Meet the Author: Emily Crookston

When I left academia after completing my PhD and started The Writing Desk, I wasn’t sure how many other former academics were out here doing similar types of work. As it turns out, there are a lot of us!

That’s one reason I was thrilled to talk with Emily Crookston, a fellow PhD who left academia behind. Emily is a business book ghostwriter, and our conversation covered her reasons for starting a business, how she collaborates with business owners to write their books, and her advice for anyone who’s thinking about writing.

​Emily Crookston is an award-winning business book ghostwriter, author, and developmental editor. She specializes in helping founders, experts, and business owners write a book that sells. As the Owner of The Pocket PhD, she works with self-published business book authors to find their big idea, align their content, and write a better business book.

Her first book, Unwritten: The Thought Leader’s Guide to Not Overthinking Your Business Book (affiliate link), is out now. Emily is also a former philosophy professor, speaker, and podcast guest. When she’s not writing intensely, she’s most likely practicing yoga intensely. She lives for desserts topped with real whipped cream.

You can connect with Emily on LinkedIn and sign up for her free “Find Your Big Idea” mini-course to uncover your book idea’s unique angle.

Unwritten is a guide for thought leaders. What led you to write it?

I’ve had a couple of false starts on books that I’ve tried to write and been unhappy with and abandoned halfway through. I joined a group called Brainstorm Road, with Margo Aaron.

The whole thing is you’re going to ship something every week, and you’re going to work together for six months and really emphasize practice. Ten minutes a day, ship something.

I said, “I’m going to do this, and I’m going to come up with my book idea.” Literally, the first week I had joined this thing, I was talking to a friend and she was like, “What are you talking about? Your book is how to write a business book. Why are you going to spend six months trying to figure out what this book is about? It’s obvious.”

I said, “I don’t want to write a book about writing. There are so many other books out there about writing. How could I possibly have something more to say than Stephen King on the subject of writing a book?”

I was thinking of thinking it over, and I was like, “Well, a lot of these books are written for other writers.” It’s how to write your novel, or how to write a screenplay, that kind of thing.

There are not as many books about how to write for non-writers, and in particular, business owners, which is my audience. So I decided, “Yeah, I do think I have a unique process and something to share.” That’s how I came to the idea.

What was the process of getting that written?

I shifted my goal for that group to be more outlining the book. I do think I started writing and sharing what I was writing in there.

But it’s really funny. I tell my clients this a lot: Once you’re writing about the thing that you do every day, it becomes a lot easier.

The book feels like it fell out of my brain. In two months, I had a full draft of the book.

It turns out that that six-month program became like, now it’s marketing. I just kept moving along: What’s the next step that I need to do? Research publishers, all of that.

The draft came very quickly for me once I found my way to the idea. It just came pouring out. I guess this is the book I needed to write.

What were your writing practices like?

At the time, I didn’t have any ghostwriting clients. I think that’s why it was such good timing for me. When I’m ghostwriting for clients, I like to work on one at a time. I like to really immerse myself in the work. It would have been harder. It would have taken longer to write it.

I generally will write when I’m in a good mood. I try to write at least two hours a day, and I only write five days a week.

Your recent newsletter was about whether to write every day, and I have similar advice about that. I don’t think you need to do it every day—and this is my job.

I try to stick to five days a week for sure. I always tell my clients, we as business owners have to write in the cracks and crevices that we have. I was pretty lucky to have more time to actually work on it and write.

I also tell people to set word count goals. That’s one of my big systems. Do some timed writing exercises.

See how long it takes you to write 500 words. Then you can kind of extrapolate: I’ve got two hours a week and I can write 500 words an hour, so I’m going to write about 1,000 words a week.

I was trying to write 2,500 words a week, maybe 5,000. I set a word count goal, and I worked toward that. That really helped keep my momentum going.

What should someone know before they decide to write a business book?

My book is all about not overthinking it. That’s the first tip: Don’t overthink the planning and the writing of the book. I like to come up with a pretty rough outline and just start going at it.

You pick the chapter that’s the easiest to write, or the thing that’s pulling you along, the thing that’s exciting for you. If you open up your outline and you’re like, “I don’t want to write the next thing,” great. Write something else, whatever is exciting you.

That’s the first tip, just go for it. Just get that messy first draft done as quickly as you can, because you’ll feel so great once you have a full draft, and then you can take as much time as you want to edit it.

The other piece of advice I always tell business people writing business books is, make sure you have a business case for your book. Make sure you know what that book is meant to do for you and your business. How does that fit into your business model?

The biggest mistake I think people make is thinking, “Oh, I just need a book. It doesn’t really matter.” They don’t think too hard about what it’s going to do for them.

How are you going to market the book? What is the book, really? How does it fit into the service offerings? Are you working on three huge projects this quarter? Maybe starting a book is not in the cards right now.

You can really set yourself up for failure if you don’t think ahead about the bigger picture.

