working on a book I had to write. And I was parusing. And so there was a listing for somebody who had an irreverent kind of east coast home to be a blogger. And I had a little sample that I had written once upon a time. And I thought, “Alright, I'll just toss that in.”
Turns out when he accepted me for the position, and I met with him in New Jersey, that he was actually looking for somebody to do a major edit on his first book, which was called The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, which he self-published, and that's how we began our relationship. And from that book forward, I've been his collaborate on every single book.
We're actually about to start book nine in about a month.
Josh Steimle: Wow. That's great. So what does it look like working with a client like Mike or your other clients? When they sit down, how do you go back and forth? How do you draw out the material from them that needs to go in that book?
AJ Harper: So Mike's slightly different.
So after I retired from ghost writing, which was about five-six years ago, I still work with Mike. He's an unusual relationship because we don't have a client relationship anymore. When we started working on his second book, Pumpkin Plan, which was published by Penguin Random House, just Penguin at the time. We entered into a partnership agreement. So we're, we don't actually operate like client anymore. We're in business partnership arrangement. I think we're texting and talking to each other every other day, all year. We're always working on a new book.
So that's totally different than back in the day when I would ghost for somebody. It would be a one-off or maybe two books. That is a series of phone calls asking a lot, a lot, a lot of questions. And pulling from the content that they already have, trying to get their voice down. But it's a series of phone calls, testing out a couple of chapters, is this working, testing out a couple more chapters, sending things back and forth. And sometimes you'd have to work with someone who wasn't really available. So then you would adapt, ask them to record things, give them prompts that way. There's so many different ways to work with a ghost writer. And I think the best ghost will adapt to how you work and your time schedule.
Josh Steimle: And you said now, you're not really playing the role of ghost writer anymore, is that right?
AJ Harper: No, I did it for about 10 years.
Josh Steimle: But you're still writing books? So is it just you're only doing it in these types of partnerships or how is it different today?
AJ Harper: Well, I quit ghost writing and started working with clients to help them write their own books. And then that evolved into teaching a workshop on that topic. And so I have students now, not clients.
So I still write with Mike and we write one book a year. And other than that, I don't write any books except the one I wrote for my own community.
Josh Steimle: So why did you make that switch?
AJ Harper: It's a number of reasons. I was not very good at managing time, to be frank. And the freelance world can be a lot of projects at the same time. Sometimes I had 10 books at the same time, just at various stages. And that's one piece. A little bit of burnout.
Another piece is I didn't always love the people I was writing for, to be frank. And I didn't feel great about every project. But I also felt that I lost my voice and that's a bad thing if you're a writer, 10 years of being someone else, or being dozens of other people, or hundreds of other people. I couldn't remember what my own voice was anymore. So I knew I had to get it back.
Josh Steimle: And is that why you decided to write your own book at this point in time or did that feed into it at all?
AJ Harper: No. I wasn't going to write a book on writing and then I was on vacation and I realized that there were so many people who didn't have access to the methods I teach. And I wanted people who couldn't afford my class to be able to buy the book for $25 or whatever number, get what they need. And even if they didn't have $25, to check it out from the library, if they needed to. And I thought this is better. Let me just make sure people have access to this information because I'm passionate about raising the bar so that people will write better books. I'm really on a mission to help people write better books. So I only take 30 new students a year in my class, so I had to write a book so people could have access to the information.
Josh Steimle: Got it. I'm really curious about this, you’ve written a hundred books for other people. There must have been sometime during the past 20 years when you thought, “I should write my own book.” So why didn't you during those 20 years?
AJ Harper: I kept thinking if I'm gonna write my own book, it's going to be creative nonfiction, essays about my family, or I'm going to write a novel. Most writers are always fantasizing about writing a novel. And that was me. I just didn't think I'd write one about writing. I thought, “I'm teaching the class. I don't really need to do that.” But that's the reason. And then I was too busy. I really was writing books for other people and there was no time for any writing on my own.
So yeah, I still have that novel idea.
Josh Steimle: Can you give us a sneak peek of what it would be?
AJ Harper: My own novel?
Josh Steimle: Yeah.
