Ghostwriting, Productized

Your Expertise, Published.

A real, published book on what you know — ghostwritten in your voice by Leanpub’s industry-leading ghostwriting process: GhostAI drafting from three deep interviews, chapter-by-chapter professional editing, published everywhere in 90 days. It starts with a half-hour call.

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Leanpub

The Definitive Guide to Product Discovery

by You

The service

The business card that’s a book

In every field, the person who wrote the book outranks the person who wrote the deck. Consultants, advisors, coaches, fractional executives: your next client is comparing you to someone — and “they wrote the book on it” ends the comparison. A book is the one credibility asset you can hand a prospect that keeps selling after the meeting ends.

You know the options. Write it yourself: five hundred hours you’d otherwise bill. Hire a freelance ghostwriter: months of back-and-forth, and editing, design, and publishing are still on you. Or an agency: $50,000 and up — where most engagements end at a manuscript rather than a published book, and the full-service firms that do publish measure their timelines in a year, not 90 days.

The Expert Book is ghostwriting, productized: the same Leanpub pipeline behind our founder-led books — three deep interviews, GhostAI drafting from your recorded words, a professional editor on every chapter — at the price the process makes possible, all-in through publication everywhere.

The definitive book on what you do is still unwritten. Publish it, and every pitch you make afterward starts from “I wrote the book on this.” Instant credibility, compounding forever.

How it works

You talk. GhostAI writes. A Leanpub editor refines. You approve.

You talk — three times. Three recorded interviews with your Leanpub editor, GhostAI interviewing alongside — about 90 minutes each, one a week, booked at checkout. The first is the map: your argument, your audience and your outline. The second is the method: how you actually do the thing you know best. The third is the proof: the stories, the cases and the objections you’ve answered a hundred times. Plus everything you already have: talks, posts, podcast appearances, internal docs. It all feeds the draft — and the first draft lands after the third interview, not the first.
GhostAI writes. GhostAI is the suite of AI skills we built at Leanpub on Anthropic’s frontier model, Claude Fable 5. It studies your three recorded interviews and your writing samples, learns your voice, and drafts your book in it — and your editor reads every chapter against how you actually talk. Fidelity to your voice is checked by a person, not assumed.
A Leanpub editor refines. A professional editor from the Leanpub team — working with the AI editing tools we built — reviews and refines every chapter before you see it. The process is the product: the same pipeline behind our founder-led books, run by the team that built it.
You approve. You get the whole draft a couple of weeks after your third interview, then two recorded review sessions with your editor: one to react to the whole book and go deep where you want, one for final touch-ups and sign-off. Nothing publishes until you’ve approved it.

You choose whether to ship with a colophon — “How this book was made” — disclosing the method: recorded conversations and your writing samples, drafted by GhostAI in your voice, checked chapter by chapter, refined by a Leanpub editor, approved by you.

What we never do is ship words you haven’t approved. Every chapter passes your editor’s review and your sign-off before it publishes.

The fit

Who the Expert Book is for

It is for a particular kind of expert, and the call is where we both find out whether you are one.

You are known for something — consulting, advising, coaching, a practice you run — and your next client is comparing you to someone.
Most of the book is still in your head, and three interviews, one a week, is how it comes out: the map, the method, the proof.
You can give it under twelve hours over 90 days, with zero writing, and you want it published everywhere rather than handed back as a manuscript.

It is not for you if you cannot find three ninety-minute interviews, one a week, in the next month: the draft is written from all three, and fewer makes a thinner book. If the book already exists in your articles, decks and talks and you have about five hours for it, The Authority Book ($36,000) is written from that material, on your schedule. If you are the founder of an early-stage startup racing a date, The Founder Book ($18,000) is the compressed service. We would tell you that on the call.

What's included

One Price. Everything Included.

No tiers, no add-ons, no founder’s calendar to wait on. The Expert Book is the productized version of the process.

Three interviews, one book

The Expert Book

A real, published book on your expertise — 20,000 to 50,000 words, ghostwritten in your voice from three deep recorded interviews plus your writing samples, refined by a professional Leanpub editor, and published everywhere in 90 days — launched with a podcast episode and a short interview video.

We make one at a time. The deposit takes it, and closes it to everyone else until two months from the day it’s booked.

$24,000USD all-in

Paid in 6 equal monthly installments of $4000. The first, at booking, holds your start date.

