What happens when a powerful story finds its shape
- Stuart Wakefield
- Jun 9
- 2 min read
I’m so pleased to share that Jaz Ampaw-Farr’s book, Because of You, This Is Me, has now sold over 10,000 copies. That’s wonderful in itself, of course, but it also feels very fitting, because this was never a book that was just trying to sit politely on a shelf and look nice. Jaz’s story was always going to go out into the world and do something. It was always going to find the people who needed it.
When Jaz first came to me, she already had the story. (Good grief, did she have the story!) She had the lived experience, the voice, the presence, the humour, the heartbreak, and the purpose. She also had a publisher. What she needed was the shape of the book, and that’s not a small thing.
A book has to work differently from a keynote, a talk, a workshop, or a brilliant conversation over coffee. The reader can’t see you or hear your timing. They can’t feel the atmosphere in the room. The book has to do all of that work on the page, so the job wasn’t to make Jaz’s story more powerful. It was already powerful. The job was to help the book hold that power.
We worked with the Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Book to find the spine of the project: what the book was really about, who it was for, what the reader needed to feel and understand by the end, and how Jaz’s personal story could become something that also belonged to the person reading it.
That’s where memoir and personal story can get tricky. When you’ve lived through a lot, there’s always more you could include. More memories, more context, more people, more scenes that mattered to you because, well, they happened to you. But the book can’t carry everything, nor should it. The work is in choosing what serves the reader, what deepens the point, and what helps the story land.
That’s the part I love: the digging, the shaping, the slightly annoying but necessary questions, and the moment when a writer realises, “Oh. This isn’t just what happened. This is what it means.” Jaz did that work beautifully, which is why I’m thrilled that Because of You, This Is Me has now sold more than 10,000 copies. I’m thrilled for Jaz, for her publisher, and for every reader who has found something in those pages that made them feel seen, challenged, encouraged, or changed.
And yes, I’m also very proud to have played a part in it. (Tastefully proud, of course. No medal around my neck or slow-motion walk through a cloud of glitter. Well not today, anyway.) But proud, because this is what good book coaching can do. It doesn’t replace the writer’s voice, and it doesn’t take over the story. What it does is help the writer see the book more clearly, so the reader can feel it more deeply.
Huge congratulations, Jaz. What a brilliant milestone!!!
I wrote a case study about our work together and how we shaped Because of You, This Is Me into the book it became. You can read it here:
Coaching Jaz Ampaw-Farr: Turning Her Powerful Story Into a Transformational Book
