For many entrepreneurs and professionals, writing a book is a game-changer. It can help you build a brand, establish your authority, and tell your story. A book opens doors and makes introductions for you. It’s a good move at any stage of your career—whether you’re just starting out or looking to solidify your legacy. For busy professionals, though, writing a book is challenging: how do you find the time and energy to dedicate to the project?
Biograph is an innovative social platform, designed to make it easy for anyone to record their experience—and transform it into a book. Biograph can help you with every stage of writing a book. No matter what kind of book you’re writing, Biograph gives you the tools you need to succeed. It can help you generate ideas, collaborate with your team, and make the most of the time you have to work on the project.
In this article, we look at three young professionals who are writing their own books—and using Biograph to do so. These stories are based on real Biographers, but with some details changed to protect their privacy. All three come from different backgrounds. They’re all writing books for different reasons. And they all use Biograph in different ways.
But for all of them, Biograph is the key tool in their tool chest. It helps them record, organize, and process their ideas. It helps them collaborate, get feedback, and build a readership. If you’re looking to build your career by writing a book, Biograph is an essential tool. It will help you get started, get organized, and bring your project across the finish line.
THE BLOGGER: STELLA SMITH
“Some people are just born to blog,” Stella Smith reflects. “I first started blogging when I was a junior in high school, living in rural West Texas. I was hooked: it gave me a way to connect with a broader world, beyond the oil wells and cow pastures. I met new people, learned about new ideas. And I felt validated by that community: people listened to what I had to say. They wrote thoughtful comments, shared my posts with their followers. It just seemed like a very organic, very supportive community.”
After high school, Smith moved to New York for college. She documented her experience on her blog—the ecstasy of going to her first Broadway show; the embarrassment of getting locked out of her apartment after a night at the bar. Her blog was honest, unsentimental—a reflection of what it’s really like to adjust to the fast-paced life of the big city. As she moved through college, her readership grew. After graduation, she knew what she wanted to do: “I felt like I had to write a book. I had so many readers writing me, telling me my story mattered to them, helped them figure out their own lives. I could tell that this material really resonated.”
Stella found it easy to write on her blog. “It wasn’t intimidating. I never had writer’s block. It’s just blogging, I would tell myself. But as soon as I sat down to write a book, I felt all this pressure on my back. I knew that people would take it seriously in a way that no one takes a blog seriously.”
To make matters worse, Stella had just started her first job as an assistant at a gallery. She worked long hours; she’d come home exhausted. “It felt like I didn’t have any time to work on the book—and when I did find an hour, I’d spend it staring at the screen without writing a word. Then someone told me about Biograph.”
For Stella, Biograph solved the two problems that were keeping her from finishing her book. First, it took the pressure off the writing process. “I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel as intimidating. Whenever I have an idea, I whip out my phone and start recording. Then I just free associate. When I’m done, I download the transcript and edit it on my computer. It gets me going, gets me started. Once I’m over that initial hump, suddenly I feel like I did when I was teenager blogging in West Texas: I’m just having fun, exploring what I think and want to say.”
Second, it helped Stella find the time to write in the midst of her fast-paced life in New York. “I make biographs while I’m cooking dinner, while I’m at the gym, while I’m walking to the train. Any time can be writing time for me now.”
Finally, Stella has started to explore the social side of Biograph. “I really appreciate that everything on here is private by default,” she says, “it allows me to be messy and unselfconscious in my writing. But every now and then, I make a biograph that I really want to share—or I want some feedback on an idea I’m thinking through. Then, I just tap the lock button and set it to public—it’s great to hear people’s responses. And it’s great to hear their voices. That’s something I never got with blogging: I feel like I’m getting to know my readers and listeners much more deeply, and that’s improving my book. I can write from a strong sense of connection with my future readers, instead of trying to guess who they are or what they think.”
THE BIOGRAPHER: ADAM MONIAK
Adam is an accomplished and well-known biographer. He’s written best-selling biographies of Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells. His new project has taken him in a bit of a different direction. “My previous books were about important African-Americans of the past—people who’ve shaped our world in profound ways, even if their contributions have been overlooked or forgotten. The research for that book was academic, archival. I spent a lot of time pouring over dusty files full of old letters and newspaper articles.
“But this book is about the Reverend Jesse Jackson. He’s a similarly transformational figure. But he’s still alive—as are many of the key people in his story. I needed to get their voices into my book. Not just what they said, but the way they sounded when they talked about their friend, mentor, collaborator. The shifts in their emotion, the music of their language. I wanted all of that.”
“And I needed to interview hundreds of people across the world during a pandemic to do so. These are busy, important people. They don’t have a lot of time to spare for a journalist. I needed a way to collect good material without being present in person. Biograph helped me do so.”