AJ Harper: And that's the other thing is I actually built a publishing company with two partners, which we sold in January to Chicago Review Press. And so I've edited more than a hundred novels as well.
And I've got one in mind. It's set on this group of women back in the early 20th century, who used to travel to this island in Lake Superior every summer. And a little bit of a mystery there about who they were. I've been researching it for about 18 years.
So maybe someday I'll get to it.
Josh Steimle: Interesting. All right. So with your book, Write a Must-Read, there are a lot of other books out there about how to write books. What did you feel like was missing? Or why did you feel like this book was still needed out there? What's different about it?
AJ Harper: So this is about how to write a really specific book. It's about how to write a prescriptive nonfiction book that is designed to deliver on its promise transformation. There is a methodology. So nearly all of the books that I worked on as a ghost writer or editor, were books that helped somebody make their lives better, business better, marriage better, something better.
And there's a methodology I developed to write a book that is effective in bringing about that transformation. So this is the process that I used, the frameworks and system. And so I wanted to make those systems and frameworks available to people.
Josh Steimle: Got it. So walk us through the book a little bit. What are some of the key points or what's the format? What's your process? What's your formula for getting people through this process?
AJ Harper: So, first and foremost, that's all in the title. I'm calling on people to shift their mindset away from thinking about writing a book as a better business card or a marketing piece, or just lead gem. And to write something really excellent, to write a book that becomes a must read that people love and talk about. And so first it's can we just agree to do that? Can we try to do better? And there's a methodology that’s rooted in my philosophy, which is reader first. And the core message of my book is that a book is not about something, it's for someone. And when you shift your mindset from thinking about your ideas, stories, intellectual property, and start thinking about how you can actually bring about the change you promise within the pages of the book.
And that shapes how you develop the content and how you organize the content. And it also shapes how you edit that content. So the process is exactly what I take people through in my class. It starts with identifying who your ideal reader is, and not an avatar, but hearts and minds of what your reader wants, why they can't get it and understanding them very well.
And then crafting a transformational core message that speaks to them. And is transformational on its own. This is a key point that I teach. A core message that when you hear it, it will help you bring about change, even if you don't read the book.
And then to craft a promise that you can actually deliver. This one is key. And I really believe in this. There were so many books I wrote that promised a lot of things and it made me feel uneasy because I don't think they could really deliver on it. So I think it's an important constraint that authors consider, I want to promise this big stuff and I really have a lot of hope for my readers, but can I actually deliver on it? And then what do I have to do to deliver on it? It's actually a good exercise in figuring out how to do that. So then I walk them through the process of writing a transformational outline, writing the draft, and then there's several chapters on my editing method. Which is a multi-pass method that's designed to take your manuscript and ensure that you're mindful of reader experience.
That's the book.
Josh Steimle: Got it. So where do you feel like most people get hung up in this process? What are the biggest challenges for most, especially first-time authors? Where do first-time authors tend to get hung up?
AJ Harper: I actually jotted this down, I was looking around on your website. I'm sure you're familiar with this in your own work. Cause they get hung up worrying that their book idea isn't worth doing or someone already did it. And you said this cool thing, you said, “There's an audience out there who won't listen to anyone but you.” And I wrote that down because I think that's such a good quote. And I think that's where they get hung up first is thinking that their book idea isn't worth pursuing. But then once they decide to commit to it, most people don't spend the time they need to spend on book development, on ensuring that they know their reader inside and out. And that they are crafting that transformational foundational message and promise, and they just skip it and then just keep moving forward. And it takes some time to get that ideation right.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. I really liked what you said, that a book is not about something it's for someone. Because if it's not, then why would anybody read it? I've been talking with somebody lately about entrepreneurship and business in general, and we've been talking about how his business is a people first business, that he starts out by thinking about people and focusing on people. And I've said this many times before on the podcast that writing a book is like starting a business. It's an entrepreneurial activity or creating something out of nothing. And the something that you create serves people the same way that a business creates or serves people. And just like with a business, it's not so much about, :Hey, I just want to create this product and I want somebody to buy it.” It's no, you've got to think about who you're actually going after and the problem that you're solving for that person. Otherwise you're not going to be able to share that vision with them. And if they don't catch a vision of the problem themselves, why would they buy it? Why would they spend time on it in the first place? So I love that approach.
