Last year I was crazy enough to hold a contest for a 25 page ebook. FREE. Ghostwritten by yours truly. And winner Carlin Comm (whom I strongly urge you to follow on Twitter) brought me his project.

Carlin, a veteran of Desert Storm, had written a diary during the war. And he had letters from Americans who had participated in the whole “Any Servicemember” letter writing campaign back then. He wanted to get it all into a book. And he thought he needed my ghostwriting help.

Carlin was wrong.

I remember the day Carlin told me he wasn’t sure he had 100 pages worth of material to fill the book.

Carlin was wrong again.

But these are the good kind of “wrongs” in that it turned out Carlin needed a coach and editor…not a ghostwriter. And he didn’t have 100 pages worth of material…he had 300 pages of material!!

Carlin worked on his diary entries and then sent them to me. I cleaned them up a bit, working to keep his voice intact while keeping the grammar in check (sorta like how I write on this blog – winky wink). And then I formatted it all up pretty and stuff.

And Carlin had his book. That he wrote all on his lonesome. And instead of an ebook, he went and published it!! Very, very cool stuff!! (By the way, another strong urge of yours should be checking the Desert Storm Diaries book out over at Amazon).

It was an experience that in large part brought me to coaching in addition to writing and editing. Because, really, there are plenty of people out there who are completely capable of writing their own book, they just need some guidance, some accountability and all that.

And along the way you may just find yourself having fun! Carlin and I had some great conversations, and really, the whole process wasn’t this blood, sweat, tears deal. Which is nice. When you’re tossing about 10-20 emails back and forth in a given day on the last little changes you have for your book, you want to be able to do so with a sense of humor.

I asked Carlin for a testimonial. I was going to throw it on the new Coaching Packages page. You know, gotta show the peeps I know what I’m doing and all that. But what did over-the-top Carlin do?? He wrote an entire post about my awesomeness. How cool is that??

To wrap up this post about awesomeness…the main points you should take away are:

1 – Carlin is awesome and you should check out his book!

2 – Carlin thinks I’m awesome and who am I to disagree?

3 – You may not need a ghostwriter but you may need a coach to give you a good kick in the rear.

4 – If you go with the whole coach thing, find one you can have fun with. Because it SHOULD be fun!