The Founder Story Kit has four exercises, and it takes about 90 minutes over two sittings. You'll record the story you tell when someone asks how you got into this, find the tension in it, write it at three lengths, and build an About page around it. It also includes 8 of the 64 interview questions from The Story Excavation Method.

Paid subscribers get the kit as a Google Doc you can type straight into, just like the first two toolkits.

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That story is where I'd start, because it carries the most useful thing I know about brand stories. Credentials make people respect you. One specific, slightly unexpected detail makes them remember you, and remembering is what gets you the call.

Most About pages are written for a skeptic

Most of the About pages I read are working hard to prove something, with years in business, degrees, and a row of client logos. All of that is true, and it's worth including. But it's written for a skeptic, and most people who land on your About page aren't skeptical yet. They're curious! They want to know who they'd be working with.

And yet when founders sit down to write that page, the dinner story is usually the first thing to go, because it doesn't seem professional enough.

What the dinner version has that the website doesn't

The dinner version starts in a moment. "I was standing in my kitchen at 4 a.m. with forty dozen cookies and no oven big enough to bake them" puts the reader somewhere before you've asked them for anything. "Founded in 2015, we're a family-owned bakery committed to quality" doesn't put them anywhere at all.

It also has a problem in it. Something went wrong, or cost more than you expected, or didn't make sense until later. That tension is why people lean in when you tell it, and it's the first thing that gets sanded off when the story moves to a website.

And it sounds like you. Nobody has ever said "committed to quality" across a dinner table.

How to get it onto the page

Tonight, before you type anything, tell the story out loud to your phone, the way you'd tell a friend who asked. We all tend to sound more like ourselves when we talk than when we type, and the recording keeps the parts your typing fingers would tidy away.

If more than one story comes to mind, or none does yet, The Story Excavation Method has 64 interview questions, organized by the chapters of your life and career, to help you find the one that's yours.

Then play it back and listen for the first moment where something specific happens. That's where your About page starts. Keep your credentials, but move them lower on the page. By the time a reader reaches them, they'll already want to believe them.

If you'd like to know where your story is weakest before you start, the free Story Gap Diagnostic takes about four minutes and shows you the one gap to close first.

Next month, I'll be looking at why most origin stories start too early, and how to find where yours really begins.

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Each month I'll pull one passage from a book I'm writing and show you two versions of it: what it looked like when it reached my desk, and what it looks like now. Then I'll walk you through the decisions I made in between. Th…

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On Tuesday I asked you to write one sentence before anything else: who the book is for, what it shows them, and what they'll be able to do when they finish. This is the longer version, the way I walk clients through it in our …

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When that answer is fuzzy, every page turns into a negotiation. Should this story go in? Is this too technical? Too personal? You end up arguing with yourself line by line, and after a few months of that, the draft simply goes quiet. When the answer is clear, most of those questions answer themselves.

Writing to one person

Your book will reach plenty of people, but it should sound as if it were written to one. Picture a real person, ideally someone you've worked with, advised, or raised. Write down who they are, what problem they're living with right now, and what they've already tried that didn't work. Then answer the question that matters most of all: when they finish your book, what will they be able to do, believe, or decide that they couldn't before?

The second decision is what the book should do for you. A book can do several jobs, but one of them has to lead, because that choice shapes the length, the tone, and the very last page.

• If you mainly want clients, show your method in enough detail to prove you know it, then point readers to the next step with you. Shorter is often better.

• If you want to get booked to speak, build each chapter around a story you could tell from a stage. Event planners read the table of contents first.

• If you want to be the person your industry quotes, lead with a point of view people will argue about. A book that agrees with everyone is easy to forget.

• If it's for your family, give the stories room. They'll care about the scenes far more than the lessons.

If more than one of those feels true, choose the one you'd keep if you could only keep one.

Your one sentence

Fill this in, then rewrite it until it sounds like something you'd actually say to a friend:

This book is for ______ who ______. Through the story of ______, it shows them how to ______. When they finish, they'll ______.

Keep it right next to you while you write. When a story doesn't serve it, that story belongs in a different book. When you feel stuck, read it aloud, and if it needs rewriting, rewriting it counts as progress.

This sentence is the first step of The Manuscript Map, my seven-step method for writing the book yourself, in case you want a guide for the six that come after it.

See The Manuscript Map

What stuck sounds like

Nobody has ever said to me, "I don't know who my book is for." What they say sounds more like this:

• "I've got three chapters from two years ago and no idea how to restart."

• "I've got too much material. Is this a memoir or a business book?"

