Buyers read you before they call. The book you keep not writing could be the missing piece in your business. Here is why you should get it written sooner rather than later.
The people who might hire you read first and call later. In a 2024 survey by Edelman and LinkedIn of nearly 3,500 management-level professionals across seven countries, 73 per cent said an organisation’s thought leadership was a more trustworthy basis for judging its capability than its marketing materials. The thinking in your head is now the thing being checked.
Laurey Buckland has spent a career on the other side of that check, first as a journalist, then as an English teacher, and now as a book developer working with women who have 10, 20 or 30 years of expertise and nothing on the shelf with their name on it.
There is a second problem, and it is not evenly shared. In experiments published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2022, women described their own performance on a maths and science task less favourably than men who had scored exactly the same.
What follows is why the book stays in the notebook, the questions that get it out, and why she has put a number on the whole idea.
About Laurey Buckland
Laurey Buckland is a Nottinghamshire-based Book Developer and the creator of StoryLed™.
Her StoryLed™ method helps experienced women turn decades of expertise, lived experience and the thinking they’ve become too close to, into authority-building books. She began her career in journalism in 2010, became a secondary school English teacher in 2013 and six years later became a freelance copywriter. She has written women’s fiction as a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association since 2020 and is now part of the editorial team who writes for the association’s Romance Matters Readers Edition magazine. But one thought has followed her throughout all her careers.
“The most experienced, qualified women should not be the quietest voices in their industry.”
Why the Book Stays in the Notebook
Laurey’s clients are not short of material. They have notebooks from holidays, several versions of Chapter One and notes on their phones. “They’ll be halfway through a client conversation and think, ‘That should be in my book,’” she says. “Then another year goes by.”
One woman came to her having tried for eighteen months to write her third book. She had a Trello board, a chapter outline and half the chapters drafted.
What she did not have was the shape.
The standard advice at this point is confidence. Laurey thinks that misreads the problem.
“That’s why I don’t think the answer is simply telling more women to be confident or encouraging them to ‘find their voice’. Their voice isn’t missing and neither is their experience or their ideas. Sometimes they’re simply standing too close to twenty years of their own life to see the shape of what’s there.”
After two or three decades, she says, “you stop seeing it as expertise. It’s just what you know.” And then a book asks you to put your name on all of it. “Suddenly there’s something for other people to agree with, disagree with or criticise,” she says, and for women who have spent years being agreeable, that is a real cost as well as a real fear.
Experienced women, in her words, “can become incredibly accomplished at being useful without becoming equally comfortable being visible.”
Talk First. The Chapter Comes Later
StoryLed™ does not start with Chapter One. “That’s quite a way off,” Laurey says. It starts with an interview about who the client is, what she believes, and what she does without noticing because she has done it for so long.
The root of that method is a story Laurey wrote while on work experience at her local newspaper in 2009 before her career in journalism took off. A woman in her seventies, a champion sprinter in her youth, had been mugged, sprinted after the mugger and got her bag back. The woman brushed it off saying anyone would have done it.
“I remember thinking, no, they wouldn’t,” Laurey says. The woman had lived her own life, so to her it was normal.
That is why Laurey now works by conversation first. “Because my clients are talking rather than sitting in front of a blank page trying to sound like an author, things come out that she hasn’t prepared.” One client, a woman with decades of clinical expertise, arrived unsure there was a book in her at all. In session, phrases surfaced that the client called sound bites. Laurey stopped and reflected them back, and the client realised she had just said something that really mattered. By the end, in the client’s own words: “I know and feel now that there’s a book in me, and I didn’t know that before we started.”
The Questions That Make the Steps Visible Again
The mechanics are questions, returned to from different angles.
“My job as an editorial partner is to ask the questions that make those steps visible again. Why do you do it that way? Where did that belief come from? What have you learned from seeing this hundreds of times? What do you understand now that you couldn’t have understood ten years ago?”
She then develops carefully curated transcripts into a manuscript in the client’s voice using their spoken material, ideas and language. “I’m not a ghostwriter, a writing coach or a publisher,” as she puts it on her profile. “I’m a Book Developer. My clients remain the authors.”
A lesson from teaching sits underneath the method. It arrived at a parents’ evening after she had left the classroom, when the first student to sit down repeated what the new teacher had said: “Miss Buckland has made you think you’re better than you are.”