The topic should flow from the work that you’re doing. I also see people for whom the business is on one hand and the book is on the other hand, and they’re not clearly connected.

I talked to someone whose first book was a memoir. She thought that everyone would see she’s made this huge transformation, and now she’s a life coach. Makes perfect sense. She left corporate; her story is the story of her clients.

But when she got into interviews, she was just talking about her story, and never really got around to talking about her services.

It wasn’t clear from that book that she was really trying to generate leads. With the second book, she made a different choice. She made it much more connected to the work she’s doing.

Where do you find people tend to overthink the most? How do you help them?

I gave a guest lecture for a friend at Harvard. It was super fun, because the class was about psychology and human motivation.

It really got me thinking harder about people’s motivations and why some people finish their books and others don’t. Of course, it comes down to overthinking.

Where people make the biggest mistake is not thinking through the steps that are involved. You have that initial jolt of motivation and you’re excited to work on your book.

And then, of course, you get into the reality of, “Oh, this is harder than I thought,” or, “I don’t know how I’m going to publish this book. I’ll figure it out later.”

They overthink the writing and content of the book, and they under-think the publishing and the promotion and the marketing and all those little steps along the way that can really stop you.

They enjoy thinking about the book and the idea and maybe that could keep them motivated for a while. Then they get into the slog of writing and trying to figure out how to market the book, and suddenly it gets much, much harder.

I always tell people, “Don’t under-think that stuff.” And it’s hard. I feel this way about myself. I don’t fancy myself a very good project manager. A lot of people are very good about planning out their week step by step, and people like me gloss over all the little steps.

They’re like, “I’ve got five steps to get that big thing done,” and then it’s disappointing when you’re three months in and you’re only halfway through your first step or something.

Trying to think through the smaller steps along the way without overthinking the content is probably the biggest piece of advice.

How I help people do that is just asking a lot of questions. It’s a lot of, “How do you see this book fitting in? Have you started writing your marketing plan? Are you talking about the book with people, getting feedback on it?”

What prompted you to leave academia and start your business?

My number one goal was to get a tenure-track job. That’s not easy. I knew that was not easy in some sense, but being in the middle of it, it feels very different.

I was on the job market for eight years, and the place I was at most recently had a tenure-track job that I applied for, and they ended up not hiring anyone. It was sort of a political situation. That was frustrating.

At that point, I said, “I’m done. I’m not doing this anymore.” I hadn’t thought about what I would do if I wasn’t a professor. I decided to take a year and figure that out.

It was my last year of teaching, and I set aside some money. I really thought that I would just find a job at a marketing agency, something like that, nine to five.

I became an intern for a friend of a friend who needed marketing help, and she introduced me to the world of marketing, which I didn’t know anything about. I started ghost blogging for her and her clients.

At some point she said, “You could start a business doing this.” I thought that sounded better than nine to five and a marketing agency, because the best thing about academia is you have time freedom. You can decide when you’re teaching, for the most part. You can decide what you’re teaching, and then your time is yours. You’re managing yourself.

That also helped in being a business owner, because I was pretty self-directed already. It dawned on me—my dad owned a small business. I kind of knew what it looked like.

I quit and decided I’d figure it out. I hired a business coach right off the bat, because I didn’t know how to price or what my services were. That was pretty helpful. My business anniversary was in May. It’s been nine years.

I will say that last year, when I published my book, was my worst year in business. At the end of last year I was like, “I don’t know if I can keep doing this.” But then clients came to me all of a sudden, and I’m like, “Where were you last year?”

These are the ups and downs that you just have to be prepared for. I haven’t figured out how to make any of that easier, but I’ve managed.

What is the most important thing to know before someone hires a ghostwriter?

This is a great question. I often get on the phone with people who are just learning about ghostwriting and knowing that it’s a thing they could do.

A lot of people think ghostwriting is for celebrities or politicians or something like that. I work with all kinds of business owners who are not even close to being famous.

The most important thing to ask yourself is: Have you done any co-writing? Have you had your work edited before? Do you know how you like to work with another person?

For me, it’s a really collaborative process. Not all ghostwriters work that way, but I meet with my clients every week and interview them and talk through different pieces. I take care of the discipline of writing for them, but it’s their ideas. They have to feed that to me.

You have to know your idea well enough to be able to tell another person about it and talk about everything that you do.

If you like the idea of working collaboratively, then look for a ghostwriter who’s collaborative. If you want to hand off an outline to someone and see them in six months with your book, that’s a different thing.

Knowing your own preferences about how you collaborate with other people is really important so you can direct the person who’s writing for you, so you get a good result.

You want the book to feel like yours, which is always my big goal with my clients, because if your book doesn’t feel like yours, you’re going to have a harder time publishing it. You’re not going to want to talk about it as much.

You have to really know what’s in that book once it’s finished, and the only way to do that is to work closely with the writer. It saves a lot of time. We’re meeting once for an hour a week, and I’m writing 10 or 20 hours a week—that’s a huge time saver for you.