AJ Harper: Yeah. So I shorten that to reader first, right? That's the philosophy and I make my students crazy with it. I'm constantly drumming it in. But the cool thing about it is if you are losing confidence in it, if you're wondering, should I include this story? Should I put this chapter here or there? Should I include this or not? The answer is always: What will serve my reader and help me deliver on the promise? That's always the answer. It really is nerve wracking to write a book, especially for new authors. And I think it's still hard. I've written so many and every time I have to say to myself, “Here we go again.” The answer is, will this serve my reader? Will it help me support my core message? Will it help me connect to them? And if you can get a yes about one of those, then the content could go in the book. And so it really helps build confidence.
Josh Steimle: So it's really all about being able to empathize with the reader and put yourself in the reader's shoes and say, This thing that I'm considering including in the book, how is the reader going to interpret this? How are they going to see it? Are they going to get bored? Are they going to get confused? Are they going to be interested? Are they going to be helped by this?
AJ Harper: Yeah, I get this a lot with personal stories. So this is one of the most common questions I'm asked, How much of my personal story should I include? Most people make a mistake and they dump their whole life story in the beginning of the book, and then they don't mention anything again. And the part of our personal story that matters, is the part that is illustrative of the things we want to teach. And the part of our story that connects to people where they are and where they want to go. So it's a process of making those decisions. But reader first is also about, do I need these action steps? Am I just putting this stuff in here? Because I'm filling it up or, cause I did it in three other chapters and I'm worried I have to do it all the time. It's just thinking about what do they need, instead of what does everybody else do or what should I do?
Josh Steimle: So this brings up something that I think some people get hung up on is, what to include, what not to include, but qhen you're starting out and you're writing that first draft, which some people call a vomit draft or they have other words for it. But when you're writing that first draft, how much should you worry about what to include or what not to include?
AJ Harper: I think you need to have backup and have a working outline you feel pretty good about. Not super tight. I like to say by 80%, you feel like, “Okay, this is pretty close.” And you need to have taken a lot of care and understanding, how is this going to work for my reader? Almost like you're taking them on a journey and following them along the journey. So then you can go ahead and not worry about what you're writing on that first draft, if you have those constraints of the outline. With fiction, I don't outline it all, but with nonfiction, I'm really serious about it. We have to have that outline. It changes, it evolves, you'll fix things and move things around, but having it makes the first draft go faster because most of those decisions that are made in edit.
Josh Steimle: It's interesting to think about the differences between, like you're talking about you primarily work on prescriptive nonfiction. We're talking about “How-to” books, business books, types of books…
AJ Harper: Or I also work with memoir that are teaching memoir or message memoir. It's not just business, it's relationships, spirituality. Right now I'm working with authors who are talking about child abuse, talking about money, talking about all sorts of different topics.
Josh Steimle: Okay. But there's still how to solve a problem or how to take advantage of an opportunity type of books. Or how to get through something.
AJ Harper: Yeah, the goal is that the reader is looking for something and that the book helps them find it in some capacity. But it could be done in a memoir. It could be done in a straight how to. It could be in a combo. So the formats are different.
Josh Steimle: All right. Okay. So this is where we go into Josh has his own questions and he wants to ask them independent of anybody who's listening. But sometimes it's interesting for the listener too. So I'm working on a memoir right now, and see I've written business books. So I get the whole business books thing and everything you're saying, outline all this stuff. Agree a hundred percent. A few years ago, my wife and I, we adopted an older child from China and it was a ten-year search to find her. And then we finally got her and there's drama and excitement and all sorts of things in there.
So I thought I want to write this book up mostly just for my kids and my family. So I started working on that with that audience in mind. And then I thought, maybe there are other people who would be interested in this and helped by this. So then I started switching my audience a little bit, like midway through the book, and then I started thinking about other audiences.
