How to write a business book · 5 min read
Hiring a ghostwriter for a CEO book — the parts that look different from other engagements
Confidentiality, calendar reality, GC sign-off, the legal read, and the specific shape of a CEO interview. What changes when the author has a board to answer to.
A CEO-authored business book has the same core writing process as any ghostwritten book, with five specific differences that shape the engagement.
Difference 1: NDA before any reading
Most ghostwriting projects sign mutual NDA before kickoff. For CEO engagements, the NDA is signed before the discovery call. The brief itself, the inquiry email, the existence of the engagement can all be sensitive.
A serious studio signs an NDA in your inbox before the call. If they ask you to discuss the project on a discovery call without an NDA, walk.
Difference 2: calendar reality
A CEO has 200 hours less calendar margin per year than a non-CEO author. The engagement structure has to absorb this.
Working pattern: 90-minute interviews on a fixed weekly slot, ideally booked six months out. The slot is in your assistant’s calendar, recurring, untouchable. Cancellations cost the project momentum; rescheduling is fine in advance, last-minute is not.
For the highest-stakes engagements, we run a calendar buffer: every fourth scheduled interview is a catch-up window, intentionally light. CEOs always have a fire that bumps an interview; the buffer absorbs it.
Difference 3: General Counsel involvement
Most CEO books touch confidential information about employees, board, investors, deals, or financial details. The GC needs to be in the loop from the outline stage.
The standard pattern: the outline is reviewed by GC before drafting begins. Specific scenes that touch sensitive topics get a per-scene review during drafting. Final manuscript goes through a publication legal read.
This adds 3–6 weeks to the timeline. It does not have to slow down drafting if it runs in parallel; it needs to be planned in.
Difference 4: pre-publication legal read
A media-law attorney reads the full manuscript before publication. They flag passages that touch defamation, privacy, breach of confidentiality, or right-of-publicity. They recommend specific wording changes to reduce risk.
For most CEO books, the legal read finds 8–25 passages requiring some change. Most are soft adjustments. A few are structural — an entire scene gets restructured or cut.
Cost in 2026: $4,800–$11,200 depending on manuscript length and number of named third parties. Standard practice; we recommend it on every CEO engagement.
Difference 5: the interview shape
CEO interviews are not memoir interviews. The writer should not open with “tell me about your childhood.” A senior business ghostwriter opens with an operating question — net retention rate, founding-team dynamic, the specific decision that shaped your strategy.
The operating question signals that the writer respects your time and understands your context. It also generates better material; CEOs talk freely about operations and self-consciously about feelings. The book usually needs both, but the operations are the door in.
Most of the emotional content the book needs surfaces inside the operating conversations, not as separate interviews. The writer needs to be capable of holding both registers at once.
Three tactical questions before signing
Has your writer ghostwritten for a founder or CEO before? Specifically. Not “written for executives generally.” Has the writer shipped a book with a named founder author? If yes, ask which book.
Will you work with my GC from outline stage? A yes here separates studios that have done CEO books from ones that haven’t.
Is the legal read included or extra? It should be extra (it is a separate professional service paid to a different firm), but the studio should manage it as part of the engagement and recommend a partnered firm.
What the cost looks like
A CEO book is in our Business Book or Public Figure tier. $22,800 to $48,000 for the ghostwriting and edit, depending on word count and scope. Cover and KDP publishing are separate. Legal read adds $4,800–$11,200. Total program cost typically lands $35,000–$75,000 for a serious CEO engagement that publishes through KDP/IngramSpark.
If the goal is a traditional-publisher deal, agent and publisher contract changes the math substantially. We can advise on that path on the discovery call.
What we offer
Business book ghostwriting led by Ravi (ex-McKinsey, ghostwrote a founder book cited in the lead investor’s IC memo for the author’s Series C). Mutual NDA before the discovery call. Permanent non-attribution clause on the writer. Partnered media-law firms in California, New York, and London for legal reads.
The discovery call is 30 minutes. We can NDA before it, on request.