Book a half-hour call

20,000–50,000 words, ghostwritten in your voice — from three interviews, not one
Published in 90 days, from your first interview to your book live everywhere
Every format, print-ready: PDF and EPUB on Leanpub; Kindle, paperback, and hardcover on Amazon
100 paperback copies and 10 hardcover copies sent to you via Amazon; additional copies of either at cost whenever you need them
A crawlable store page and free sample chapters — the surface answer engines read
A gated free edition that captures reader emails, with their consent
A launch interview video — a short, ~10-minute interview
A launch-timed episode of the Leanpub Podcast — typically a 30- to 60-minute interview, published on the Leanpub YouTube channel and on your book page
A feature in our weekly newsletter, which reaches 90,000 readers, and our monthly newsletter, which reaches 130,000 readers
Six sessions — three interviews, two reviews, plus one to record your podcast episode — under 12 hours of your time, zero writing
Copyright and royalties are yours; the book publishes under your name

For calibration: agencies charge $50,000 and up, mostly delivering a manuscript — and the full-service firms that publish take a year or more. The Expert Book is all-in through publication, in 90 days.

These are Leanpub books — the same store that has been publishing developer books for 15 years. We decline books we don’t believe in; everything we accept goes on the shelf next to them.

Your time

Your effort budget, to the minute

Your expertise is the product. Three interviews get all of it out of your head; here is the entire budget:

What	Your time
The half-hour call that starts it	30 minutes
Three interviews — the map, the method, the proof — one a week	90 minutes each
The draft review session — the whole book lands; you react, we go deep	60–90 minutes
The final review session — touch-ups and sign-off	60–90 minutes
Recording your episode of the Leanpub Podcast	90 minutes
Recording your launch interview video	30 minutes
Total	Under 12 hours

Our promise:
“You get a real, published book on your expertise, and its launch, in under 12 hours of your time — with zero writing.”

A book normally costs its author over 300 hours of writing. Yours costs you under twelve — three interviews and the launch included.

Frequently asked questions

FAQs

Is it my voice?

Yes — and it’s checked, not assumed. GhostAI drafts only from your raw material — your recorded interviews plus your writing samples — and your editor reads every chapter against how you actually talk, then refines it before you ever see it. In your review sessions you flag anything that doesn’t sound like you.

Do I approve everything?

Yes — you get the whole draft, then two recorded review sessions: one to react to the whole book and go deep where you want, one for final touch-ups. Nothing publishes until you’ve signed off.

Who owns it?

You do. Copyright and royalties. The book publishes under your name — on the Leanpub store and on Amazon.

Who actually works on my book?

A professional Leanpub editor runs your engagement end to end, working with GhostAI — the same pipeline behind every Leanpub ghostwritten book. The process is the product: it doesn’t depend on any one person’s calendar, which is why it never waits on a slot.

Isn’t this AI slop?

No — this is ghostwriting, productized. Business books have been ghostwritten for as long as there have been business books: Lee Iacocca’s autobiography — the defining CEO bestseller — was written with William Novak, and David Goggins wrote Can’t Hurt Me with Adam Skolnick. We do it proudly — and honestly: the great literary memoirs take hundreds of interview hours and years of writing, and we’re not claiming that. We’re claiming a sharp, polished, professional book in your voice, in 90 days. Slop is undisclosed, unaccountable generation. This is the opposite: drafted only from your recorded words and writing samples, checked chapter by chapter against your voice, refined by a professional editor, and approved by you before anything publishes.

How is it different from the other two?

The Founder Book ($18,000) is the compressed service, for a startup founder with a date: one interview instead of three, a short book, scheduled around your Demo Day and published in 28 days instead of 90. It’s the least expensive of the four — it’s only for founders of early-stage startups, priced for a seed-stage budget — and it’s paid on startup terms: $9000 at booking, the other $9000 six months later. The Executive Book ($72,000) is the deepest: Peter Armstrong, the founder of Leanpub, writes it from six to eight deep interviews with you, one a week, and up to three review sessions, on a full-length book — 40,000 to 80,000 words — published in four months, with French, German and Spanish editions and an audiobook included. Same process on all three; what changes is how much of you goes into the book before the first draft, the pace, and how you pay.

Can my company pay for it?

Of course — company-sponsored books are welcome. We support card, invoice, PO, and wire, and we’ll work with your procurement process.

It starts with a half-hour call

Thirty minutes with the Leanpub team, and it runs both ways. You find out what the book would be — we talk through your expertise, the raw material you already have (talks, posts, client work) and what your table of contents could look like — and whether three interviews over 90 days is what you want. We find out whether there is a book in it, and whether this is your service or another is. If we don’t believe there’s a book in it, or it belongs with another service, we will say so right on the call.