Leaders to Legends

What Audiences Walk Away With
1. A method they can start Monday. Mary teaches the structure she uses with paying clients: how to find the through line in your own experience, how to test whether an idea holds weight, and how to produce pages without quitting your job. Her rule is unglamorous and it works. Write a page a day and you have a book in a year.
2. Clarity as a business skill. Her editorial standard is plain English, no jargon, no inflation. Attendees take that standard back to the things they write every week, and the improvement shows up in email and decks long before it shows up in a manuscript.
3. A realistic map of publishing. Mary has worked every side of this: writer, editor, ghostwriter, business owner. She has negotiated with agents, publishers, and promotion agencies. She names what earns money, what wastes it, and which expensive mistakes she watched clients make so nobody in the room has to repeat them.
4. Permission, backed by evidence. The most persistent myth she hears is that you must be a professional writer or already famous to write something worth reading. Forty-five books argue otherwise. Most of her clients had never written anything longer than a memo.
How She Works With Organizers
Mary prepares for a stage the way she prepares for a manuscript. She interviews the organizer and, when the format allows, two or three attendees beforehand, so the examples come from the audience's industry rather than a stock deck. She delivers materials on time. She has spent a decade running a company where “the client is waiting” is the only deadline that matters, and she brings that standard to conference logistics.
On stage she is warm, funny, and direct. She has told stories on NBC Nightly News and on NPR, and she has told them to a Tuesday morning composition class that would rather have been asleep. She takes questions for as long as you will let her.
Formats: keynote, half-day workshop, executive roundtable, panel moderation, fireside interview.

Mary Curran Hackett
International bestselling author, ghostwriter of 45+ books, founder and CEO of The Author's Block
For twenty-five years, Mary Curran Hackett has written other people's books. Forty-five of them, published. Several landed on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller lists. Not one carries her name.
Her clients are CEOs, founders, physicians, artists, celebrities, and religious leaders, people who built something remarkable and then discovered they had no idea how to say what they learned doing it. Her job is to sit across from them, listen for the thing they keep circling, and get it on the page before they talk themselves out of it.
She learned early that this is not a writing problem. It is a translation problem. And it does not stop at books. It shows up in the board memo nobody finished, the pitch that lost to a worse product, the founder who cannot explain her own company at a dinner party. Mary has spent her career solving it, first as a novelist published by HarperCollins, then as an editor inside a publishing house, then as an adjunct professor teaching rhetoric to nineteen-year-olds at eight in the morning, which she will tell you was the hardest room of the three.
Audiences get the working method, not the highlight reel. They also get the parts most speakers leave out: what it costs, what gets cut, and what happens when a book fails.

I have no lighting, staging or sound requirements.