Adam would post photos of Jackson during key periods of his life to his personal account, each with a question or two for his followers to respond to. His interview subjects were able to respond to the photos and prompts on their own time, in short bursts. “It would’ve taken hundreds of hours to schedule interviews with these people, then transcribe and organize them—a huge headache for me and them. So I love the social side of Biograph, the ability to collaborate with people across the world and get great material easily.”
Adam used the transcripts to help him build his book. “I could just download them right away—no need to wait for a transcriber. And then I could run keyword searches as I was writing to find key passages, themes, and ideas. It cut my research time in half, easily.
“But I also found myself listening back to the biographs as I wrote. I don’t know—there’s more than just factual information there. You hear why something matters to someone; you hear it in their voice: the passionate lilt of their speech as they get excited, the slow turn in a story as they reach a moment of mourning and tragedy. When I was stuck or had writers’ block, I’d just flip through the app and listen to people’s stories. Their passion reminded me why I was passionate about this story. They lit my fire and kept me going.”
THE BREADWINNER: ALLISON BEATY
Allison Beaty made her name as a fitness, life, and finance coach—an all-in-one package. “I felt like people treated their financial health and their physical health as two separate things. But in reality, they’re interrelated for most people.” She had a busy practice of clients, who came to her gym, listened to her podcast, and devoured her memes on Instagram.
“I felt like I’d hit a ceiling, though,” she confesses. “There are so many motivational accounts on Insta—and so many scams too. If I really wanted to differentiate myself, I needed more credibility, more authority. I needed to write a book.”
But Allison had always struggled with writing. “Gosh, I nearly failed freshman composition in college,” she says. “It’s just torture for me to write. I didn’t think I could handle it on my own.”
She hired Biograph to serve as her editor and writing consultant, guiding her through the process of writing a book, helping her organize her ideas, and polishing her prose until it sparkled.
“There was no way that a normal editor-writer relationship would work for us,” Allison admits. “I just don’t have time to wade through an ocean of tiny edits. And I don’t have time to sit down and answer a bunch of emails from an editor. I want to be able to communicate ideas as soon as I have them. And I want to get feedback as quickly as I can, in a format that I can digest while I’m stuck in traffic or on the treadmill.”
Biograph allowed us to reinvent the relationship between a writer and an editor. Allison would biograph on the treadmill at 4am; we’d wake up, collect her notes on the latest chapter, and make the changes she wanted by noon. Then we’d bounce it back to her with a note on the app about what we’d done.
“It’s a modern way to write a book,” she says. “It felt like hanging out on Clubhouse with my friends—just very friendly, casual, and productive. I always tell my clients: if it’s meant to be, it will be. Working with Biograph felt like that—it just took all the friction out of a process that could’ve been really slow and cumbersome.”
Now Allison has broken through to another level. “I was just interviewed on T.V. for the first time. My practice is booming—I have a wait list. Writing a book with Biograph helped me reach the next level in my career, so I can help other people reach the next level in theirs.”
THE BEST IS YET TO COME: YOU AND YOUR BOOK
Biograph is different from the other writing apps out there. They force you to adapt to their parameters and structures. You have to spend five minutes per day writing in the app—no more, no less. Or you have to share everything you write with a community of strangers—even if you’re just thinking aloud, figuring things out.
These apps mean well. But their rigidity ends up inhibiting, not inspiring writing. As all three of our case studies show, writing is a fragile process. You need time and space, but also urgency and determination. You need privacy, so that you can be vulnerable and messy, but also the support and accountability of a community.
And your needs will shift as you work on your book. In the early days of writing, you might want to have privacy to protect the precious, growing bud of your book. But later on, you might want to build an audience or a community around selections of your project. At first, you might want to just think aloud without any concern about the finished product. Later on, you might want to be able to search those tender early drafts for the seeds of inspiration.
It’s a messy, fluid process. Your needs will change as your project grows and matures. You need a tool that’s flexible enough to support your book at every stage—from first draft to final edit.
Unlike other writing apps, Biograph offers you all the tools and flexibility you need. You can work in privacy—everything on the app is private by default. Or you can share your biographs with a vibrant community of fellow writers. You can use the app to brainstorm while you’re sitting in traffic or working out at the gym. Or you can use it to conduct polished, professional interviews with collaborators across the globe. You can use it to generate messy first drafts, then download the transcripts and use them as the basis for your book, relying on the automated transcripts that Biograph generates of every session to help you get started. Or you can use Biograph to collaborate with editors, passing memos, instructions, and ideas to your team.
For Stella, Adam, and Allison, Biograph was the difference-maker: the difference between dreaming of a book and writing a book. And it was also a difference-maker in their careers: empowering them to grow their audience and build their authority. If you’re dreaming of writing a book—and of reaching the next stage in your career—let Biograph help you get there.
