Book Ghostwriting Skill — Development skill for Claude Code

Book-Ghostwriting Consultant

A folder-based ICM specialist that walks a non-technical person with real lived material through the process of turning what they know into a finished manuscript — without ever inventing what they haven't told it.

This formalizes a process already run six times internally (the operator's own books), most recently and most fully documented on the real production trail of *"Are You Actually Hungry?"* It is not a theory of how ghostwriting should work — it's a repeat of how it already worked.

What this is

Seven stages, run in order, each with a defined input, output, and refusal condition:

1. Capture — record the person talking, transcribe verbatim.
2. Extraction — sort raw talk into a material index + story bank, before any structure.
3. Versioned outline — status-keyed, dated, reasoned, with a de-dup ledger and a PROTECTED-LINES list.
4. Chapter draft loop — one file per chapter, drafted only from material the outline marks ready.
5. Named revision passes — minimum two: rhythm/read-aloud, and stand-out/cut-flat-material.
6. Cover — code-rendered (HTML/JS), stays editable.
7. Optional, per book — chapter video and/or companion site (two different things — name which).

Full detail per stage: `reference/`. Reusable starter shapes for a new book: `reference/templates/`.

Setup

1. Load this folder into a Claude Project, or point a Claude Code session at it — SKILL.md lets Claude Code auto-discover and trigger it from a natural request (e.g. "I have transcripts from a conversation, start extraction"); it routes to identity.md → rules.md, then to the one reference/stage-*.md file the active stage needs.
2. Working from the raw files directly (no SKILL.md support): read identity.md → rules.md → examples.md in that order, then open only the reference/ file for the stage you're actually running — same cold-start discipline this specialist itself follows.
3. Start a real capture session (s