A couple years ago, I was playing around with AI and I remembered that I used to record bedtime stories to my daughter. I had transcripts from those recordings sitting on my computer. So on a whim, I fed one to AI and started messing with it.

That was the moment everything shifted.

The writing AI generated from scratch was garbage. I’d known that for a while. But when I gave it a clean transcript of someone actually speaking, it could organize and deploy that content without flattening the voice. The input just had to be structured. Clean. Not a rambling back-and-forth conversation, but someone speaking with intention about something they knew cold.

I sat with that for a while. Because I’d spent years watching the same painful cycle play out with authors.

Why Ghostwriters Lose Your Voice

The core problem with ghostwriting is that the writer isn’t an expert in your industry. They’re building the book from their interpretation of what you said, not from the way you actually think. That’s why ghostwritten manuscripts almost always lose the author’s voice.

I watched a friend of mine go through two ghostwriters. Both times, the drafts came back and they’d lost his voice. It didn’t feel authentic. It didn’t feel like him. So he’d end up having to do the work anyway, and it took three times as long and cost him a small fortune.

That wasn’t unusual. I’ve been working with authors for years, hundreds of them at this point. The ghostwriter story is almost always the same. You pay $65,000 to $100,000. Sometimes more. You wait nine months to a year. And the draft comes back sounding like someone translated you into a different person.

The grammar is fine. The sentences are clean. But the book doesn’t sound like you wrote it. Because you didn’t.

If you’re a CTO explaining how AI is reshaping financial services, or a CEO unpacking a leadership framework you built over two decades, the ghostwriter doesn’t know that language. They’re not in that world. So they interpret what you said, and a lot gets lost.

I’ve seen drafts that took two ghostwriters, over $150,000, and a year and a half to produce. The result was okay. But it wasn’t the author. And when your entire business depends on your credibility and your specific point of view, okay isn’t good enough.

How Geoff Woods Got His First Draft in 39 Days

Geoff Woods got his first draft done in 39 days by speaking his book instead of writing it. No ghostwriter. No generative AI creating the content. Just his words, structured and organized through a process I designed around clean transcripts.

Geoff was the first person through. He’d just bought AILeadership.com. He’d had a lot of business experience, done really well, but he’d never written a book. He came to me and said he had an aspiration to be a thought leader on the same level as Jim Collins. His exact words: I don’t know what I don’t know.

He was happy with the draft. But I had to explain to him: I don’t think you understand the pain and the time you just avoided. I pulled up first drafts from New York Times bestselling authors I’d worked with. Drafts that took a year and a half and $150,000 across two ghostwriters. Geoff’s was on par.

It was basically a one minute mile for a first-time author.

The second time I tried it, the author recorded his book in one day and I had his manuscript back in three days. That’s when Miles and I looked at each other and said, okay, we have something.

How the Speak-Your-Book Recording Process Works

The process takes about two weeks of pre-work followed by two days of in-person recording in Austin. Before any recording happens, we lock in the book’s positioning, gather 30 to 50 stories through structured prompts, and build out a complete table of contents. That table of contents is the MVP of the whole book. The blueprint.

Once all that’s locked, I generate what I call chapter talking points. Not outlines. Talking points. One-line bullets written as prompts for a speaker, not a writer. Hit this point. Hit this point. Hit this point.

Then they fly to Austin. Two days at Hotel Van Zandt in a presidential suite. 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day with a break for lunch and walks. A book director sits with them and works through each chapter, checking off talking points and making sure every section gets covered. It’s like a movie director ensuring the right shots get captured. You show up prepared. You know your material. The director just makes sure nothing gets missed.

After that, the transcripts go through our processing system. No generative AI is creating content. The technology reorganizes the author’s words based on the outline we built together. I’ve run these manuscripts through LLMs and asked it to rank how hard the editing job would be on a scale of one to a hundred. Over and over, it comes back at 25, 30. Light work. The structure is sound. The voice is theirs.

Why Authentic Voice Can’t Be Manufactured

Early on, I developed two versions of the manuscript process. One hyper-focused on structure. One hyper-focused on voice.

The structural version was tighter. Shorter. Better for the reader. But it lost something. The voice version was longer. Took more time to get to the point. Wasn’t as compelling in places. But it was very close to what the author actually said.

Every single time an author bristled at a section of their manuscript, it was the same complaint: this part didn’t sound like me. And I can get it to sound like them. But that means they’re doing a lot more editing. That’s the reality.

So the whole architecture of this process is built to preserve their actual words. You’re the single source of truth of your material. No one can speak it at a higher level than you can because it’s yours. I know that sounds a little woo, but I’ve watched it play out enough times to know it’s true.

Can AI Write Your Book for You?

No. AI is a terrible generative writer. Every AI publishing company promising you a book in 15 minutes produces garbage no one wants to read. We use AI extensively in our process, but never for content generation. The author’s spoken words are the source material. AI handles the organization.

Every other avenue out there is either wildly expensive and time consuming, or if it’s DIY, it leads to failure. Like, nearly 100% of the time.

Geoff Woods had 2,000 LinkedIn followers when he published. No email list. Within a year, his book had done over 70,000 copies. He got invited by Tony Robbins to open as a keynote speaker. He’s landed $100,000 speaking gigs. He’d never made $10,000 from a keynote before this.

The book changed the trajectory of his life. And it started with him speaking it.

If you’re a founder or CEO thinking about writing a book, let’s talk about what that could look like. Or if you want to see what your book’s potential ROI could be, try our calculator.