Writing Is Not Enough Anymore

Or: why your ghost should also build

For fourteen years now (going on fifteen; the age is showing), people have paid me to write things they then put their own name on.

What I wrote? Theses, mostly. More than 1,300 of them, as some of you might remember from an earlier piece or two. But that was never the whole story. On top of the theses there are more than fifty fiction and non-fiction books (management, psychology, health, a couple I still can’t quite categorize, and a few novels), blogs I have run for other people for years, LinkedIn profiles I have been for other people for years (yes, that is a thing, and it is more fun than you would think), newsletters, website copy, whatever needed a voice and didn’t have one yet.

In German and in English. For people I liked, for some people I’d rather forget faster, and for a few who became actual friends. You know who you are!

Suffice to say: I know how to write. That’s the easy part, really. I say this without false modesty, because after fourteen years and a few million words it would be odd if I didn’t. Yes, I can write.

And yet.

Lately I catch myself thinking something a writer is probably not supposed to think, let alone write down in public. But at the same time writing things down in public I’m not supposed to is kind of my MO. So:

Writing is not enough anymore.

Let me explain, because I don’t mean this the way it might sound.

What I actually learned from 1,300 theses

Not too long ago I wrote here that the real skill of a ghostwriter isn’t knowing things. Clients ask me: Are you an expert on my topic? Do you know everything about railway systems in the UK? Do you really know everything about cardiac arrest? Are you familiar with the differences between the UTAUT and UTAUT2 model? And the honest answer is no, and that’s exactly the point. What I learned to do is take a topic I had never heard of on Monday, build a scaffold for it by Wednesday (or Monday evening if I’m bored) and hand over something on Friday that holds up under scrutiny. And scrutiny is what a writer’s work will always face. Building usable knowledge on demand, I called it back then. Back then.

I still stand by every word. But I have started to look at that sentence differently.

Because what is that, really? Is it a writing skill?

I don’t think it is. Not primarily. Not really, no. It’s a building skill. You figure out what has to carry weight, what is of relevance, you build that part first, and then you make the rest look as if it had always been there and came naturally. That’s how you write a thesis. It’s also how you write a book. And (this took me embarrassingly long to see, considering I have founded a few companies along the way, whoops) it’s also how you build a business, a product, a brand, a website.

Writing just happened to be the material I was working with. Sentences instead of steel.

Where good words go to die

Now, here is what I kept and keep observing with my non-academic clients. Founders, executives, consultants, experts of all kinds.

They come to me because they want good words. And they get good words. Sometimes very good words, if I may say so. (Yes, I’m working on that modesty thing) A book that finally says what they have been trying to say for ten years. A blog that actually sounds like them. A LinkedIn presence that doesn’t read like it was written by an intern (or a founder with no time). In short: They get words. Cool.

And then what happens to those words?

They go onto a page.

A blog post nobody scrolls past the second paragraph (like this one, probably). A LinkedIn post that lives for a day and a half before the algorithm loses interest. A beautifully produced PDF that gets attached to an email, opened by exactly one person and forwarded to someone who doesn’t open it at all. A book that sits on Amazon with a great cover and four reviews, three of them from friends.

Was the writing bad? No. The writing was fine. The writing was never the problem. If anything in our day and age the writing is the opposite of the problem.

So what was?

Competent text is no longer scarce

Let’s be honest here.

Your reader has ChatGPT open in the other tab. Or Claude, or Gemini, or whatever the next one is called (please don’t say Grok). They can get a decent summary of almost any topic in eight seconds, in their own language, at their own level, with examples from their own industry if they ask nicely. Decent text has become something like tap water. It’s everywhere, it’s fine, nobody gets excited about it because it is just there.

I’m painfully aware that I say this as someone who produced decent text for a living. For fourteen years. In ten countries. In cars (not driving, mostly), in bars (drinking, moderately) and in a lot of different homes.

But this is where I think most writers get the diagnosis wrong. The conclusion is not “nobody reads anymore.” People read more than ever, way more than ever; they just read differently. The conclusion is that reading alone is no longer what your audience wants from you. Reading is the entry ticket. It’s not the whole show.