So then I have four or five different audiences I'm thinking about as I write this book. And they're very different audiences. And I just thought, you know what, I'm just going to write everything down and then I'll go back and I'll figure out what do I cut? What gets included, what doesn't get included. And because it's my experiences. It's my life stories. So, I didn't really outline it. Cause it's all in my head. I'm just writing down chronologically everything that happened.
But then I felt like I don't feel like people can really understand the story of this adoption and what we went through without understanding the background. Before that, who I am makes a difference as to why this story matters. So then I start including my biographical information. And then I'm like, people don't really know who I am unless I go back further. And I thought about David McCullough, who's written a lot of history books. He wrote a biography of Truman and he's written a John Adams book that got turned into that mini series a few years ago and was famous. And he always starts with like grandparents and great-grandparents whenever he starts his book. He'll go way back and give this ancestral history, leading up to the person that he's focusing on. And I always find that interesting. So then I thought, I'm going to go do some family history and I'm going to include this well, so now I've got this memoir, that's like 400 pages and has 75 pages of family history before I'm even born.
And I'm like, this might be interesting for my kids when they're old or something, but I don't know if anybody else cares about it, but then I think, but David McCullough includes this stuff. So maybe people are interested in this. I dunno so like I'm thinking, Nah, maybe I'm going to end up just chopping off the first hundred pages of this book. Cause nobody's going to care about it. But then I'm like, I don't know. Maybe I should include it. I don't know how to get around that without actually like bringing in an editor and having them look at it. But do you have any quick advice on that type of question? Getting pretty specific there?
AJ Harper: Thank you. I love this challenge. So you have to decide who it's for. If it's for your family, then leave it all in. But if it's for say a reader who has a general interest in memoir, because that's the benefit of memoirs. People like to read memoir and they'll weed all sorts of topics. Then probably you're not going to leave all of that in because you want to stay with the arc of the current story and you can pull pieces of it that's relevant to what's happening in the present. So you'll have to determine which pieces of the past are relevant in the current story.
On the other hand, if you're writing a book that is infused with message and it's designed to help somebody who's on the adoption journey. Or maybe it's designed for a different audience, which is adoptees. I don't know, you’d have to make the decision. Then you're choosing the parts of the story that connect to what you want to say about that. So the beliefs or teaching points that you have just like with a business book, actually. So you might not say them directly, you might not have a teaching part of the book, but even being aware of it is helpful.
So one of the student alumns in my workshop is writing a memoir, that is a non-linear essays about she was born a conjoined twin and then her twin passed away as an adult. And so her memoir is about living with her twin, Emily, and then her name is Francesca, the author. She's a brilliant writer. And also living without her. But it's for people, it's not just about that. It's for people who consider themselves to be the survivors. So she has messages in each chapter, but you they're just inferred in the story she chooses the to tell.
So that's the way I would do it. If you were trying to write it to say help a specific person. So you have three options, in my view. Give it all to your family, write a memoir that is not in any way message memoir at all and then choose accordingly, or align your stories based on the messages you want to share about the experience.
Josh Steimle: It's funny because I tell my students in my courses and the people I'm coaching, the same thing all the time. You've got to focus on that audience. You got to figure out who your ideal audience is. That one person and that one person only. It gets harder when you're doing it for yourself though, because you think I want this to work for this person and this person, I want them all to get something out of it.
It's hard to choose, isn’t it?
AJ Harper: It is, but you’ve got that ideal reader, but then you have what I call the peripheral audience. And those are people that will find the book anyway. So you know. You've written books. You've helped people with countless books. Other people will find it anyway. If it's good, people find it. If people are reading something great, they talk about it, and other people find it. So I don't think you really have to worry about the peripheral audience finding your book. They will.
Josh Steimle: There's so many things to balance because part of it is that it's not just my story, but it's also my daughter's story, who we adopted and we adopted her at 14. She's 16 now. And so I've told her, like, “Hey I am writing a book about your adoption.” She's like, “Okay, great.” Because she doesn't really know what that means. And she won't really know what that means for a long time. So then I think, is it fair for me to put this book out there when it's also her story?
