Most Business Owners Are Writing the Wrong Book — Ally Machate on Authority, the Memoir Trap and Book Strategy

Host Daniel Hill sat down with Ally Machate, CEO and founder of The Writer’s Ally, an author services company whose team of publishing professionals helps serious authors write, publish and sell high-quality books. Ally came up inside the industry — a job at Simon & Schuster, one of the Big Five, straight out of school — and stayed through the dot-com bust and 9/11 before the contraction pushed her into freelancing. She meant it as a break. Working directly with authors turned out to be so much more fulfilling that she never went back.

She has been at this since childhood, in the most literal sense: making construction-paper-and-crayon books at three years old and handing them out, telling people she was a publisher.

The most valuable thing in this conversation isn’t encouragement. It’s the number of ways she’ll tell a business owner not to do it.

No, Not Every Business Owner Should Write a Book

Every expert has heard it at a party: you’re so smart, you should write a book. Ally’s response is unsentimental — it’s easy to say when you’re not the one doing it, and loving your idea over drinks is not the same as buying and reading three hundred pages.

Her first objection is timing. Founders who are early in a business often want the book precisely because they want it to grow the business. It can. But too early and there’s nothing to put in it:

“It’s kind of hard to attract clients if you don’t have any case studies, if you don’t have any client stories to share, and if you haven’t really tried and tested your ideas and your systems and your programs. You’re kind of just throwing out theory. It’s not the same.”
— Ally Machate

Her second objection is format. With every content channel now available, a book isn’t always the best tool for the job — a point she makes even when it costs her the engagement.

She’s blunt about how she delivers that, too: she lays out both pictures, explains that a thin book will read like a thin book, and lets the client choose. Some go quiet for six months or a year and come back once they’ve built an audience and run real programs. Others say they simply want the book out in the world and accept it may not generate a pipeline — which she considers a completely legitimate choice, as long as expectations are in alignment with reality.

The Memoir Trap

The single most common wrong book, in Ally’s experience, is a coach’s memoir. And the logic behind it is genuinely sound right up until it isn’t. The author reasons: my clients come to me to solve this problem, I lived through that same problem, so let me tell them my story.

“The market for memoir is a completely different market than it is for business books and self-help. So the people you want to attract are not memoir readers — the people you want to attract are the business book readers.”
— Ally Machate

The fix isn’t to delete the story. It’s to relocate it: the same journey, told inside a prescriptive how-to or business book, reaches the readers who might actually hire you.

Her definition of the failure mode is worth writing down, because it isn’t about quality at all:

“The wrong book is the book that is not strategically designed to actually attract the right people to achieve the specific goals you want.”
— Ally Machate

You can write an objectively good book — well written, interesting, nicely structured — publish it, and hear crickets.

Backwards-Engineer It from What You Want to Happen

The mindset shift she asks for comes right after someone decides yes, they’re doing this: stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about the reader.

“Who are these people that I’m trying to reach? What is it I want them to do? Do I want these people to hire me to speak on the stage? Do I want them to become clients? Do I want them to bring me into their companies? What is it exactly that you wanna see happen beyond the basic assumption of book sales?”
— Ally Machate

Answer those and the book’s shape becomes derivable rather than improvised.

The structural rule she applies on top is that every genuinely good nonfiction book takes the reader through a transformation. Sometimes literal — change your diet, lose the weight. Sometimes softer — a paradigm shift in how someone thinks about a problem. Deliver real value along that arc, then make the next step unmistakable at the end: hire me, take the course, come to the event, read the next book.

The Authority Effect Is Baked Into the Language

The reason “everyone should write a book” persists is that there’s a real phenomenon underneath it.

“It’s not an accident that that word ‘author’ is the root word of ‘authority,’ and we say things like ‘she wrote the book on it.’ We have these phrases in our language because they reflect a very real phenomenon.”
— Ally Machate

With the caveats attached — it has to look professional, it has to be well done — a person with a book on a subject is perceived as a greater expert than a person without one. For a realtor, a consultant, nearly any expertise-driven business, that’s a client-attraction tool and a door opener: stages, podcasts, media. People love to interview authors.

Pricing: The Windows Are Fixed, Your Flexibility Isn’t

Book pricing, Ally says, is mostly a matter of reading the market. The windows are well established and readers expect you to sit inside them: paperbacks typically $14–18, hardcovers roughly $22–30, ebooks anywhere from free to $0.99 in the indie space, with traditional publishers usually landing around $8.99–10.99.

Where independents have an edge is flexibility — including the move that clients find hardest to accept:

“You can sell more copies in the long run if you give some away for free… Not talking about leaving a stack at the bus stop — actually giving them to people that you’ve chosen strategically can be a really great way to increase visibility, bring people to your book, start getting those reviews and start to build the kind of momentum that will ultimately explode into whatever results it is that you’re trying to go for.”
— Ally Machate

She also flags the opposite fear — American business instinct says cheap signals low quality, so authors price high. But an indie book doesn’t carry a publisher’s imprint doing the quality vouching for it. If your book looks like what the reader wants and costs half what the category bestseller does, that’s an edge, not a discount.

Where the Work Actually Starts

The Writer’s Ally’s most popular service is developmental editing, and it’s where most client relationships begin. Every first call is with Ally herself, walking through the business, the goals, and the book. When she senses a disconnect between what’s on the page and what the author needs the book to do, the developmental editor can usually reshape an existing draft into the right one. Occasionally something is too far off to take on — but in most cases, the draft is salvageable material, not a wasted year.

Connect with Ally Machate

Ally Machate is the CEO and founder of The Writer’s Ally, where the site carries a blog and free resources for anyone on the mailing list, plus a contact form for a free book strategy call with her. She’s active on LinkedIn, and she made a gift for this audience: a pre-recorded webinar called Don’t Write the Wrong Book — under 30 minutes, covering much of what’s in this episode.

🎧 Listen: Castos