The book idea usually has years on it. It lives in some corner of the mind, accumulating detail each time the speaker takes the stage or the executive wraps up a client call. The material is there. The calendar never is.
Anne McAuley Lopez has built a career around that gap. McAuley Lopez is the founder of Agency Content Writer, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm that ghostwrites nonfiction books for entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and nonprofit executives who know what they want to say but have never found the time to write it down. In July 2026, the company announced an expansion of its book ghostwriting service, formalizing a process built around structured interviews: clients share their ideas, stories, and expertise in conversation, while McAuley Lopez handles the writing, structure, and manuscript development from start to finished draft. The author’s name goes on the cover. The writer remains invisible.
“A keynote can move a room for an hour,” McAuley Lopez said in announcing the expansion. “A book keeps speaking long after the event ends.”
From Layoff to Long-Form
McAuley Lopez’s path into professional writing began with a disruption of her own. A University of Connecticut economics graduate, she had spent years in banking and data-related fields before a corporate layoff in 2010 handed her a pivot she had not planned for. She launched what would become Agency Content Writer, starting with social media content for small businesses and later taking on blogging work for digital marketing agencies. The work shifted, over time, toward longer-form projects.
Her client roster has included, by her own account, a stroke survivor who rebuilt her professional life, a woman who came through a difficult upbringing to become a community leader, and a client in her nineties who had climbed Kilimanjaro at 89. Each project, as McAuley Lopez describes the work, begins with listening.
Her own relationship with long-form storytelling sharpened in 2016, when she was diagnosed with Chronic Myeloid Leukemia four months after getting married. The diagnosis altered how she thought about her time and what she wanted to do with it. She worked with a book coach and editor to write We Don’t Get to Ring the Bell: My CML Story, a memoir published in December 2021 that addresses the practical and emotional realities of living with a blood cancer that requires ongoing treatment rather than a defined course of it. The book is available on Amazon. McAuley Lopez and her husband volunteer with Blood Cancer United, the organization formerly known as The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and the company reports they have raised more than $65,000 for blood cancer research and awareness.
Going through the process of writing her own book, she has said, clarified what ghostwriting clients actually need: structure, a reliable process, and someone who stays committed to the project when the author cannot.
Three Ways In
Agency Content Writer’s ghostwriting work moves through a seven-stage methodology McAuley Lopez calls the STORIES Framework, covering Spark, Tidying, Outlining, Running with It, Immersing, Evaluating, and Sharing. Most projects run six to eight months from first conversation to finished draft. According to the company, nonfiction business books typically land between 40,000 and 60,000 words. Ghostwriting services start at $8,000.
“My job is to take what my clients already know and turn it into a manuscript that sounds like them, not like me,” McAuley Lopez has said.
Not every client needs a ghostwriter in the traditional sense. Agency Content Writer offers two additional paths. Book coaching provides accountability, feedback, and strategic guidance for clients who want to write their own manuscripts. The From Posts to Pages program is built for writers who already have a body of content, blog posts, newsletters, social writing, and want a structured route to turning that material into a book rather than starting from scratch. Both paths run through the same STORIES Framework. Which fits a given client is something the initial consultation is designed to figure out before any project begins.
McAuley Lopez moved Agency Content Writer from the Phoenix area to Charlotte in June 2022. The firm works with professionals across the country. McAuley Lopez frames the practice in a phrase that runs throughout her work: “Everyone has a story. Yours just needs to be told.” Details on the book ghostwriting service and the full range of programs are available on the company’s website.