Episode Summary

Most experts, when they think about writing a book, imagine starting from nothing. A blank page. Months of generating new content from scratch. The intimidating work of creating something that does not yet exist.

In Episode 14 of the Author-ized™ Podcast, Ada Cuaresma challenges that assumption directly. Through the story of a spiritual coach who came to her convinced the book would take "a few years" — and left with a manuscript built largely from materials she had already created — Ada makes the case that most experts have far more book material than they realize. The problem is not that the material does not exist. The problem is that nobody has gone looking for it.

The episode introduces the Audit stage of the CATCH Method™ — the second stage, positioned before the Transform and Create stages — and explains its simple but often skipped job: before building a framework and before writing a single chapter, take inventory of everything you already have. Client emails, session notes, workshop slides, voice memos, social media posts, intake questionnaires, testimonials, repeated questions from clients — all of it is potential raw material.

Ada walks through what counts as existing material, what gets missed most often (including sales calls, objections, and the expert's own frustrations), how the Audit feeds the framework-building process in the Transform stage, a loose process for organizing what is found, and a pruning framework for evaluating what belongs in the book versus what belongs in a future project.

Key Takeaways

• The Audit stage of the CATCH Method™ comes before writing and before outlining — its job is to take inventory of everything you already have before creating anything new.

• Most experts dramatically underestimate what counts as book material: recordings, written content, client materials, presentations, testimonials, research notes, sales calls, objections, repeated questions, and moments of personal frustration.

• Skipping the Audit means reinventing insights already developed, rewriting explanations already perfected, and recreating stories already told many times over.

• The Audit reveals patterns — consistent sequences, recurring concepts, repeated explanations — that become the raw material of the framework built in the Transform stage.

• A loose organizing process: gather everything first without filtering, then label each piece by what concept or story it represents, then group by theme to see the shape of the book emerging.

• Pruning criteria: does the material serve the book's core promise? Is it in a form that can actually be used? Does it represent current thinking or an earlier version?

• The Audit does not reduce the writing — it accelerates it. When thinking has already been done, the writing that follows moves faster and sounds more like the author.

Reflection Questions

1. If you spent one hour gathering existing materials related to your book's core topic, what would you find? Where would you look first?

2. What types of materials on the list surprised you — that is, what had you not previously thought of as potential book content?

3. When you explain your methodology to a client or in a sales conversation, is that explanation recorded anywhere? If not, how might you capture it?

4. What questions do you get asked most consistently — by clients, by prospects, by audiences? What does that repetition tell you about what your book needs to address?

5. After doing a rough Audit, what patterns emerge? What concepts, sequences, or ideas keep showing up across different materials?

Prefer to read? The full transcript is below.

Welcome to Authorized, the podcast for experts ready to build authority and thought leadership with their own nonfiction book. I'm your host, Ada Cuaresma. If you're a coach, consultant, or service-based expert looking to build authority in your niche or carrying a book idea but not sure where to begin, well my friend, you're in the right place.

Here we talk about structure, clarity, and authoring the right book so your work can reach more people and make a bigger impact in the process. Enjoy the show and let's get you Author-ized™.

Introduction

You probably don't realize it, but you've most likely already written half of your book.

And I'm not talking about actual drafts of your book chapters. But in your years of serving clients, running your business, and honing your expertise, you have accumulated raw materials that can be easily transformed into content for your book.

Client emails, session notes, presentation slides, voice memos, articles, video recordings, these are just a few examples of what you could already have saved on your computer or your phone.

Many experts get paralyzed at the thought of writing their own book because they think they're starting from nothing. But the truth is, most of them are starting with too much.

So in this episode, we will dive deeper into the audit stage of the CATCH Method™, so by the time you sit down to write, you are not starting from nothing, but from everything that you have already built.

The Audit Stage

In case you don't know yet, the CATCH Method™ is my proprietary framework for turning your expertise into a structured, authority-building, nonfiction book. I discussed the CATCH Method™ in this episode.

The second stage of the CATCH Method™ is the letter A, which stands for Audit.

Before you begin drafting your book, and even before you outline the chapters, your goal is to take inventory of the assets you already have.

When experts come to me ready to write a book, the instinct is almost always to start writing. Open a document, begin chapter 1, using new content.