“That sentence was a gut punch,” Laurey says. It also told her what she had actually been teaching, which was not English so much as the habit of forming an opinion, getting it wrong and trying again. StoryLed™ runs on the same habit, for adults.
Laurey also works the reader’s side of the story with her clients. “What does the reader believe when they open the book? What have they experienced? What needs to change for them by the time they close it?” A book with a clear job for its reader does not need to be long either, which is another misconception in the publishing world. “Your reader doesn’t need proof of how much you know,” Laurey wrote. “They just need you to take them somewhere.”
Sage, Not Crone: The Thousand-Manuscript Target
Behind the individual book is a bigger problem, and Laurey has given it a name and a number.
The One Thousand Voices Project is her commitment to help 1,000 women over the next ten years recognise the value of their expertise and lived experience and turn it into a complete manuscript. “If I’m asking other women to back their voices, I need to be prepared to back mine too which is why I have set myself this goal.”
One thousand is deliberately more than she can support alone, which is why she is planning retreats where women build their book architecture together and write the manuscript themselves.
But first she wants to challenge the old framing of a woman’s life which runs maiden, mother, crone. Laurey points out that crone came into the language through the Anglo-French carogne, with connections to carrion. “It’s an awful word to give a woman at the stage of life when she may have accumulated more knowledge and experience than at any point before it,” she says. “I’d replace crone with sage.”
“These can be incredibly productive years for a woman’s thinking. She might have 10, 20 or 30 years of professional experience behind her by then. She knows things she couldn’t possibly have known at thirty because she hadn’t lived them yet. I want more of that knowledge attributed to the women who developed it and available to the people who could benefit from it.”
Laurey is 41, with a two-year-old daughter who is currently fearless. “If I want her to back herself as she grows, I have to let her see me back myself too,” Laurey says. She does not want the project to be a scoreboard with her name above it but more a movement for women to get behind and one that encourages them to back themselves too.
Why Laurey, and What the Evidence Says So Far
Laurey’s credentials are the two careers already running through this piece. Journalism taught her to find the story and follow the thread. Teaching taught her how to help someone trust their own interpretation and say it clearly.
She is also writing her own non-fiction book, Your Extraordinary Ordinary, on why we become so familiar with our own experiences that we overlook their significance.
It is the thinking behind StoryLed™, written down.
Laurey is careful about the claims she makes because StoryLed™ in its current form is still new. Having been launched in May, Laurey is about to sign her sixth client. “I’m conscious of not making claims I can’t substantiate yet,” she says. What she will stand behind though is that manuscripts are being completed, a book that had stalled for eighteen months is finished and being launched in November, and women are describing their own expertise differently.
Her profile carries 21 recommendations. One, from a consultant who heard her speak at a legal sector conference, reads: “She’s a brilliant communicator, a true expert in her field and an all-around lovely person with her ethics firmly in the right place.”
Where Laurey Is Now
Laurey lives and works in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire. She develops books with experienced women through StoryLed™, one-to-one and soon in group retreats. Outside client work she writes uplit and speculative women’s fiction and, by her own account, handles a great deal of toddler laundry, meltdowns and all-round joy.
As for her goal, she says, “I suspect that when we get close to one thousand women, I’ll want to start again. Perhaps it’ll be two thousand. Perhaps it will be ten thousand. Either way, women will value their knowledge, their experience and their worth in every sector.”
The Laurey Buckland Playbook: Getting the Book Out of Your Head
Talk before you type a chapter. The material you have not prepared is usually the point, and it surfaces in conversation.
Ask why you do it that way. Interrogate your method until every instinctive step is visible and explainable to a stranger.
Write for the reader’s transformation. Decide what they believe on page one and what must change by the last. Stories and anecdotes are important too. Show your human experience and understanding.
Stop waiting for permission or a platform. Someone else’s book in your space does not close the door on yours. Remember, the things you dismiss as ordinary are often the very things that make your perspective extraordinary, because nobody else has lived your exact life.
Let someone read you from the outside. You cannot always see the shape of your own 20 years. Find the person who asks the second question.
Laurey Buckland develops books with experienced women through her StoryLed™ method at laureybuckland.com. Connect with her on LinkedIn or follow on Instagram.
