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Executive Ghostwriting Service

“You Should Write a Book.”

You’ve heard it for years. Here’s how it finally happens: a real, published book, ghostwritten in your voice from recorded conversations with your dedicated partner — Peter Armstrong or Len Epp, founders of Leanpub — published in 90 days, not two years. It starts with a half-hour call.

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Leanpub

The Definitive Book on Enterprise AI

by You

The case for your book

Everyone has told you to write it

It happens after the keynote, after the board meeting, after the podcast interview: someone tells you that you should write a book. They keep being right. “They wrote the book on it” is the strongest credibility sentence in the English language, and other people say it for you — in the rooms where the keynote invitations, the board seats, and the seven-figure deals get decided. Nobody carries a slide deck into those rooms. A book gets carried in.

You also know why it hasn’t happened: a book this size is five hundred hours of writing, and you have a company to run. So twenty years of thinking stays trapped in slide decks, keynote recordings, and the heads of the people you’ve mentored — everywhere except the one format you can actually hand to someone.

The traditional answer is a ghostwriting agency. The good ones charge $50,000 to $150,000 and up, take twelve to twenty-four months, and need thirty to fifty hours of your time in interviews. Most engagements end at a manuscript — publishing is a separate industry, where a hybrid publisher charges another $15,000 to $50,000 and adds about a year — and the full-service firms that do publish still measure their timelines in a year or more, not 90 days. Two years and six figures is a perfectly normal outcome for “you should write a book.”

We publish books for a living, we build AI writing tools for a living, and we’ve rebuilt the whole engagement end to end. The same deep interviews. The same collaboration. A fraction of the calendar and a fraction of the invoice — and it ends with a published book, in print, in your hands, not a manuscript in your inbox.

The definitive book on what you’ve spent your career learning is still unwritten. Write it, and you’re no longer one more executive with an opinion — you’re the person who wrote the book. That’s the whole trade.

How it works

You talk. GhostAI writes. Your partner edits. You review.

  1. You talk. Recorded sessions with your dedicated partner — Peter Armstrong or Len Epp, matched to your subject and voice on the discovery call — scheduled weekly, so the book ships in 90 days. One architecture session to build your table of contents, then three to five deep interviews, shaped by your material rather than a fixed script — with GhostAI interviewing you alongside your partner. Plus everything you already have: talks, posts, podcast appearances, internal memos. It all feeds the draft.
  2. GhostAI writes. GhostAI is the suite of AI skills we built at Leanpub on Anthropic’s frontier model, Claude Fable 5. The skills teach Fable to write like you: it studies your recorded sessions and your writing samples (public posts and talks, plus private samples you provide, like emails or internal memos), learns your voice, and drafts book-length chapters in it — at a speed no human ghostwriter can touch. We measure every chapter against how you actually talk — fidelity to your voice is checked, not assumed. And the drafting isn’t linear: the whole book takes shape as an in-progress draft about a month after your first interview, and every chapter deepens with every session — a book-in-progress in the truest Leanpub tradition. You read your whole book while it’s being written, not in month nine.
  3. Your partner edits. Every chapter is reviewed and edited — in conjunction with the AI editing tools we built — by your partner: either Peter Armstrong, founder of Leanpub with over two decades as a software developer and the author of multiple technical and non-technical books, or Len Epp, a former investment banker with a DPhil in English from Oxford and the host of the Leanpub Podcast. That combination is the whole point: Fable 5 ghostwriting guided by the actual creators of GhostAI, plus full human editorial judgment. A really good book has one mind on it, start to finish — your partner is matched to your book, not assigned from a bench.
  4. You review it with us. One to three recorded review sessions — as many as the draft needs, not a fixed script. In each one you react to the whole book as it stands, go deep where you want, and just talk; it feeds straight back into GhostAI. The last one ends in sign-off: nothing publishes until you’ve approved it.

You choose whether to ship with a colophon — “How this book was made” — disclosing the method: recorded conversations and your writing samples, drafted by GhostAI in your voice, checked chapter by chapter for fidelity to it, edited by a Leanpub founder, reviewed and approved by you. Ghostwriting has always been confidential by default; disclosure is entirely your call.

What we never do is ship words you haven’t approved. Everything passes our fidelity checks, your partner’s edit, and your review before it publishes.

The alternative

What the agencies charge you for

We built The Executive Book to compete directly with traditional ghostwriting agencies — so here is the comparison, on their best terms:

What's included

One Partner. One Book at a Time.

Your book gets one partner — Peter Armstrong or Len Epp, matched to your subject and voice on the call, not assigned from a bench. And while we’re making your book, it’s the only book your partner is making.

One partner, one book

The Executive Book

A real business book — 25,000 to 50,000 words, ghostwritten in your voice from recorded conversations plus your writing samples — made with one dedicated partner, and published everywhere, hardcover included, in 90 days.

$72,000USD all-in

Paid in 6 equal monthly installments of $12,000, the first at booking.