• "Every time I sit down, I rewrite the first chapter."

• "My calendar fills with things that have deadlines, and the book never does."

Every one of those traces back to the missing sentence. Without it, there's no way to tell which stories belong or when a chapter is finished, so the book loses every contest for your time. With it, a free hour comes with an obvious next task.

I'll show you what that looked like for one client. Her book had been "in process" for almost a decade, and she'd been stuck on Chapter 3 for more than a year. She had the story, what happened to her health and how she got herself well again. What she didn't have was a way for readers to do what she'd done. She could tell them about it, but she couldn't yet show them how. Once we saw that together, her sentence came together too: the book was for moms who didn't feel like themselves anymore, and when they finished, they'd have a protocol they could follow to heal the way she had. We built the second half of the book around those protocols, each one laid out the same way so a tired mom could pick it up and use it. We finished nine months later.

"When I met Nikki, I had been stuck on Chapter 3 for over a year and the book had been 'in process' for almost a decade. With her guidance and expertise, we finished the book in nine months. I count it among my greatest accomplishments."

Business leader, hybrid memoir and success principles for life and business

Would you send me your sentence, even a rough one? Reply with it, and I'll tell you whether it's specific enough yet.

From my desk to yours,
Nikki

P.S. The Manuscript Map is my client method, laid out so you can work through it on your own. It comes as a Google Doc workbook with a manuscript tracker and a starter file, for $397, and you can see everything in it here. Paid subscribers also get the step-by-step worksheet behind today's essay later this week. And next Tuesday, I'm sharing five of the questions I ask clients before we ever start recording.

In the essay I shared the four habits I mark first. This is the whole voice edit I run on a chapter, in the order I run it, and I love this part of the work so much. Everything happens on screen, in a Google Doc or Word, with nothing f…

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In that essay I said your spoken story is already a draft, and that three decisions turn it into a chapter: where it opens, where the tension sits, and what you leave out. This is how I make those decisions with my clients, step by step, …

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Sometimes an AI tool did the writing. Just as often, it's a smart, accomplished person trying very hard to sound like a Writer with a capital W. Readers feel it either way, usually long before they could tell you why, and they stop trusting the book one page at a time.

That matters more for your book than for almost anything else you'll ever write. A prospective client reading it is deciding whether to hire you. A grandchild reading it is meeting you. If the pages sound like a press release, both of them will notice.

These are the four habits I mark first when a manuscript lands on my desk.

Words you'd never say to a friend

Journey, landscape, testament, delve, leverage, navigate, pivotal, transformative. Any one of them is perfectly fine on its own. When half a dozen turn up on the same page, though, the reader can tell that nobody in particular wrote it. I swap each one for the word the author would use if they were telling me about it over coffee. "My career" beats "my professional journey" nearly every time.

The second habit is arguing with a claim nobody made. "This isn't just a book. It's a movement." "It's not about money; it's about freedom." Sentences like these invent an argument just so they can win it. Say the second half on its own. "I wanted freedom" is the stronger sentence.

The third is a story with no scene in it. "After months of persistent networking" gives the reader the summary of a story and skips the story itself. A real story happens somewhere, at a particular time, with another person in the room. So I ask the author what actually happened and who said what, and that's what goes on the page.

The fourth is the lesson arriving before the story, which I touched on in last week's essay about where the tension sits. Plenty of drafts open with the moral: "Securing my first major client taught me the power of relationships." Now the reader has nothing left to find out. (A reader made this exact point in the comments last week, and they were absolutely right.) Tell the story first, and let the reader arrive at the lesson alongside you.

What a voice edit looks like

Here's an example I use in The Manuscript Map. The facts are made up, but the method is exactly what I do.

A raw transcript of an author talking:

So, um, the first year we had the restaurant, I mean, we did not know anything, right? And my partner, Dave, he would say, he always said, you can fix a bad meal but you cannot fix an empty room. And I did not get it at the time. I thought he was just being, you know, Dave. But then that winter we had like three weeks where nobody came in, like nobody, and that is when I got it.

What a machine might write from it:

The early days of restaurant ownership were a crucible of learning. My business partner's wisdom, that an empty dining room is the ultimate challenge, proved prophetic during a particularly difficult winter, underscoring the vital importance of customer acquisition.

The same passage, edited in the author's voice:

The first year we owned the restaurant, we did not know anything. My partner, Dave, had a saying: "You can fix a bad meal, but you cannot fix an empty room." I thought he was just being Dave. Then came that first winter, and three weeks in January when almost no one walked through the door. That is when I understood him.

