Services
Book Strategy and Development
An engaging, well-written book demonstrating your deep expertise can begin a relationship with your ideal client—before you even know they are looking. Here’s how it works.
The book provides a virtual introduction to you and your expertise. If the book is done right, it fosters trust and creates familiarity such that the reader is inspired to reach out and connect with you and potentially engage your services.
If you’re like most of our clients, you have deep knowledge, but no time (or desire) to learn steps required to get that book out of your head and onto the page much less deal with all the logistics that follow such as design, publishing, and promotion. That’s where we come in.
Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute consultation on your book idea.
Book Discovery and Roadmap
If you’ve never written a book before (and even if you have) writing a good one is a craft unto itself that starts with figuring out what the book is about and who will be reading it and exactly how it will get done.Â
Our discovery and roadmap engagement results in a comprehensive strategic plan for the book based on a number of factors, including your professional framework.
Framework Design
A framework in this case is a structure that allows readers to easily understand and implement your approach and advice. Don’t have one of those? We’ll help you reverse engineer your expertise into one.Â
The cool thing about a framework is that it gives you multiple ways of talking about your expertise, which is perfect for chunking information out for a presentation!
We love a good framework here at Executive Words!
The Book Project
Once we agree on the contents of the book discovery and roadmap report, I’ll use that to generate a comprehensive proposal for co-writing and developmental editing as well as copy editing, proofreading and book interior design by my team (if applicable) and we’ll get started.
By this time you’ve provided us with all the content that you have already created and we have used that to arrive at a working table of contents. The next step is to join us on a series of recorded calls where we have you unpack all you know for each chapter after which we turn the content of those calls into prose and relevant stories. We’ll also interview all the contributors if that is part of the plan and figure how to feature them in the book in a way that supports your points.
Figures? Graphs? Illustrations? Index? We can coordinate all of those things for you using your provider or one of ours.Â
Want to use a quote that requires permissions? We know how to do that, too.
Basically, anything the book requires, we can handle.
Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute consultation on your book idea.
Audiobook Creation
ACX is the entity behind Audible and they are ridiculously picky when it comes to your audio book recordings.
That’s why I recommend that you work with my preferred partner to adapt the manuscript, facilitate the studio and recordings, and oversee uploading them on the ACX platform.
If the recording is not exactly to spec the first time, it will cause significant delays and may not be available for launch.
Publishing and Promotion
Also included as part of my proposal is a publishing and promotion discovery project with my preferred provider, which results in a proposal from them for those activities (including the book cover). This happens once the book is fairly well formed and we do this so that you have a chance to think about what you might want to invest in this part of the project.
In this engagement, you will discuss the different publishing options, as well as the options for book promotion, book cover preferences, and the actual book launch, among other things.
(Don’t worry, I stay involved and available to my publishing and promotion provider for anything they need until the project is complete!)
BOOK A CONSULTATIONBook Idea Incubation
Not sure yet if there’s a book in all of your expertise?
We can do a mini-engagement where you meet with us a set number of times to talk through your ideas.
In addition to those meetings, we’ll provide you with our insights and feedback, and we can also record and transcribe those sessions, and summarize the gist of those conversations for you.
Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute consultation on your book idea.
"I engaged Helena Bouchez as a coach and developmental editor to help me explore several nonfiction book ideas. Within just a few calls, she was able to identify the core message I wanted to convey and then help me to see it. Our conversations, which took place periodically for about a year, allowed me to gain absolute clarity on what I wanted to say…and validate the idea with others to determine if there was sufficient need and interest in the topic."
Rob Toomey, President of Typecoach, LLC
Turn Your Book into an Online Course
Many authors are electing to maximize the impact of their nonfiction business books by further unpacking concepts in an online course.
A well-designed online course leads your client step-by-step through the process of operationalizing your program, anchoring in the concepts so they can be more easily shared with their team. It also gives you a chance to share more anecdotal information that may not have been included in the book.
The key is to make sure the course is well-organized and engaging enough that the student will want to invest the time to go all the way through it. That starts with getting the sequencing right so that one lesson builds on the next in a way that is virtually transparent.
That’s why, as we are developing your book we are also thinking about how we would deploy it as an online course. So, if we’ve done your book, the underpinning for the course version will already be baked in!
Just like with your book, we handle the course development end-to-end with the assistance of another group of rockstar team members. We can also advise on best practices for videos, what to look for in a video editor (and what to avoid), what kind of support materials you want to supply, and more.
BOOK A CONSULTATION
