Legacy is something that we all, sooner or later in our lives, come to think about. How will I be remembered? What am I leaving behind in the world? What happens to my expertise, my knowledge, my memories when I am gone?
Thankfully, there are ways to preserve your legacy – with a book being one of the most popular. Consider this your quick guide to capturing your legacy before you lose the chance.
Step 1: Decide what your legacy is
What will you be remembered for? What do you want to be remembered for? A book is a way of entering your side of the story into written record, of writing history the way that you remember it. It gives you a voice when you are gone, and you get the chance to control what that voice will say. Leave it until later, and someone else could be making those decisions for you.
Work out what you want future generations to know about you, and who you want to preserve your legacy for. Is this a book you want to leave for your children, full of your learnings across your life to help them avoid the same mistakes you’ve made? Is it a slice of history, a time now left behind, that you want to preserve for future readers who will want to know what it was like? Would you like to record your business expertise to help the leaders of the future follow in your footsteps? Whatever it is, you first need to figure out what you want to say, who to, and how you want it to be received.
Step 2: Find a ghostwriter or write yourself
Now we need to decide how this book is going to come together. Are you going to write yourself, or hire a ghostwriter? There are many advantages to hiring a ghost, and you may find they align with your needs better than writing your book yourself would. A ghostwriter is already a professional author and therefore knows how to write a great book; they have the writing chops to make something really great out of your own words, ensuring it sounds just like you but is elevated in the way that the written word needs to be; and they can save you a lot of time, effort, stress, and elbow grease by taking care of the physical typing and the act of transforming memories and thoughts into a coherent story.
Whether you hire help or go it alone, there’s a recommended structure that I would advise you to follow, so let’s look next at how that goes.
Step 3: Plan out your book
Yes, my next recommendation is to plan things out before you start. Make an outline for your book. How will you organise your chapters? Will you tell your story in chronological order, or mix it up into sections that revolve around the life lessons you want to impart? How many chapters will you have? How long, in word count, do you expect each section to be? Will you include illustrations, diagrams, charts, or only words?
These decisions can all be changed later, of course – you might get halfway into the book and realise the structure you’ve chosen isn’t working, or that you could actually do something a lot more clever and interesting for the reader. But it’s still important to build a framework: this will keep you on task, cut down on rambling and unnecessary tangents, and give the project a better chance of success overall.
Make sure you put down every single thing you want to include in the book, whether that means mapping out the big events of your life, figuring out the lessons you want to give, or any other format you can think of. If you’ve hired help, your ghostwriter will be able to write the outline for you, subject to your final approval.
Step 4: Write the book
A huge step to summarise in such a small paragraph, but here we are! Writing the book will be the bulk of the project work, and unfortunately, there’s no way to get through it but to just sit down and get through it (unless you’ve hired a ghostwriter for your book, of course).
This is a good time for me to remind you that I’m a professional ghostwriter myself with over a hundred books under my belt and plenty of experience in legacy books – which is how I’m able to deliver this advice with confidence. I know exactly how to write a memoir or business book, because I’ve done it many times – and though the books are as unique as my clients are, that experience gives me the knowhow to break a project down quickly into what you need, what the reader needs, and what other ingredients are essential to make a great book.
Step 5: Edit the book
The dreaded edit phase comes next. It can be tempting at this stage just to call it done, or to run it through ChatGPT and just accept any and all edits the AI makes. These two options would be doing your book a disservice, so you should strongly consider hiring a human editor to look over your work for you.
Whether you have a ghostwriter or not, an extra pair of eyes is never a bad thing – so long as those eyes are trained and specialised, of course. I am available for editing on manuscripts even if I haven’t been involved in the writing process, so bear that in mind as an option when you’re looking for help.
Typos, grammar and spelling errors, layout issues, gaps in your ‘plot’ that may result from forgetting or omitting certain details, poor structure – all of these may hamper your book from delivering the message you’re aiming for. A legacy is only preserved in print if people are able to bear reading the words, so make sure they’re polished until they shine.
Step 6: Publish or preserve
Finally, you have a finished book in your hands. What next?
Depending on the goals you decided on in step one, you may wish to publish the book – either seeking a traditional publisher or going the self-publishing route. Or, if the book was just for your nearest and dearest to preserve your story, just make sure you have enough copies to keep it alive within the family and that should do the trick.
Once your words are in print, they will last so much longer – and represent you for decades or even generations to come. You can rest easy knowing that no matter what happens next, your legacy is preserved.
If you’re ready to get started on your legacy book, there’s no time like the present to enquire. Ghostwriters can be booked up months or even years in advance, so the sooner you make contact, the sooner you can get your book moving. Contact me today if you’d like to work with a premium legacy ghostwriter with all the experience and expertise needed to bring your memories and life lessons to a new generation.
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