When I work with executives and authors on long-form books, reports, and articles, my job is often less about putting their ideas into words than helping them discover what they actually want to say. That requires the skills of a journalist, editor, coach—and, occasionally, a jazz musician.
Long-form writing is like jazz. True improvisers don’t decide their response in advance. They listen to the moves someone else makes and answer them. That back and forth is the music. But the sound is based on a solid tradition, a well-crafted plan, and deep knowledge.
It helps tremendously in my profession coaching book and report authors to be a working musician. Sometimes I step back to reach alignment on an outline about what we’re trying to say, so we can productively improvise from there, like a musical chart a jazz orchestra follows. Sometimes I pop off questions in an interview, call and response style, to see what develops live.
Sometimes, I’m like the band leader, listening to the tangle of signals from everything we’ve assembled and picking out the arguments, or the patter of notes, I think we should or should not follow.
Some authors arrive with a rough outline or draft and need help pressure-testing the argument so we can take it to the next level. Others have a book or report in them but no structure yet. My job is to ask questions that pull their best ideas out of them, so that we can find the shape of their unique point of view together.
Other times, I’m adamant about defending the rights of the reader to clear, concise, and logical prose when authors want to impose their nonprofessional opinions about grammar, style, and argumentation. I win little business when I push back as an expert with decades of experience shaping and teaching the effective use of language.
Confident writers may want me to coach them as they write, with direct, sometimes uncomfortable feedback about what isn’t working yet, and what could work with more thinking and tinkering. AI is a huge help, and I often use its advice in supporting my arguments that something doesn’t make a bit of sense logically. AI is supremely logical, but be warned, it can argue in circles. Many projects get stuck for all-too-human reasons of perfectionism, tunnel vision, or inattention.
What I’ve learned managing ghostwriters for one of the biggest management consulting companies in the world, and from years of helping authors with more than a dozen books, is that the writing is only part of it. Clients think they are hiring a writer. They are actually hiring a thought partner, one with the potential to magnify their business impact as a consultant, executive, or entrepreneur.
Long-form writing like books also need positioning—comparable titles, the right publishers and agents to approach, a real strategy for pitching it. That comes from deep expertise in publishing. AI cannot remotely handle the tasks involved.
This combination is rarer than many people expect: deep experience on the publishing side, plus the ability to inhabit someone else’s argument and voice. My sweet spot is developmental work on the messiest of drafts that few sane editors would touch without tripling their rates, or giving up, which I rarely do. Let’s talk if you want that kind of human touch.