Book a half-hour call
  • 25,000–50,000 words — a real business book, roughly 120–220 pages
  • One dedicated partner: Peter Armstrong or Len Epp, matched to your subject and voice — and while we’re making your book, it’s the only book your partner is making
  • An architecture session, three to five deep interviews, and one to three review sessions — plus your podcast episode — under 20 hours of your time, zero writing
  • Published in 90 days, from your first session to your book live everywhere
  • Every format, print-ready: hardcover, paperback, and Kindle on Amazon; PDF and EPUB on Leanpub
  • 500 paperback copies and 50 hardcover copies sent to you via Amazon; additional copies of either at cost whenever you need them
  • A crawlable store page and free sample chapters — the surface answer engines read
  • An optional gated free edition that captures reader emails, with their consent
  • A launch interview video, and a launch-timed episode of the Leanpub Podcast with its host, Len Epp — published on the Leanpub YouTube channel and on your book page
  • A feature in our weekly newsletter, which reaches 90,000 readers, and our monthly newsletter, which reaches 130,000 readers
  • Copyright and royalties are yours; the book publishes under your name

For calibration: this is the engagement premium ghostwriting agencies sell for $50,000 to $150,000 and up — most ending at a manuscript, with publishing left as someone else’s job and someone else’s invoice, and the full-service firms that do publish still running a year or more. Ours ends with the book published, in print, in your hands, in 90 days.

Against human ghostwriting of any kind, our difference is fidelity and speed: drafted from your own recorded words, measured against your voice, published in 90 days — not reconstructed from a freelancer’s notes over a year and a half.

The Executive Book is a cash engagement — card, invoice, PO, or wire. Company-sponsored books are welcome; we’ll work with your procurement process.

These are Leanpub books — the same store that has been publishing developer books for 15 years. We decline books we don’t believe in; everything we accept goes on the shelf next to them.

Your time

Your effort budget, to the minute

A traditional agency needs thirty to fifty hours of your time in interviews — and still takes a year and a half. Here is your entire time budget with us, to the minute:

Our promise:

“You get a real book in your voice, published everywhere, in under 20 hours of your time — with zero writing.”

A book this length normally costs its author over 500 hours of writing. Yours costs you under 20 hours, with zero writing — and the manuscript is never the bottleneck. Your calendar is the only schedule constraint.

Frequently asked questions

FAQs

Is it my voice?

Yes — and it’s measured, not vibes. GhostAI drafts only from your raw material — your recorded sessions plus your writing samples — and every chapter is scored against how you actually talk. A Leanpub founder reviews and edits before you ever see it, and in your review sessions you flag anything that doesn’t sound like you. Ghostwriting has always promised your voice; this is the first version of it where fidelity is a number.

Do I approve everything?

Yes — the whole book exists as an in-progress draft almost from the start, and it deepens with every session. You review it with your partner across one to three recorded review sessions — as many as the draft needs — and the last one ends in sign-off. Nothing publishes until you’ve approved it.

Who owns it?

You do. Copyright and royalties. The book publishes under your name — on the Leanpub store and on Amazon.

Is this confidential?

Yes. Ghostwriting has always been confidential by default, and we’re happy to sign an NDA before the discovery call. Your recordings and any internal material you share stay private. Whether the finished book discloses how it was made — the optional colophon — is entirely your choice.

Isn’t this AI slop?

No — this is ghostwriting, brought into the AI era. Business books have been ghostwritten for as long as there have been business books: Lee Iacocca’s autobiography — the defining CEO bestseller — was written with William Novak, and David Goggins wrote Can’t Hurt Me with Adam Skolnick. Most important CEO books are ghostwritten. You’re an important CEO. Yours is too — and we do it proudly. And honestly: the great literary memoirs take hundreds of interview hours and years of writing — we’re not claiming that. We’re claiming a sharp, polished, professional book in your voice, in 90 days instead of three years. Slop is undisclosed, unaccountable generation. This is the opposite: drafted only from your recorded words and writing samples, checked chapter by chapter against your voice, edited by your dedicated partner — a Leanpub founder — and approved by you before anything publishes.

Can my company pay for it?

Of course — company-sponsored books are welcome. We support card, invoice, PO, and wire, and we’ll work with your procurement process.

What if I want a shorter or longer book?

The 25,000–50,000-word range is deliberate — it’s where the business books people actually finish and hand to other people live. Rework is about 27,000 words; The Mom Test is 33,700; both sit comfortably inside it. If your material genuinely wants a different shape, that’s a discovery-call conversation, not a problem.

I’m a startup founder on a deadline — is this the right one?

Probably not — The Founder Book is the same machinery, compressed for exactly you: a 20,000–40,000-word book from one deep interview, published in 28 days — scheduled around your Demo Day — on startup terms: a deposit at booking and the rest six months after the book ships. The Executive Book is for when the book itself is the point, not the deadline.

Is there a more affordable version?

Yes — The Expert Book ($24,000) is the productized rung: the same GhostAI pipeline run by a professional Leanpub editor instead of a dedicated founder-partner, a 20,000–40,000-word book from one deep interview, published in 60 days, with its own podcast episode and launch video. What you give up is the depth of the interviews and reviews, the founder partnership, and the print run — 500 paperbacks and 50 hardcovers against 100 and 10. What you keep is the process — and the book.

It starts with a half-hour call

Thirty minutes with either Peter Armstrong or Len Epp, founders of Leanpub. We talk through your book — the thinking you’re known for, the raw material you already have, and what your table of contents could look like. If we don’t believe there’s a book in it, we will say so right on the call. We only want to do this if the book will genuinely work for you.

Book a half-hour call