Turning Spoken Words Into a Book

Ghostwriting is an exercise in adaptation. My role is to adapt my client’s story or ideas to the written page. In some cases my clients have started with a wealth of material in their podcasts. The task, then, is to adapt hours of interviews and recordings to a book.

Here are three ways I’ve done that with recent clients.

The client wanted a compilation of interviews to mark a milestone in the podcast as she stepped into a more prominent public speaking role. She selected the interviews. The challenge was to capture the wisdom of each guest in a way that balanced their biography – and some were amazing stories – along with their approach to the podcast topic. Each chapter was structured a story to capture this.

The author was a public speaker with a podcast. He was incredibly knowledgeable on his topic and spearheaded some niche discussions on his theme. In the development process, we trawled his podcast and blog for information to piece together to support the main ideas of the podcast. Some chapters partially came from keynote presentations he’d done, and other chapters the client made a presentation just for me that covered the material. He was very comfortable talking about the topic. He was hiring me to write it. Adapting this way meant connecting different ideas that had been separate, or finding other threads to weave ideas together. The goal was to complete a book that stood by itself as a companion to the podcast. The book helped the author capitalise on further speaking engagements, and opened opportunities to work with industry leaders.

This author was well versed in his topic and it wasn’t his first book. He had outlined the goals of the book then spent a year building the podcast around it. When we developed the book we found other directions some chapters could go, and he covered those topics and interviews while I was ghostwriting the book. This approach also developed his audience with the book in mind, meaning that he had done a heap of marketing before the book was released.