Nicolas Cole 🚢👻

I have been writing every single day for 15+ years. Here are the main things that ruin your daily writing habit: 1. Overthinking every topic 2. Reading more than you write 3. Perfectionism & endlessly editing 4. Not protecting your Sacred Hours 5. Drinking alcohol & not getting good sleep Avoid as many of these as possible.

If you want to charge $5,000 for ghostwriting, stop selling "blog posts" or "words." Sell a finished asset with a clear ROI: a 5-Day Educational Email Course. It solves one specific problem, captures leads automatically, and runs forever. Clients happily pay flat rates for assets that generate pipeline.

🚢 Day 29 of Ship 30 for 30 Today, we combined 3 smaller pieces of content into a Pillar Piece! • Pick an overarching topic • Reuse existing material on that topic • Add “more” to write a long-form article/newsletter. Shippers… share your Pillar Pieces!

How to make your non-fiction impossible to stop reading: Great writers use a simple cause-and-effect technique that makes their words feel like a conversation happening in real-time. It’s a Fiction Writing technique called Motivation-Reaction Units (MRUs). Instead of a character reacting, it’s your reader reacting to your words. Every line you write creates a motivation. Your job is to predict your reader’s reaction and answer it immediately. Stop writing monologue lectures. Write the exact dialogue happening inside your reader's head.

"Join my newsletter" is the worst call to action on the internet. Nobody wakes up wanting more generic emails in their inbox. If you want your opt-in rate to jump from 2% to 40%+, stop offering a generic newsletter. Offer a specific 5-day Educational Email Course that solves one concrete problem.

The biggest mistake writers make with AI is thinking voice is universal. - They build one giant voice.md file - They dump every rule, every example, every framework into a single project. - They open one chat and use it for newsletters, LinkedIn posts, YouTube scripts, sales emails, and everything in between. And then they wonder why the output keeps getting worse. Voice isn’t universal—it changes by format. Isolate your projects.

The internet doesn’t always favor “good writing.” But the internet always favors what’s fast. When people read online, they don't actually "read." They skim, browse, and scroll. Their eyes gloss over your words, and if something compelling catches their attention in the first few seconds, they'll stop and engage. The second your writing loses momentum? Your reader is gone.

Ghostwriting retainer pricing benchmarks every writer should memorize: The vast majority of recurring ghostwriting services fall in the $3,000 to $7,000 per month range. - If you’re charging less than $3,000 per month for a recurring service, you are most likely undercharging. Not because you don’t have the skills, or the credibility. But because you have some faulty belief swirling around inside of you insisting you “can’t.” - And if you’re charging more than $7,000 per month, it’s because you have some sort of other strong variable working to your advantage. You might have a huge personal brand with a ton of public credibility, or an insanely valuable network you’ve found a way to monetize, etc. Stop billing hourly. Package your asset, anchor to client business outcomes, and claim your tier.

The biggest prospect targeting mistake ghostwriters make: A mistake many ghostwriters make is they try to go after people who are already doing so many of the “digital” things right. They’ll pitch Ali Abdaal and tell him why his funnel isn’t working properly. People do this to me all the time too. They’re like, “Your emails could be converting more people.” And I’m like, no they couldn’t. Because either I wrote the emails, or someone on our team wrote the emails, who I trained. So you don’t want to pitch people who are already 8, 9, 10/10 on the digital stuff. Pitch traditional businesses that have cash flow, zero digital presence, and a massive gap you can easily bridge.