I kept Dave's line word for word, along with the author's own phrase, "just being Dave." I cut the filler and added one real month. The machine version went in the opposite direction: it traded a real person's words for abstractions and explained the lesson before the reader had a chance to feel it. There isn't a single sentence in it that could only have come from this author.

If you want this kind of edit on your own pages, The Editor's Pen is my full edit of one of your chapters, and The Manuscript Map comes with it.

See The Editor's Pen

A small thing to try tonight

Search your draft for the eight words from the first habit. If you find more than a handful, start your edit there.

"I doubted anyone could write the way I speak. After 15 interviews, Nikki delivered chapters that read exactly like me. When my wife read the draft, she teared up."

Founder, leadership book

And if you come across a sentence that makes you wince, you're welcome to reply with it. I'll fix a few of them, anonymously, in a Note this week.

From my desk to yours,
Nikki

P.S. The whole voice edit I run on every chapter, all six passes in the order I do them, goes to paid subscribers later this week. And next Tuesday, I'm writing about the one sentence every stalled book I've read was missing.

Somewhere on your phone there's a note titled "book idea," and it has been sitting there for years. You've told the story inside it at parties, to old friends, and to at least one stranger on a plane, and every single time, someone says you should write a book.

You agree with them. You may have even started. Most of the people who come to me have a half-finished draft, a folder of notes, or a story they've told so often they could recite it in their sleep. They assume the problem is discipline, and they feel a little embarrassed about it, because they're disciplined about nearly everything else.

In all my years of ghostwriting, I've met very few authors who lacked discipline. I've met so many more who were trying to do a craft job when no one had ever shown them the craft.

Telling a story is different from shaping one

When you tell a story out loud, the room does half the work for you. You can see faces. You notice when people lean in and when their attention starts to drift, and you adjust without even thinking about it. You skip the part about the second meeting because you can feel it dragging, and you slow down right before the line that always gets a laugh.

On the page, nobody leans in. You have to make every one of those decisions in advance, alone, with no faces to read, and three of them decide whether a reader keeps going:

1. Which moment opens the book. Usually it's later in the story than you'd think. Readers will happily wait for the background if the opening scene makes them care first.

2. Where the tension sits. A reader needs to know what was at stake before you tell them how it turned out. Many first drafts announce the lesson in the first paragraph and leave the reader nothing to wait for.

3. What to leave out. This is the hardest one for accomplished people, because everything happened and everything mattered. A book that keeps everything reads like a résumé.

Each of these is a decision, and there are reliable ways to make them. Helping you make them, one Tuesday at a time, is what this newsletter is for.

Your spoken version is already a draft

The version of your story you tell out loud has been edited by every audience that ever heard it. You've already cut what bored people and kept what made them react, which puts that spoken version closer to a good chapter than anything you've typed.

That's why the very first thing I do with a new client is record them talking. The best sentences in most of the books I've written were spoken long before they were typed. The questions I ask in those recordings are in The Story Vault, the full set of 48 I ask every client, if you want to try them on yourself.

If any of this feels familiar

The people who come to me usually describe the same handful of frustrations:

• Someone asks when the book is coming out, and you change the subject.

• A colleague with less to say publishes first, and you feel it more than you'd admit.

• You've started twice, written a few chapters, and stopped both times.

• You've thought about hiring help, then worried the result would read like a brochure with your name on it.

None of these mean you're short on discipline or material. Each one is a symptom of trying to shape a story without the craft for shaping it, and each one goes away once the decisions above are made.

Before next Tuesday, if you have a quiet moment, open the voice memo app on your phone and tell the story you tell most often, start to finish, the way you'd tell it to someone hearing it for the very first time. Try not to plan it. Then listen back and jot down two things: the moment where you sped up, and the line you said with the most energy. Those two spots are where your book's first chapter is hiding.

If you feel like sharing, hit reply and tell me which story you chose.

Next Tuesday, I'll show you the words and sentence habits that make a page sound machine-made, and why readers stop trusting a book that has them, even when they can't quite put their finger on why. I can't wait to share that one with you.

Take a look at The Story Vault

From my desk to yours,
Nikki

P.S. If the voice memo exercise opens something up for you, The Story Vault gives you 48 more questions to record your answers to, for $47.

The Voice-Finding Toolkit

Four exercises to help you hear how you actually sound before you write another chapter. You'll record yourself talking about your book, mark the phrases and habits that are unmistakably yours, rewrite one stiff paragraph in your spoken voice, and define your voice in three precise pairs, such as "direct, not blunt."

