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Founder Ghostwriting Service

“They Wrote the
Book on It.”

A real, published book on your category — ghostwritten in your voice, from just a few hours of you talking. It starts with a half-hour call.

Book a half-hour callSee everything you get

Leanpub

The Definitive Guide to Agent Evals

by You

Why a book

The week after Demo Day, every deck looks the same

Your whole batch has a deck, a launch post, and roughly the same round. A launch post has a 48-hour half-life. GitHub stars mean nothing to a VP. A benchmark table dies at the next model release. All of it works on developers. None of it works in the rooms where your next round and your first big deals get decided — rooms you are not in.

“They wrote the book on agent evals” is a sentence other people say for you, in exactly those rooms. The partner who wants to lead your round has to re-sell you at the Monday partner meeting, to a partnership you never get to pitch — this is the sentence they carry in. Your champion says it to their VP to push the pilot through procurement. The candidate who Googles you before betting a career on a six-person company finds an author, not another deck. There is no such sentence for stars, benchmarks, or launch posts. A book is the only credibility signal with a stock English idiom attached.

Your own tribe just proved it: Principles of Building AI Agents, by Mastra’s cofounder (YC W25), is 133 pages — and it’s everywhere. (To be clear: we were not involved with that book in any way. We’re linking it here since we think it’s the perfect example of a startup using a small book tactically for big marketing benefits.) The short book has always been the form: Rework is about 27,000 words and was a bestseller; The Mom Test is 33,700 words and sits on university syllabi. Short is the point.

Books carry so much positioning and reputational weight that Stripe — a payments company — built an entire publishing house to own them. You can get yours in 28 days for the price of a conference booth. Start early enough to have printed copies to hand out at Demo Day, or start after it and your book is live while your round is still open.

The definitive book on the exact problem your startup is solving is still unwritten. Once we ghostwrite it with you, you are the person who wrote the definitive book on it. So, of course the startup you founded should be the one best positioned to solve it, no? Instant credibility.

How it works

You talk. GhostAI writes. A Leanpub expert edits. You review.

  1. You talk. One deep recorded interview — 90 to 150 minutes, booked at checkout — and you sit down with a Leanpub expert while GhostAI interviews alongside us. You pitch all the time. This is that, but friendlier. During this first session, we interactively build out your book’s outline with you, combining our editorial judgment and the GhostAI skills. Plus your existing public writing: launch posts, blog posts, talks, podcast appearances. Plus, provide us with any internal documentation you can share.
  2. GhostAI writes. GhostAI is the suite of AI skills we built at Leanpub on Anthropic’s frontier model, Claude Fable 5. The skills teach Fable to write like you: it studies your recorded interview and your writing samples (public blog posts, conference talk recordings, and private samples you provide, like emails or university essays), learns your voice, and drafts book-length chapters in it — at a speed no human ghostwriter can touch. Every chapter is drafted from your own words — and read against them by a Leanpub expert before it goes any further.
  3. A Leanpub expert edits. Every chapter is reviewed and edited by a Leanpub expert, in conjunction with the AI editing tools we built — read against your interview and your writing samples, so what sounds like you stays and what doesn’t goes. That combination is the whole point: Fable 5 ghostwriting guided by the team that built GhostAI, plus full human review. You get incredible quality and incredible speed, in your voice. The result is polished and professional.
  4. You review it with us. Shortly after the interview, you get the draft of the whole book. In a second recorded session we go through it together — you react to the whole thing, go deep on the sections that matter, and just talk; that conversation feeds straight back into GhostAI. The third session is the final review: touch-ups and sign-off before we publish.

You can choose to ship with an optional colophon — “How this book was made” — disclosing the whole method: recorded conversations and your writing samples, drafted by GhostAI in your voice, read against your recordings and edited by a Leanpub expert, reviewed and approved by you.

What we never do is ship words you haven’t approved. Every chapter passes a Leanpub expert’s edit and your own review before it publishes.

The fit

Who the Founder Book is for

It is for a particular kind of founder at a particular moment, and the call is where we both find out whether that is you.

  • You founded an early-stage startup: you have raised a seed round, or you are in an accelerator.
  • You have a date the book has to be live for — Demo Day, a raise, a launch — and 28 days is the point.
  • You can give it one deep interview and two review sessions inside those 28 days: under eight hours, zero writing.

It is not for you if you are not the founder of an early-stage startup, or if there is no date to race. Then the depth matters more than the speed, and The Expert Book ($24,000) is the same process from three interviews instead of one, published in 90 days, with no date to schedule around. We would tell you that on the call.

What's included

One Price. Built Around Your Date.

Your book, scheduled around your date — for founders of early-stage startups: you’ve raised a seed, or you’re in an accelerator. The half-hour call works out what it’s about and when it needs to be live.

Startup terms

$9000 at booking holds your start date, and the date the book is scheduled around

The other $9000 is due six months later — on the assumption that by then, you’ll have closed your round.

That’s deliberate: before Demo Day, your cash belongs in your company — so we carry half, and bet it on you.

