Podcast
Kate Frank, Ghostwriting
Kate Frank is a book coach and ghost writer. Has written more than 1,100 pieces of content over the past 7 years.
She’s contributed to five published books and dozens of articles in national magazines. What makes her different than most ghost writers is that most of them are looking to support themselves but she’s looking to make you profitable. She’s not just writing the book for you she’s helping you develop your marketing strategy to get that book sold.
A common perception of books is that you get one to establish your expertise but not to expect any money from it. People have an expertise that they wish someone would’ve taught them, they wish the could’ve had the kind of book that would’ve had the information that they now know, so they want to write that book.
They write it, then they figure out how they can sell the book and how they could monetize it, that’s getting the cart before the horse. Kate believes that creating revenue from a book is relatively easy to do, but you don’t figure it out after the book’s written, you figure it out before, and you write that book for revenue.
There’s a whole process that Kate has to get the cart behind the horse where the marketing is the horse, this is what drives your profitability to know who you’re going to market it to, who your reader’s going to be, where they hang out and who will pay you, those are the kinds of things that you need to know in order to get the course that’s going to drive this revenue in front of the book.
One is the focus on revenue and the other thing is writing a book the way the person talks. You write your book as if you’re turning a paper to your college professor, it’s not that interesting. When Kate works with somebody she get into their language, she knows how they talk, she leaves some of those fragmented sentences in there for this person, you could tell how passionate he was about something by how broken his sentences were.
They’d talk in hypertext, they’d talk in a language that was a lot more emotional, and not as grammatically correct. So if they’re out there talking in front of people, when they get excited about something they’re talking in these broken sentences and their book is written in perfect prose, it doesn’t look real.
For somebody who’s trying to make a living in sales it could not be anymore important that the language that you have when you’re face to face with a client, or on the phone with them, or on a video call, and the language that you have in your book is as close to the same language as you speak.
Case studies
One of the books that Kate has ghost written was for an owner of a multimillion dollar company in New York and it was only when they were half way thru the book when Kate found out that he was running for senator in a New England sate, that’s the reason why his book was different. He was basically talking about his belief system, it had as much profit potential than most. Kate had to convince him that she didn’t sanitize it, it was very important for her that if he was going to be up there trying to get into office he couldn’t have something different when he was in his book.
Another case was a vice president in what was provably the largest insurance company, he had moved up the corporate ladder by having some principles that he had coached people with on one on one. He received a couple of promotions since the book came out, because he now has a book that talks about what he’s all about. Now he’s succeeded in the corporate world, he’s also speaking more often, he’s been given international opportunities to go out for the company and it’s been very good for his business.
A third case was a kid that dropped out of high school, his language was very repetitive, very rough. He got into a real estate investing company and was doing very well making lots and lots of money. It was a real estate coaching company that had multi levels in it. By Kate getting his book into some legible order that still had his personality, you could tell that he wasn’t a college graduate because his language wasn’t that, but you could follow his thoughts better than what he wrote, now he’s able to use that to grow his multi-level business much faster. He’s seen as an expert, he’s invited to speak at a lot of speaking conferences, so it’s been very good for his business.
If a book has been in the back of your head nagging at you, then there’s a good chance that you’ve already written content, if you haven’t perhaps you have recorded sales calls, or some other way in which you’re talking about your process.