So I have doubts about that, but then I feel like when I was going through this process as an adoptive parent, I really would have liked to have read this book or a book like this. And so then I feel like I have this obligation to put it out there, but do I really need to? Am I doing this for the right reasons? All sorts of things to balance when you're writing about real people in real life and there's personal stuff.
AJ Harper: If you had this for people who are considering adoption, and maybe even you’re going to write it for people who are considering adopting an older child, really specifically. The way that shapes the book then is so fascinating. And then it's really not about your daughter actually. Then it's about the reader and what parts of your story are helpful. And I just think it's easier then for family members to appreciate. When it's just a memoir, it feels like, why are you sharing this story? But when it's in service to this specific group, I don't know. I think it's easier to present it that way.
Josh Steimle: One thing I have found helpful is that I've done all this writing, right? I spent a lot of time researching family history and writing up that part because I was thinking about my kids reading this and thinking how I want them to know their ancestry and some of these stories and where it came from. It's not like I delete that and it goes away and disappears. It's just, if I'm going to publish this, it gets chopped off. And then that becomes something that I just share personally privately with my family. But I think sometimes people get it in their heads that, “Oh, but if I delete this, then it's just gone forever. Nobody will ever see it or anything.” But it's like, No, you might use that later on. It might be part of a different book, it might be part of a blog or something that's released in a different form. Like it doesn't have to go away forever. I dunno. For me, that makes it easier to let go and start chopping things out, knowing that it's not necessarily the end of that content.
AJ Harper: Yeah. I think that's a great attitude and it's also not wasted if you never give it to anyone, because sometimes it's a process of figuring out how you feel about it or where you stand on something. And so those words may never see the light of day, but they informed the words that do.
Josh Steimle: Yes. And this was something I wanted to ask about earlier and I forgot. I'm glad you brought that back up, which is, it does seem like sometimes the exercise of writing something is valuable, even if you don't use it, because it informs what comes next or it helps you sort things out. I think of an artist. Artists, painters often do what's called a study, right?
Where they'll do sketches of something. They might even do a painting that they know is not THE painting, but it's practice for the painting. And sometimes you look at all the work that goes into it behind the scenes, and they may have done 30 or 40 or 50 studies before they actually paint the painting that they're painting.
We always think, “Oh, DaVinci, he just sat down and just painted the Mona Lisa.” He might've done a hundred sketches of that before he ever painted and we just don't know about the sketches or something. What's your take on that in the writing world? Where do you see that being useful to have that practice on things? Even if it doesn't make it into the final manuscript?
AJ Harper: I think it’s essential. I think writing practice is vital, even if you don't think of yourself as an artist. If you're deciding to write a book and you're going to do it on your own, then you are, you just have to come to terms with the fact that you are an artist, whether you like it or not. And part of that process is surrendering to that creativity of just playing with stuff and trying things. I think we're too worried about, is this right? Does this go here? Am I using the right tone? Is this good? And the creative process is about, Hey, let me try that. What does this sound like? What does this feel like? And letting yourself imagine things and practice with things, knowing it may not actually be something people are going to consume.
Josh Steimle: Now you've worked with some high profile authors and you don't need to mention names, but I'm curious, has there been times working with these high profile authors where you're like, Man, this person could not write a book to save their life, it's a good thing that I'm here helping them out. What are some of the behind the scenes stories about these authors and some of the struggles they face or the insecurities or the lack of skill? And yet they were able to get a book out that has done really well.
AJ Harper: I’m going to be honest with you, the people who were the most successful, they don't lose any sleep over it. If they can't write the book, they're hiring the ghosts, they're getting it done. They're not worried about that. It's the people who are hiring a ghost, and I know that you have services like that, and it's the people who are hiring a ghost and they're just starting, that feel nervous about it. But the folks who are really successful they're really fine. They just, they're looking for the best person to help them execute, and I don't think they're tangled up more about that at all.
The people who are the most successful, sometimes I had to track them down to get 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there. One time, it was someone I can't name and I had to get about a thousand words on something. And so they said, “Okay, I'm standing. I'm about ready to board my plane.” So I had, from the time they were standing in line, there was all this background noise in the airport. And I had to wait and then as soon as they got to their seat, I had to stop. So I had this very short window to ask. But the thing is that the pros, you ask them a prompt and it comes out like butter. They just know their stuff. So from a seven minute conversation in an airport, I could write a thousand words. The newer people, they need a lot of help because they aren't really sure what their voice is yet. So people who are really successful, they know their message, they know their audience, they know who they are, and what they're supposed to sound like.
