I signed my first book deal on Christmas Eve, and at the time it seemed like Santa was going way above and beyond. I had spent the previous six months pitching a proposal for Earl Greenwood, who had been beating the journalistic bushes for someone to write his story about being Elvis Presley’s first cousin and their childhood together, first in Tupelo and then in Memphis. He’d later work as Elvis’s publicist in the singer’s meteoric first years. I eventually found an agent who was able to secure a handsome advance at Penguin Inc. I thought that getting the proposal written and bought by a publisher would be the hard part. What’s that old line about God laughing?

Nine months later, after transcribing dozens of hours of conversations with Earl, and trying to revise the narrative as per the copious notes from the editor that followed every chapter sent in, it seemed my author career would be over before it had a chance to start. I had sent in the completed manuscript, and it was flat-out rejected. Fortunately, my agent had included a provision that guaranteed me the opportunity to do a rewrite.

With nothing to lose but a career, I tossed the first version completely and started from scratch, this time just telling the story Earl had shared with me, focusing on what I thought was the heart of his story. It worked. That book, The Boy Who Would Be King, would go on to be a Literary Guild selection, and I became a full-time author. While my early books were entertainment-related, I soon found myself drawn more to telling the personal and professional stories of people in the business world, from the entrepreneur sharing their journey of establishing a successful start-up to C-suite executives who rose through an established company’s ranks to make their mark.

Even though the genres I work in may have changed, the lessons learned from my first book have remained fundamental: the true job of a author/ghostwriter/cowriter is using the words spoken and events recounted to capture the storyteller’s voice and create a vivid sense of personality and place so readers feel like a fly on the wall as the story unfolds. All books tell a story, and the goal of every writer should be to engage the reader so they want to keep turning the page to see what happens, or what they learn, next.