This month, Gotham COO Alison Schwartz interviewed Gotham CEO Dan Gerstein on Big-Picture Thinking for First-Time Authors.
The session was designed to provide aspiring authors with a plan, a new perspective, and practical advice on how to get the most bang for their book.
Highlights from the session included:
An honest assessment of AI and humans: Let’s be honest about what AI can do well. We’ve seen it help new authors overcome the paralyzing blank page, synthesize mountains of research, pull together anecdotes, and even help assimilate rambling voice memos and written material into chapter drafts. For non-professional authors who just need to get their ideas down on paper, AI can be a powerful first step.
And it may be helpful to those authors who want to use the summer to turn their book concept into an organized collection of research, anecdotes.
When to enlist human ghostwriters: Here’s what we’ve learned from people who’ve tried the AI-first approach: efficiency isn’t the same as impact. AI can create grammatically correct sentences and logically structured passages that read as information without insight, facts without feeling, competence without soul.
This perfectly illustrates AI’s fundamental limitation: it can’t find your unique hook. It can’t push you to be more vulnerable, to share the stories that make you human, or to explore the contradictions that make your perspective interesting. AI can help you write about leadership, but it can’t help you discover why your particular approach to leadership matters.
The case of Andre Agassi and J.R. Moehringer: The most powerful books aren’t just repositories of information—they’re windows into how a unique mind processes the world. Think about Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open.” What made that book extraordinary wasn’t just the tennis stories; it was ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer’s ability to help Agassi explore his pain, his contradictions, and his humanity. No AI could have prompted those revelations or shaped them into something so compelling.
To learn more about best practices for working with ghostwriters, setting budgets, creating a book strategy and other big-picture ideas for first-time authors, don’t miss the full webinar.