Josh Steimle: So that's interesting because, it sounds like if you're insecure writing your own book, hiring a ghost writer is not necessarily the solution because you might be insecure with that process as well.
AJ Harper: Yeah, it's true. A good ghost to someone who is also a little bit like a therapist and is helping you through all of that process. It's not a coincidence that many of the people that I ghosted for ended up becoming very close friends because it's a pretty intimate process. There are some ghosting things where I barely ever spoke to anybody. So it definitely was not an intimate process. But yeah, it's pretty nerve wracking to put any book out in the world, whether someone wrote it for you or not. It’s nerve wracking for me right now. It's been 17 years and countless books as we said, but I'm pretty nervous about it.
Josh Steimle: Well the book is looking great and it sounds great. So I'm excited to see this get out there.
For those of you listening, I have an advanced copy. We're currently recording this, it's April 13th, the book's coming out May 24th, 2022. Is that correct?
AJ Harper: Yep.
Josh Steimle: Okay. That's what it says on the cover right there. Advanced copy. So by the time this episode comes out, either the book's going to be out or it's going to be very close to being out. I know it's up for pre-sale on Amazon right now. So even if this episode comes out before the actual release date, people can still go order it and then it will ship to you once it gets in stock at Amazon.
So with the ghost writers you've worked for… And I'm sorry, I'm asking you all these questions about ghostwriting, even though that's not what you're focused on these days. But when you're ghost writing somebody's book, about how much time on average would you say that you're putting into these books? And I know it varies because books are different lengths. There's different types of books and different clients are different to work with. But you have ghost written like a hundred bucks. So if you had to average that out, how much time would you say both hours and months or years, would you say, what's the average for getting a book done?
AJ Harper: Oh gosh, that's hard. And the other variable is how available is that person? So there's sometimes I'd have a project that all of a sudden would stop for six months. And that kind of depends. If I only had one book to write and I had total access to the person and it was say roughly 70,000 - 75,000 words. It would probably take me three solid months, three to four solid months to finish the draft. Yeah. To be ready to go on to their editor at whatever publishing house they had.
Josh Steimle: Got it. And how many hours of time with the person would you spend? Cause you were saying, Hey, seven minute conversation. You can get a thousand words out of that, but sometimes you're talking for hours. Sometimes you're getting tidbits here and there. What would you say is the average time you spend with the client? Is it 10 hours, 20 hours, 50 hours?
AJ Harper: If it's a new client, it's much more. So probably at least of just discovery calls, I don't know, at least 15 hours. And I'm not taking the interview and just turning it into the book to be clear. I'm asking a bunch of questions to try and get at the heart of it because in my experience… And I talk about this in my book. That's how I developed the reader first methodology, because most of the people I talked to had no idea how to talk about their reader, did not have clarity about their message, did not know what they were promising, had no idea which content to includ,e and didn't know how to organize it. So the discovery calls were mostly, what is this book we're doing here? Then I would go off to my cave. And one of my superpowers is sequencing and figuring out how things should flow. So I would do that and then give them a couple chapters to see if I had nailed their voice. And then the calls would start up again, just filling in blanks. Oh, we need another story here. We would also do, maybe, depending on the type of maybe 20 to 30 hours of interviewing together of other people for their book. So I would go have them line up some people to interview and then together we would interview. So that would be another 20 hours or so. Yeah.
Josh Steimle: Okay. Great to have those insights. Thanks so much, AJ, for being with us here today. Again, if you're listening to this. If you're watching this on YouTube, AJ Harper, her new books coming out, Write a Must-Read. If you were an author trying to write a book, then this is a must read. AJ, thanks so much for being with us here today and sharing all your thoughts and wisdom on the writing process and best of luck to you with a book release.
AJ Harper: Thanks for having me. Thanks so much.