Think about what you yourself do when you land on a page that actually interests you. Do you want to read a 2,000-word explanation of how to calculate something? Or do you want to type in your numbers and see the result? Do you want twelve paragraphs on whether you qualify for something, or do you want to answer ten questions and find out whether you actually do? Do you want a description of how good someone’s product is, or do you want to click on it?

Exactly.

Your audience is no different. They don’t want to be told. They want to be shown, and ideally they want to try it themselves. Text that only describes has become the least a person can offer. Text that does something is what people remember.

What happened when I built instead of wrote

Let me give you an example from my own shop, because I would rather show than tell (see what I did there).

Part of my work these days is writing business plans for founders who apply for the E-2 investor visa in the United States. It’s a niche, it’s a strange one and I like it, partly because I went through the immigrant-founder thing myself. Fun story. In hindsight.

Now, the obvious marketing move for a writer would have been to write. Articles. Ten things to know about the E-2. Is your investment substantial enough? What officers actually look for in a business plan. I could have written twenty of those in a week, and I probably would have enjoyed it. As I said, writing is easy.

Instead I built a Reality Check. Ten questions, no login, a few minutes. At the end you get an honest read on where your own case actually stands, what’s missing and what to do next. Immigration attorneys can put their own logo on it and send it to their clients. (It lives at juergenpretsch.com/check, if you’re curious.).

Did I write it? Of course I wrote it. Every question, every result, every next-step line is writing, and more careful writing than most articles get, because a clumsy sentence in a tool costs you more than a clumsy sentence in a blog post (as this sentence shows). Nobody abandons an article because paragraph four is a bit off. People abandon a tool the moment question four confuses them or feels off.

But here is what I didn’t expect: the writing didn’t disappear. It moved. It stopped sitting still on a page and started talking to one person about their case. It does something twenty articles could never do, no matter how well I wrote them. It talks.

Write. Show off. Build.

So where does this leave a writer? Or a founder who hires one?

Here is what I now believe, and what I now do.

Write. Yes, still. Text is what search engines index and what AI assistants read, quote and recommend. This is what we all need to understand: We are not only writing for the reader. We are writing for the reader and the machine. If you want to be found, you need words, and they need to be good, because the assistants are getting picky. A tool with no writing around it is invisible. A brand with no writing behind it is a logo.

Show off. If you know something, demonstrate it. Don’t describe how experienced you are; let people experience it. Put a calculator where the paragraph about calculating used to be. Put a diagnostic where the list of “signs you might need X” used to be. Put a working prototype where the pitch deck used to be. If you’re good, this is the easiest part. If you’re not, no amount of adjectives will save you anyway, because there are others out there who show off.

Create actual content. Content that lives and breathes. Content that responds when someone touches it, that takes the reader’s own situation and hands back something about them. Not “here is what I think about your problem in general” but “here is what this means for you, right now, based on what you just told me.”

Does every post need a tool? No. Most don’t. This essay doesn’t; it’s an essay and it’s fine as one. But every serious piece of content should be asked one question before it goes out: What would the reader want to do with this? And can I let them do it?

If the answer is “nothing, they just want to read it”: great, write it well and move on. That’s the case more often than the tool people want you to believe.

If the answer is anything else, you now know what to build.

The ghost who builds

I have started calling this write and build. Not because it’s catchy (it isn’t, particularly), but because it describes what my clients actually need and what they were never able to buy from one person.

They could hire a writer. They could hire a developer. They could hire an agency and get a slide deck about content strategy for the price of a small car (well, before car prices exploded, but I digress). What they couldn’t get was someone who writes the thing and builds the thing it lives in, and who understands that these are not two jobs but one.

Fourteen years ago I built scaffolds out of sentences.

Now I build them out of sentences and the thing the sentences live in. Sometimes that’s a book. Sometimes it’s a tool. Sometimes it’s a website, a launch, a product that exists because somebody described it to me well enough that I could build it.

Clients still ask me whether I’m an expert on their topic.

No. I’m not.

But I’ll be one long enough to write it. And now, long enough to build it too.