Mentoring & Ghostwriting
Over the years I've enjoyed coaching quite a number of aspiring authors with a great book inside them needing to get envisioned and completed. Now that I've written most of the books in my own bucket-list, I'm opening up more time to help younger writers discover how to envision, rough out, edit and publish their books.
Here's my basic mentor-ghostwriting presentation, in case you are currently seeking professional guidance in manifesting your own book project:
John Selby: mentoring, ghostwriting, editing support ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John Selby is a fiction and non-fiction author with over thirty published self-help/meditation books plus eleven feature screenplays and half a dozen novels. He has been a cognitive therapist and spiritual counselor, and conducted NIH brain-research examining the inner mechanics of mindfulness meditation. Over the years he has also taught creative writing and publishing strategies, coached numerous authors in book-project development, and ghostwritten over a dozen books for aspiring authors in a wide variety of genres including fiction, feature screenplays, and non-fiction books.
Ghostwriting Client Recommendations:
“John Selby has written numerous novels and psychology books which collectively have sold in excess of one million copies. As a long-time co-author, agent and friend of John, I can recommend him with complete enthusiasm and confidence. John is a talented writer for both fiction and non-fiction and also a wonderful mentor, researcher, editor, and sounding board.”
Bill Gladstone President, Waterside Productions
“Investing recently in the help of John Selby to coach me and ghostwrite my book Spiritual Psychology was one of the best professional decisions I've made. John and I worked closely together on my book project for 7 months. I came in with only a general idea and he brought me to clarity, commitment, and action. We met twice weekly by phone for 2-3 hours throughout the entire process. John asked pertinent and intelligent questions and we recorded my answers which became the raw material that John then advanced into final manuscript completion. I couldn't be happier with the outcome – John is thoughtful and dedicated, and we forged a partnership around my work that was deeply supportive. John is professional, timely, responsible and a consummate professional, while also kind and friendly. 5 stars!”
Renee McKenna Therapist, author of Spiritual Psychology
“John stepped in and completed the ghost-writing phase of my book Voice: How to Share your Message, Products and Business with the World. The results were wonderful - the book has earned a number #1 bestseller ranking on Amazon. John is articulate, diligent, an accomplished editor and writer, and prolific author. I enjoyed working with John personally and look forward to using him on future book projects. Please feel free to call me with any additional recommendations as needed: 505-660-6622.”
Kristen White WhiteMediaAgency.com
"Last year I felt the strong urge to write a personal account of my long-term struggles to recover from a terrible brain-damage accident. A friend recommended John Selby as ghostwriter and literary mentor - and we teamed up for 6 months of phone-based recording, rewriting and editing. The result is the book “My Path To Healing” which John also helped me publish. On all fronts John’s participation was experienced, professional, supportive, insightful, respectful, challenging - and ultimately satisfying and enlightening. The book got completed on time and published despite my sometimes-difficult health condition, and it reads as good as anyone could wish for. Both thumbs up for John!”
Keith Kuegel
Author: My Path To Healing
"To my rewrite editor John Selby - thank you so much for your major ghostwriting contributions to making my book SHARP a success, and for your mentoring and guidance in helping me live more fully what I teach through this adventure."
Heidi Hanna
Corporate Consultant
"I am Swiss/French and was luckily guided to John Selby in California to transform a very bad English translation of my inspiration-book (Accepting Who You Really Are) into a truly wonderful expression. His expert knowledge of psychology and meditation enabled him to advance my writings into new realms. John is also now building a special app to further transform my original project. He has the ability to ghostwrite an author's writings into a higher level of clarity and expression, without in any way altering the underlying message - this is truly a gift! We're lucky he's now sharing this gift and helping writers manifest their highest vision.
Nassrine Reza Author: Accepting Who You Really Are
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Sampling ... of published John Selby ghostwriting projects:
Tapping The Source: (spiritual guidance, for Bill Gladstone)
Voice (business success, for Kristen White)
My Path To Healing (medical memoir, for Keith Kuegel)
The Seventh Mindset (novel, for Jeffrey Frick)
Sharp: Simple Strategies For Managing your Brainpower (self-help, for Heidi Hanna)
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John Selby Bio:
John was born in the valley of Ojai near Santa Barbara. The grandson of early west-coast settlers, he grew up on cattle ranches in California and Arizona, and attended the Ojai Valley School. He went east to Princeton in the mid-sixties, getting his BA degree in Psychology. He worked as a research hypnotist at the New Jersey Neuro-psychiatric Institute under the renown Dr. Humphry Osmond MD doing brain research for the National Institutes of Health. His recent memoir Blowing America's Mind documents in dramatic form that early professional experience; the story is now in consideration as a TV series.
Under the guidance of his mentor Alan Watts, John moved to San Francisco to continue his graduate studies in psychology at UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. His new novel Shooting Angels dramatizes this period of his life. In the mid-70s John moved to LA to participate in the early director-intern program at the American Film Institute. Demonstrating a sharp knack for story-telling and screenplay-writing, he was taken aboard at the renown film agency of Reece Halsey – but unsatisfied with the Hollywood screen-writing scene, John finished his post-grad studies under Dr. Chuck Kelly PhD at the Radix Institute in Ojai, and worked as a Neo-Reichian therapist/consultant in San Luis Obispo.
Continuing to write fiction, John made lengthy trips south of the border to Mexico and Guatemala studying primitive tribal customs and working on various fiction projects. Returning from a wild year in highland Guatemala in 1979, he wrote and sold his early mystic/action novel (Powerpoint - still available) to Warner Books. Forced by his NY editor to change the plot and theme into an occult thriller, he swore never again to write commercial genre novels – and shifted his primary focus to developing effective therapy techniques for transcending anxiety and depression. His meditation books sold very well (over 700,000 copies) and helped to fuel the the mindfulness movement.
In the eighties, John moved to West Berlin where a young generation of Germans were eager to explore his new therapy and personal-transformation methodologies. While in Switzerland in 1984, John met the Bavarian artist who would become his third and present wife, Birgitta Steiner. Together they envisioned and sold a 24-book 'self-therapy library' to a major European publisher (Knaur Verlag), and worked for 4 years creating both text and audio dimensions for those German-market programs. Overall, two dozen of John’s titles have now been published in 17 languages.
During his research and therapy career, John often worked at the creative edge of the corporate world, counseling executives and developing mindfulness programs in the workplace. This focus led to the founding of the BrightMind Corporation in Hawaii in the nineties. That company morphed into WizeWell Inc in Silicon Valley before being sold. A number of John's therapy clients have been business leaders – and several of them became characters in his Jack Hadley psych-tech mystery series.
John now lives with his wife in Santa Cruz. During the last seven years he has envisioned, written and published five new suspense/mystery/thriller novels and related film properties, along with the Mindfully High text and app. He is now mostly focused on mentoring new writers, helping them to envision, write and publish their books. To date he has ghostwritten 11 books in fiction, psychology, self-help, business and memoir genres.
For more info please contact John at ... johnselby24@gmail.com
or his ghostwriting agent Johanna Maaghul at ... johanna@waterside.com
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