For 17 years, Craig Gauthier thought about a book he kept talking himself out of writing. He had built and sold a technology company young, taught at a university for five years, advised leaders at organizations like Microsoft, Disney, and the NHL, and spoken at more than 1500 events over two decades. Professionally, he had every marker of success.

What he wanted was work that reached people directly, the way a book reaches someone who picks it up because they need something, and that desire had been building for years. When he turned 50 and his daughter left for university, his calendar opened up and the timing finally felt right.

Craig grew up in a small blue-collar town where his parents kept few rules and asked him one thing whenever he faced a decision, “What do you think?” The book was his own answer to that question.

A False Start

He had tried writing it once before, in 2009, with a version titled Work Less, Live More, Grow Rich. He tested it with the people around him, and they loved it. Craig saw it was a problem. They heard a promise of getting rich without hard work, which was the opposite of what Craig believed. He had grown up treating work as honorable, and he was not going to sell a quick fix he did not buy into.

The timing was wrong in another way too. At that point, writing the book would have meant writing to prove himself rather than to help the reader, so he mostly set it aside.

Meeting Charlie

In 2024, he met Charlie Hoehn, Author.Inc’s co-founder, at an event and made up his mind on the spot. Craig trusts his read on people, and his read on Charlie was immediate. He did his homework, looked into Charlie’s track record, and knew he wanted to work with him.

By then Craig had already drafted a couple more versions of the book, and he arrived with a manuscript he happily calls pretty bad. It turned out to be the right place to start, because the thing that made it bad was the thing he needed to unlearn.

Built for the Reader

Craig realized one draft was all about himself, a case for why his experience had earned a reader’s attention, a list of the people he had worked with and the things he had done. The other draft overcorrected into a 500-page academic thesis stacked with research and proof, the version he now says would put a reader to sleep. Both had the same flaw underneath them. They were built to justify the author instead of serving the reader.

That was the problem Author.Inc helped him solve. Craig and the team reshaped the book into a narrative built on story, science, and a clear set of steps in every chapter. It combined the three things Craig cared about, the stories he loved to tell, the proof behind them, and something a reader could actually act on.

For a man whose usual mode of creativity was controlled chaos, throwing ideas at a wall to see what stuck, the discovery that creativity could have a foundation under it was a real shift. He started reading every line out loud until the rhythm was right, and for the first time he looked forward to the work.

The subject of his book was never new territory for him. The ideas came from decades of living and teaching them. What was new was giving them a form that could travel beyond the rooms he spoke in, built for the reader rather than the author.

A Launch Built to Reach Readers

The result is Rules: Optional.

The same lesson he learned during the writing process nearly caught him again at launch. Going for a New York Times bestseller was tempting, and he considered building the launch around making the list. Then he caught himself with the question, “What’s the reason for doing the book?” The answer was getting the ideas into as many hands as possible, on the principle that a good book which finds its first readers begins to carry itself. So, he built the launch around that principle.

Rather than sending everyone to a retailer, he produced a special Founders Edition he could put directly into people’s hands, because he wanted a book that was beautiful from the inside out. And he leaned on the network he had spent 25 years building, bringing hundreds of readers into the book before it launched.

What the Book Returned

Optimizing for the reader turned out to be a good business decision. The book drew roughly 2,000 pre-sales, and it’s now in more than 4,500 readers’ hands, most of them reached through clients and referrals. It debuted at #1 in Business Mentoring & Coaching and in Self-Help Creativity categories in Canada, US and the UK.

His speaking fee has risen by 50%, and he has 31 engagements booked across 2026 and 2027, with clients who did not blink at the new rate and even ordered hundreds of copies on top of it. Through his speaking engagements he’s on pace to generate roughly $100,000 a month in revenue, a level he credits in part to the book’s pull on his fees, his bookings, and the referrals it brought back.

The Return He Values Most

The return Craig values most is harder to measure. It’s in the messages from readers who saw themselves differently after reading the book. The people navigating difficult times and high achievers who simply needed a reminder to stop, question the path they were on, and choose more deliberately. Teenagers he knows through coaching and school talks have read it. So have strangers across five continents who reached out to tell him what stayed with them. For someone who grew up in a small town, knowing that an idea he carried for seventeen years is now reaching people he may never meet feels surreal.

“This is a way. It’s a framework,” he says. “It’s up to them to decide.” What he wants for a reader is the thing his parents gave him, the room to look at their own life and choose how to live it for themselves. Having written for that standard, he now lives held to it, which is exactly what he wanted.

On working with Author.Inc, Craig says, “I can’t speak highly enough of the team. It was a true partnership, and without their direction I don’t think what I did would have been possible. I didn’t even know it was possible going in.”