Case study · Non-fiction · 2025
ASIN B0DZQM4HW8
A clinical psychologist with two decades of research data and zero spare hours hired us to ghostwrite a popular-press book on adult ADHD diagnosis. The book launched in October 2025 and reached #1 in Amazon's Psychology > Mental Health sub-category for 41 days. Her practice waitlist now runs nine months.
Inside the project
Working shots from this engagement — interview sessions, manuscript pages, cover concepts, launch day.
A 90-page Google Doc of frameworks, twenty years of de-identified clinical observations, and a calendar that could absorb roughly four hours per month. She had been told for six years that she should write a book. Three previous ghostwriting pitches had been from writers whose portfolios were self-help. None of them had ever read a peer-reviewed paper about diagnostic sensitivity.
Ravi opened the first discovery call with a question about ADHD diagnostic sensitivity rates in adult populations — a question that comes from inside the literature, not from a generic writer’s prep. That signal was the buying decision. The author trusted that the book would not flatten her thinking into pop-psychology language.
The book that came out of the engagement is 60% case-study (composite, de-identified) and 40% framework. The framework — a four-stage diagnostic-and-treatment model the author had been refining for a decade — lands cleanly in chapter 3. Chapters 4 through 9 each illustrate one component.
The launch was sized to the book’s natural audience: adult ADHD readers (a large, underserved category) plus mental-health practitioners (a small, vocal one). Clara’s team ran Amazon Ads against the adjacent-bestseller categories, sized to win category placement without burning the budget on top-of-funnel breadth.
The book sustained inside the top 5 of Psychology > Mental Health for over six weeks. The audiobook (a 9.5-hour listen recorded by Dr. Okonjo-Fields herself, against Clara’s initial recommendation — Clara was wrong, the author’s voice carries the audiobook better than a professional narrator would have) is now the dominant format for ongoing sales.
Three things. Her clinical practice waitlist went from 5 months to 9 months in the four months after launch. Three popular-press outlets profiled her practice. Most quietly: she started seeing patients who had read the book and arrived already knowing the framework. The therapy moved faster as a result, with measurably better engagement in the first six sessions.
The book is, in this sense, doing work the author could not have scaled any other way.
“Ravi opened the first call by asking me about diagnostic sensitivity rates. I knew within ten minutes he could write this. The book reads in my voice because it is, in fact, my voice — they captured it on tape.”
Cover rounds
The shortlist we presented to the author before round-one revisions. The selected concept is the second in the strip.
Project facts
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