There’s value to working with a professional writer, for sure, but you shouldn’t think of the value being in the ideas they’re giving you. It’s your ideas, amplified. That’s the idea.

Is publishing different when you’re the primary author versus a ghostwriter?

For the most part, I’m handing things off to my authors. I always tell them I’m happy to stay around as a consultant.

I edited a book last year, and that client is trying to find an agent right now. I helped her with the book proposal. She’s come back to me several times and said, “Here’s the feedback I’m getting. Can you look at this new proposal?”

I’m always happy to be involved, because I’m excited about the success of my clients, and I want to do anything I can to help them.

I also share resources. I have different publishing consultants and people like that, who I’m happy to pass my clients off to if it makes sense.

I don’t help with the publishing so much, but I’m always around as a sounding board to help them, because I know the book almost as well as they do, maybe better. It’s good to have that gut check sometimes.

How do you work with writers to generate ideas? What does that look like?

With my most recent clients, I’ve actually started using AI a little bit to help with that process. I can ask them about their book ideas. I usually will have them, if they are comfortable talking it out, record themselves talking, and then I’ll put that into Claude.

I’ll ask Claude, “What’s the book idea?” Claude has three book ideas, and I’ll tweak them a little bit and read them over and figure out what I like, what I don’t like. Then I’ll present them to the client, and then we’ll brainstorm about those ideas a little bit.

Then from there, I might have Claude write an outline, and that would be a starting point for us. Then we can talk about the outline, and we can say, “I don’t like this jargony word. Let’s replace it with the word I actually use.”

I’m realizing how important it is to understand the book’s angle, even from the outline stage. That’s something that you can’t just get from AI if you don’t have a critical eye about it.

Another little technique that I like to use is, I’m always asking clients to tell me stories. The more stories I get about how they work with their clients, the better—not only because we want to put stories in the book, but also because it gives me a real flavor of how they work.

Often I wish I could just be a fly on the wall and watch my clients work. Maybe I’ll try something like that someday as part of the package, to be a little reporter for what I’m seeing.

I often ask them about concepts and things. “How would you explain this to your client?” Because if I can get them talking in that language, it’s going to be more conversational, it’s going to be less jargony, it’s going to be more in line with what they would be saying to readers.

There’s always that question of how we have to modify your framework and your process for a reader versus somebody one-on-one, because obviously those are different things. You have to give a lot more background in the book, but those things give us a solid place to start.

What is coming next for you creatively?

I’m in the process of figuring that out. At the moment, I’m actually getting really deep into my spirituality practices right now. That’s how I connect with my creativity.

I feel like something big is coming through, but it’s not quite here yet. I don’t quite know, but I imagine I’ll write another book at some point. Maybe not this year. But who knows?

My big goal is to take a sabbatical at the end of the year. It’s a matter of getting enough clients before November. I’m hoping to take Thanksgiving through the beginning of the year off from client work to have some time to work on the business and think about my next creative project.

I would really love the next book to be more of a research type project, to go back to my academic roots a little bit. I’ve been playing with an idea. My book is Unwritten (affiliate link*), maybe my next book is Written.

If you offered advice to a business owner who’s considering writing a book, what would that be?

The biggest tip I always tell people is to set a word count goal. That’s the best way to keep that momentum going.

If you’ve read Atomic Habits (affiliate link*), by James Clear, he has the thing where if you have a streak going and you miss a day, he’s like, “Don’t miss two days.” Get back on your feet. Don’t worry about missing one day. Keep moving forward.

That might be, you write five days a week and you miss Monday. Okay, no problem. You’re going to write four days this week.

Do as much as you can to make the writing process fun for you and keep it in that game mode for yourself. That translates also into all the harder stuff, the marketing and the other tasks on your list that it takes to get the book published.

Look for the fun. Lean into the fun. Don’t get too bogged down, like, “I have these 50 to-do items before the book is published, and I’ve only done 20 of them.” Okay, take the win. Who says 50 was the magic number?

You have to have a light attitude about all of it. At least for me, that’s what works. If I try to put myself into a rigid place, I’ll just rebel at some point. That probably means not doing any writing or forgetting about my book for three months. That’s not where I want to be.

Avoid comparing yourself to everyone else. This is your book. It could be whatever you want it to be. I often have clients who are like, “Well, how should it be done? How many of this, or how many of that? How many chapters should I have?”

There are no rules. There’s not even really a book length that you really need to shoot for. You can certainly write a 20,000 word book if you want to.

What is the best book that you’ve read recently?

I’m reading this really fun book. It’s called Going Infinite (affiliate link*), which is about Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency guy who ended up in prison.

He has a biographer. It’s very fascinating to hear how he got into crypto and about his personality. I find those kinds of stories fascinating.

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

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I loved chatting with Emily about her approach to ghostwriting and her own writing practices. Her strategies for figuring out your writing pace and setting word count goals are great tools for keeping you on track.