Scheduled around your date

The Founder Book

A real, published book on the problem your startup is solving — ghostwritten in your voice from one deep recorded interview plus your writing samples, then refined with you across two review sessions. Everything included. One price.

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

$18,000USD all-in

$9000 at booking, $9000 six months later.

Book a half-hour call
  • 15,000–30,000 words, ghostwritten in your voice — about 70 to 140 pages, the length an investor actually reads
  • Published in 28 days — from your first session to your book live everywhere; printed copies arrive on Amazon’s shipping schedule
  • 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, so you can give them to potential investors and prospects
  • Additional copies of either whenever you need them, ordered at cost from Amazon KDP as author copies
  • 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
  • Four sessions — three to make the book (record, iterate, review), plus one to record your podcast episode — under eight hours all-in

For calibration: premium ghostwriting agencies charge $50,000 to $150,000 and up — and take about a year.

But frankly, who cares about all that. As a startup, what you are racing against is time. That’s why we win. Against human ghostwriting of any kind, our difference is fidelity and speed: drafted from your own recorded words, in your voice, published in 28 days, scheduled around your date.

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

Frankly, since you’re in an accelerator, your time is more valuable than ours. That’s why we’ve built the Founder Book process to support you and help you win.

WhatYour time
The call that starts it30 minutes
The interview — you pitch all day; this is that90–150 minutes
The draft review session — the whole book lands; you react, we go deep60–90 minutes
The final review session — touch-ups and sign-off60–90 minutes
Recording your episode of the Leanpub Podcast90 minutes
Recording your launch interview video30 minutes
TotalUnder 8 hours

Our promise:

“You get a book you can use tactically in your fundraising and marketing, in under 8 hours of your time.”

A book normally costs its author over 300 hours of writing. Yours costs you less than 8 hours, with zero writing. And if you make the sessions, we make the 28 days — the draft is never the bottleneck.

Frequently asked questions

FAQs

Is it my voice?

Yes — and it’s checked by people who have listened to you. We built AI skills so Fable learns how to write like you: GhostAI drafts only from your raw material — the interview plus your writing samples — and a Leanpub expert reads every chapter against how you actually talk, then edits it before you ever see it. In the review sessions you flag anything that doesn’t sound like you.

Do I approve everything?

Yes — but not chapter-by-chapter with a thumbs-up button. You get the whole draft after the interview, then two recorded review sessions with us: 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.

What if you sell this to my whole batch?

Honestly, we’re not that good at marketing. But even if we were: your book is in your voice, about your topic — another founder’s book, even in a category near yours, is a totally different book by a completely different person. The signal is your name and your thinking.

Who owns it?

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

Isn’t this AI slop?

No — this is ghostwriting, compressed and brought into the AI era. 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. Most important CEO books are ghostwritten. You’re an important CEO. Yours is too — and we do it proudly. And honestly: the great literary memoirs take hundreds of interview hours and years of writing — we’re not claiming that. We’re claiming a sharp, polished, professional book in your voice, in 28 days instead of three years. Slop is undisclosed, unaccountable generation. This is the opposite — a book made of conversation: you’re interviewed by a Leanpub expert working with GhostAI; you talk through the whole draft with us in your review sessions; and when the book ships, we interview you twice more — on camera for your launch video, and for your episode of the Leanpub Podcast. Underneath it all: a Leanpub expert reading every chapter against how you actually talk and editing all of it, and your sign-off before anything publishes — with an optional colophon disclosing the method. Slop has no one standing behind it. This does.

Why does the Founder Book cost less than the Expert Book?

Because it’s the compressed one. One interview, a short book, 28 days, scheduled around your date — the same editing and the same launch as the Expert Book, with less of your time and less of ours in it. And because of who it’s for: only founders of early-stage startups, and before Demo Day your cash belongs in your company. So it’s priced for a seed-stage budget, and half of it waits: $9000 at booking, the other $9000 six months later — likely after your round has closed. We carry that half, and bet it on you. The Expert Book ($24,000) is the deeper book for everyone else: three interviews instead of one, 20,000 to 50,000 words, published in 90 days, paid in 6 monthly installments, no date to schedule around. Not a founder of an early-stage startup, or not racing a date? Then the Expert Book is the one for you, and we’ll say so on the call.

What if I’m not racing a batch?

Then you probably don’t need the compression — you need the depth. The Expert Book ($24,000) is the same process and the same launch — podcast episode and launch video included — with three interviews behind the draft instead of one and a longer book, 20,000 to 50,000 words, published in 90 days, paid in 6 monthly installments, with no date to schedule around. The Executive Book ($72,000) is the deepest: six to eight interviews, 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. The Founder Book is built for exactly one moment: scheduled around your date, on startup terms.

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 category, the raw material you already have (talks, posts, podcast appearances) and what your table of contents could look like — and whether 28 days around your date is what you want. We find out whether there is a book in it, and whether this is your service or the Expert Book 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. We only want to do this if it helps you win.

Book a half-hour call