The Story Mining Toolkit

Four tools to help you find the stories you've stopped noticing. You'll map the turning points of your life and work, answer ten prompts that shake loose forgotten moments, capture one story in full detail on a Story Card, and run it through a four-question filter to decide whether it belongs in your book.

Read more

Almost every one of them had heard "you should write a book" for years before we started. Hardly any of them were short on material. What held them back was a quieter worry, that the finished book wouldn't feel like theirs, that it would come out stiff instead of carrying the way they actually talk. If that worry has followed you around, too, you're in the right place.

Who reads this

Maybe you run a company, teach what you know, or practice medicine or law. Maybe you're retired and your family keeps asking for the stories. You've probably started at least once. There's a folder of notes somewhere, or three chapters from two years ago, or a voice memo called "book idea" that you haven't opened since you recorded it.

You don't need to think of yourself as a writer to be here. Most of my clients never did.

What you'll find here

Every Tuesday I send one essay on how a book actually gets made, using the same process I use with my clients. Over time that covers deciding what your book is for, getting your stories out of your head (usually by talking rather than typing), choosing a structure, editing until a page reads like you on a good day, and what each path to a finished book really costs. Each essay ends with something small you can try in an evening. Paid subscribers, at $8 a month, also get the full method behind every one.

A few times a week I also post short Notes here on Substack: a word to cut, a before-and-after edit, or one of the questions I open with when I start a new book. Piper, my editor-in-chief, makes the occasional appearance (she signs off on every chapter from her corner office, which is my lap), and so does Finn, my retired editor, who sat in on more of my chapters than anyone.

When you subscribe, I'll send you The Voice Check, the checklist I run on every manuscript before anyone else reads it. It takes about 20 minutes on your first page.

And if you'd ever like more than the newsletter, everything I offer, from my 48 interview questions to writing the whole book with you, lives in The Writer's Room.

What I believe about books

The first thing I believe is that your spoken voice is your best draft. Most people talk in their own voice and then write in someone else's, and the best sentence in nearly every book I've written was said out loud before anyone typed it.

A book should also be written for one person. It will reach plenty of readers, but the drafts that stall are almost always the ones written for everyone at once.

I'll take a specific detail over an impressive one every time. A month, a place, and one line of dialogue will do more for a chapter than any amount of polish, which is the very thing I suggested to speakers turning a talk into a chapter.

And the people closest to you are the real test. When your business partner or your daughter reads a page, they should hear you in it. If what they hear is a press release, the page isn't finished yet.

So, what is your book about? Even one sentence is plenty. You can hit reply or leave a comment, and your answers really do shape what I write next.

Take a look at The Writer's Room

From my desk to yours,
Nikki

P.S. If you already know you'd rather have the book written with you, that's The Private Press, one of the paths in The Writer's Room, and you can book a conversation with me here.

It's such a fair question, and most people answer it for themselves with a picture of a stranger at a keyboard, inventing paragraphs out of thin air. A good ghostwritten book gets made very differently. Let me walk you through what the work actually looks like, step by step, and why the finished pages end up carrying the author's voice instead of the writer's.

It starts with a lot of talking

Long before the first chapter exists, I spend hours talking with the author over several weeks. I ask open-ended questions and record every answer. Where did you start? What were you supposed to become? What was the worst month of your working life? What do most people in your field get wrong?

While they talk, I'm listening for the stories they tell with the most energy, the phrases they repeat without noticing, and the beliefs they've been teaching for years without ever writing them down (sometimes from a stage, which brings its own quirks once it reaches the page). All of those are already in the author's voice, because the author is the one who said them.

Every session gets transcribed, and I read those transcripts the way an editor reads a manuscript, marking the scenes, the lines that could only have come from this person, and the lesson attached to each story. A story paired with the lesson it taught is the seed of a chapter. By the time I build an outline, most of the book's content already exists, because it came out of the author's mouth. My job is to find it, put it in order, and shape it.

Keeping the author's voice on every page

Early in every project I write a short voice profile. It lists the words the author uses and the ones they would never use, how long their sentences tend to run, whether they joke, whether (and how) they swear, and the expressions their family would recognize in a heartbeat. Every chapter gets checked against it.

This is the part most people underestimate. A voice is mostly made of small choices. One author says "folks" where another says "people." One always gives you the reason before the result, while another tells you the result and makes you wait for the reason. Small choices like these, kept consistent across 60,000 words, are what make readers feel they're hearing the author.