On the surface, that makes sense. Writing a book feels like it should involve writing. But if you skip doing the audit work, you are creating from nothing, when you could be creating from something. You are reinventing insights that you have already developed, or rewriting explanations you have already perfected through repetition, and recreating stories that you have already told dozens of times in sessions and conversations.

You cannot use what you don't know you have, and most experts have far more than they realize.

A Client Story: No More Writing for “A Few Years”

That was exactly the case for one of my clients who came to me convinced that writing her book would take, in her own words, “a few years” because she felt like she was starting with nothing.

She's a spiritual coach who is certified in multiple healing modalities, and her business has been running for close to a decade at that point.

When we talked about the book, her main concern was the sheer amount of writing that's ahead of her. She imagined several months of brainstorming, and another several months sitting down and generating content from a blank page.

So before we started writing anything, I asked her to gather everything she had. She came back to me with recordings of client sessions that she had permission to use as anonymous examples, the intake questionnaire she refined over the years, a slide deck from a workshop she had given twice, and about 40 Q&A posts from her private Facebook group.

The intake questionnaire revealed parts of her process that she walks her clients through. The workshop slides contained a rough version of her framework, and many of the Q&A posts were fully developed explanations of her concepts written in her actual voice.

Of course, none of those materials were a finished book, but almost none of the thinking had to be done fresh.

The book she eventually wrote drew significantly from the material that already existed before she even opened a blank document.

My client later told me that the audit ended up taking what she thought would be a multi-month writing process and cutting it down dramatically, not because she wrote faster, but because so much of the thinking had already been done.

What Counts as Existing Material

The challenge with the audit stage is not really the work itself, but recognizing what actually qualifies as material.

Most experts dramatically underestimate what counts. So here are just a few examples of existing materials that you might already have.

Audio and video recordings. It could be in-person training videos, webinar replays, podcast episodes, sales calls, or even voice memos you recorded for yourself. These types of recordings usually include multiple instances where you spoke about your expertise.

Written content. Blog posts, social media captions, email newsletters, client proposals, even detailed emails where you explain the concept to a single client. These often contain fully-formed explanations of the ideas that would otherwise take hours to write fresh.

Client materials. Session notes, coaching frameworks that you maybe sketched on a whiteboard and then took a picture of, intake forms that you have refined over the years, feedback you have given that follows a pattern. These materials often reveal your methodology more clearly than you could describe it from memory because they show the methodology in action.

Presentations and training materials. Slide decks, workshop outlines, course curriculum. If you have ever taught your expertise to a group, you have likely already organized it into some kind of a structure, which is exactly the kind of material you need for building authority.

Testimonials and case studies. What clients say about working with you often contains language and insight you would never think to include yourself. It is the specific transformation that they experienced described in their own words.

Research and reference notes. Articles that you have saved, books you have read and annotated, ideas that you've jotted down after a conference or a podcast that sparks something in you. While these are not yet your content, they often point to what you find compelling enough to develop further.

Then there's also a few types of materials that get missed more often than they should.

Sales calls and discovery conversations. These often contain your clearest, most concise explanation of what you do and why it matters because you are speaking to someone who doesn't understand your work yet and needs to grasp it quickly.

Complaints and objections. The pushback you hear most often from prospects or clients reveal exactly what your reader needs addressed in the book. If you have heard the same objection a dozen times, your book should probably answer that directly.

Repeated questions. If multiple people ask you the same question across different contexts, that question is doing you a favor. It is telling you exactly what content needs to exist.

And finally, your own frustration. The moments where you have thought, “why does nobody talk about this?” Or, “I wish someone had told me this earlier.” Those thoughts often contain the most original and valuable material you have, precisely because it came from a genuine friction rather than trying to sound like an expert.

You might already have a couple, several, or all the materials mentioned in this list and never have thought to look at them as book material.

The Audit Feeds the Framework

One of the most important and practical purposes of the audit is to help you create the framework for your expertise.

I did an episode about frameworks previously. In that episode, we talked about how a framework is the “package” that makes your expertise unique and notable, and that it usually already exists inside the way you work even if it hasn't been named or built yet.

The Audit stage is where that framework reveals itself. When you gather existing materials and lay them out together, patterns usually emerge. You start noticing that there's a consistent way you explain things, and that certain concepts appear in a specific order. You may also have a variety in certain parts of your workflow for different kinds of situations.