Drafts go back to the author one chapter at a time. They mark anything that doesn't feel like them, anything that's wrong, and anything that's true but that they'd never say in public. We revise until they would sign their name under every page, because they will. I consider a chapter finished when the author reads it aloud and stops noticing that someone else typed it.

Who does what, and where it can go wrong

The author brings the life, the expertise, the stories, the opinions, and the final say. I bring the structure, the pacing, the scene-building, and the hours at the keyboard. It's the same division of labor a speechwriter has with a senator, or a producer has with a musician, and nobody thinks the speech belongs to the speechwriter.

That's how the work divides inside The Private Press, my done-for-you ghostwriting, which I quote project by project.

Take a look at The Private Press

The worry that a ghostwritten book won't carry its author's voice is a reasonable one. It comes true when the writer works from a summary instead of recordings, when the author is too busy to review drafts, or when someone polishes the author's plain speech into something more impressive and less true. Every one of those is a failure of process, and every one can be avoided.

Something to try tonight

You can borrow the first step of my process whether or not you ever hire anyone. Open the voice memo app on your phone, press record, and spend fifteen minutes answering one question out loud, the way you would if a curious friend had just asked you over coffee: What do most people in your field get wrong?

When you listen back, write down the one sentence you said with the most conviction. That sentence is in your voice, so keep it somewhere safe. Most books begin with a handful of lines just like it.

When you find your sentence, hit reply and send it my way. I'll be reading.

From my desk to yours,
Nikki

P.S. If you'd rather have a ghostwriter write the book with you, I take on three Private Press clients each quarter. You can read more about The Private Press here, or book a 45-minute call with me here.

All of that is valuable, truly. But I've watched many speakers transcribe a keynote, divide it into chapters, and end up with a manuscript that feels thin and repetitive on the page, even though the very same material earns a standing ovation in a ballroom.

The material itself is usually fine. A talk and a chapter do different jobs, and a few habits that work beautifully from a stage quietly work against you in print.

What the room was doing for you

When you speak, the audience supplies energy, timing, and feedback. Your slides carry the structure, so you never have to say "now we move to the second principle," because the next slide says it for you. Your tone of voice tells people which line is the joke and which line is the point, and a pause does the work of a paragraph break.

On the page, none of that comes along. The reader is alone, reading at their own speed, and they can set the book down at any moment without anyone noticing.

Four stage habits to soften on the page

1. Repetition. From a stage, saying your key idea three times is good practice (some of the room was checking their phone the first time). In a book, the reader can flip back, so say it once, say it well, and trust them.

2. Applause lines. A line built for a pause and a reaction often reads like a slogan in print. If a paragraph ends on something that sounds like it belongs on a poster, try cutting that last sentence. More often than not, the paragraph is stronger without it.

3. Missing transitions. Your slides were quietly doing this work. On the page, you need a sentence or two that tells the reader why the next section follows from the last one. Read through your draft and mark every place where a slide would have changed, because each of those marks needs a bridge.

4. Compressed stories. A keynote story often gets trimmed to ninety seconds because the clock is running. A book has room for the whole scene: where you were standing, what the other person said, and what you were afraid of. Your stage version can serve as the outline, and the chapter gets to tell the full story.

What comes with you from the stage

Please don't throw out your talk! Several things you've already done as a speaker are exactly what most first-time authors are missing.

Your stories have been tested. You know which ones land and which ones fall flat, because a room has told you, and that's real evidence most writers never get.

Your phrasing belongs to you. The lines you've said a hundred times have been worn smooth into your voice, so keep them word for word.

And your framework gives the book a spine. Three principles or five stages can become the chapter structure, as long as each chapter has its own story and its own reason to exist.

For a guide to building the rest of the book on that spine yourself, The Manuscript Map is my seven-step method for it, with a Google Doc workbook, a manuscript tracker, and a starter file.

See The Manuscript Map

Something to try before your next talk

Record your next presentation, or find a recording of a recent one. Pick a single story from it and write it out as a scene, with no slides and no audience. Give it a place, a time, and at least one line of dialogue. Then set the two versions side by side.

The stage version is how the room hears you. The written version is how a reader will meet you, alone, on a plane or in a quiet corner of their own home. The book needs the second one, written in the voice of the first.

Which story did you pick, and what changed when it reached the page? My inbox is always open, and a reply comes right to me.

From my desk to yours,
Nikki

P.S. The Manuscript Map is $397, and it's the same seven-step method I use with my own clients, written so you can follow it on your own. You can see everything that's in it here whenever you're ready.