Those patterns are the raw material for your framework. After the Audit stage, you then go to the Transform stage to finalize your framework and give it a name, a visual, and a clear explanation. The Audit stage is what makes that task easier, faster, and more grounded in what you actually do rather than what sounds good in theory.

The Audit Process

You don't really need an elaborate system to do your audit, but having some structure makes the difference between a useful audit and a pile of files that you may never look at again.

Start by gathering everything in one place. A folder, a board, or whatever works for you. Don't filter anything yet because the goal at this stage is volume, not quality.

Once everything is gathered, go through each piece and ask a simple question: What is this an example of? You're not asking about what type of file it is, but what concept, story, or explanation it represents.

For example, a workshop slide could represent a step in your methodology, or a client testimonial could be an explanation of an important concept.

What you want to do is to group and label your materials by theme rather than by source.

And as you label, you will start to see the clusters — several pieces that all relate to the same idea, a handful of stories that illustrate a similar transformation. These clusters will start to show you the shape of your book before you even begin writing.

Pruning: Evaluating What Is Usable, And What to Leave Behind

The last part of your audit is what I call pruning.

Because the reality is, not everything that you gather will make it to the book, and that's completely fine. The goal of the audit stage is not to use everything, but to know what you have so that when you move into building your framework and outline, you are choosing from real material rather than guessing what might exist.

So how do you know which ones to include and which ones to leave out? Prior to the Audit stage is Clarify.

That is where we created a Book Anchor Document to clearly identify your target reader and your book promise. I'll link the episode about the clarify stage here as well.

So in order to prune your materials, you first need to ask whether the material serves the promise in your book anchor document. A brilliant insight that doesn't serve your specific reader's transformation doesn't belong in this book, but it might belong in a future project.

Next, check whether the material is in a form you can actually use or whether it needs significant rework to be usable. For example, a workshop recording with rich content but terrible audio quality may still be worth transcribing for ideas, even if the audio itself is not usable. A polished blog post that already reads well might not even need any adjustments at all. Knowing the difference helps you prioritize where you would spend your effort.

And lastly, determine whether the material represents your current thinking or an earlier version of it. Expertise sometimes evolves. Something you said three years ago might no longer reflect how you would explain the concept today. That doesn't make it useless, but it might still capture a useful story or example.

But be honest with what needs updating versus what can be used as is.

Get a Head Start

So here's something you can do after listening to this episode.

Set aside time this week to do your audit.

Go through your emails, your files, your recordings, your old presentations. Gather everything that might relate to your book's core promise. Don't filter as you go, just collect.

And once you have your collection, sort it loosely by theme. Notice what goes together and notice what comes up again and again. That repetition is telling you about the framework that already exists inside your work.

Then, look honestly at what you have. How much of the book might already exist in some form, waiting to be organized rather than be written from scratch? For most experts, the answer is more than they expected.

Join the Author-ized™ Accelerator

The Audit stage is one of the things we work through carefully inside the Author-ized™ Accelerator, my group coaching program that guides coaches, consultants, and service-based experts through the CATCH Method™, from the Clarify stage all the way to a completed first draft.

We don't just help you write new content, but we help you find what you have already built so that the writing that follows moves faster and sounds more like you.

So if you're ready for it, visit gogetauthorized.com to learn more and get in touch.

Conclusion

As we close, remember this.

Writing a book doesn't have to start with a blank page. For most experts, it starts with an inventory, a careful, honest look at everything you have already created, thought, said, and written over years of doing your work.

The Audit stage is not just for formality. It is often the fastest path through the book writing process that feels the most daunting.

And who knows? What you find may surprise you. Most experts discover that they are far closer to a first draft than they ever imagined.

Thanks for listening! If this episode resonated, it's because your work deserves authority and the kind of impact that lasts. And if the show helped you in any way, feel free to subscribe, leave a review, or share this with someone who has a book idea but doesn't quite know where to start.

You can connect with me by emailing [email protected]. Framework first, book second, authority that lasts. I'll see you in the next episode.

Join The Author-ized™ Accelerator

The Audit stage is one of the things we work through carefully inside the Author-ized™ Accelerator — my group coaching program that guides coaches, consultants, and service-based experts through the CATCH Method™, from the Clarify stage all the way to a completed first draft.

We do not just help you write new content. We help you find what you have already built, so the writing that follows moves faster and sounds more like you.

If you are ready for that, visit gogetauthorized.com to learn more and get in touch.