Join Our Advance Reader Teams (ART)

Help Shape These Books — And Get Free Early Access Before Publication

Some books are written in isolation, released into the world, and then quietly fade — not because they were bad, but because they never got the benefit of real readers while it still mattered.

That is not how Five Year Life™ works.

The Advance Reader Teams — ART, short for Advance Reader Team — are small groups of early readers who receive selected free pre-publication drafts in exchange for honest, practical feedback. Team Members help strengthen the books before launch — catching rough spots, clarifying confusing sections, and making sure these frameworks land the way they are intended to land in real life.

In plain English: you are not joining a mailing list. You are joining the inner circle that helps these books become what they are capable of becoming.

A quick note if you’re a fellow author. If you’re writing your own book right now — completed manuscript, partial draft, or somewhere in between — please read to the end. If you become an Advance Reader Team Member, I’d like to offer you a free specialized review of your own manuscript. Details in the PS at the bottom, or jump straight to the full explanation of the Triple Hat Critics™.

First, the Most Important Thing

Every Advance Reader Team is absolutely free. There is no cost to apply. There is no cost to participate. There is no cost ever. There is no upsell, no paid tier, no subscription, no “premium membership,” and no hidden ask of any kind. Every Team Member receives every benefit at my expense, as my thank-you for helping these books meet readers with the precision they deserve. That structure is permanent. It will never change.

And you are not required to read the entire book for any ART you join. Read what you have time to read. Even engaging with one section or chapter honestly and sharing what you found back with me is exactly what the Team is here to do.

What an ART Team Is (In Plain English)

An ART Team is not a fan club and it is not a marketing gimmick.

It is a simple, structured exchange:

You receive early access to selected drafts before public release — free.
You tell me what helped, what did not, and what you wish had been included.
If you have the additional time and interest, I would also appreciate any help you can give proofreading and link-checking both the books and the website I have built around them.
If you choose, you can later post an honest public review after the book is released.

That is it.

No hype. No pressure. No complicated requirements. Just real readers helping shape a book so it better serves the people who will need it most.

Why This Matters (More Than Most People Realize)

Books do not spread because they are “good.” They spread because they are useful, clear, and trusted — and because early readers help them find their footing.

If you have ever thought, “I wish I had a book like this five years ago,” ART is how you help create that book for someone else.

ART also prevents a common failure: authors guessing what readers need instead of listening to what readers actually experience. These Teams keep Five Year Life™ grounded in reality — real emotions, real constraints, real lives.

What You Receive as an Advance Reader Team Member

Early access to selected pre-publication watermarked PDFs and drafts — free.
A direct way to influence the final book with real feedback, not noise.
Optional acknowledgment by name in the book’s Acknowledgements section. If you prefer to remain anonymous, that is completely fine.
Recognition as a Team Member Superhero for Team Members whose feedback is especially substantive and influential — listed separately in the Acknowledgements.
First consideration for every future Advance Reader Team across the Five Year Life™ Series.
Book-specific Team Member benefits on certain titles — for example, exclusive early access to The Upwork Exposé™ for Team Members of the Your Last Paycheck™ ART, and private access to the restored NovelistSeeksHeroine.com™ archive for Team Members of the Efficient Love™ ART. See each book’s individual opt-in page for details.
Fellow authors also receive a review of their own manuscript — see the PS at the bottom.

In short: you get the manuscript early, you help make it better, and you become part of the story behind it. Every benefit is free.

What I Ask From You

ART is designed to be realistic for real life.

I do not require you to read an entire book in a fixed time window. Instead, I ask for something more practical:

Read what you have time to read.
Tell me what was clear, what was confusing, and what felt missing.
Share any “this hit me hard” moments — both good and bad.
If you found the book genuinely helpful, consider leaving an honest review after the book is released, on the platform you normally use.
If you would like to share a few honest lines of the review you might post at launch — even in draft form — I would also like your permission to potentially quote them (with your approval) in pre-launch marketing, social media posts, and potentially on the book’s website, dust cover, or interior pages.

I will never ask for a “positive” review. I only want honest reactions from real humans. Your job is truth, not promotion.

How Participation Works

ART is a Team, not a mailing list. The word “Team” is the operative one — Team Members are the people who actually help.

You do not have to post a public review. You do not have to read the whole book. You do not have to write anything polished. You just have to genuinely engage with what you read and share something honest about it. Team Members who participate at that level are acknowledged by name in the book’s Acknowledgements (if they wish), and Team Members whose feedback is especially substantive and influential are recognized separately as Team Member Superheroes — also in the Acknowledgements — and given first consideration for every future Advance Reader Team across the Five Year Life™ Series. Team Members who sign up and then disappear still keep everything they were sent and owe nothing — they simply will not appear in the Acknowledgements or on the Superhero list.

This is framed as a request, not a requirement, because that is what it actually is. A Team works when people show up. I’d love to have you show up.

A Note About Reviews (So We Stay Clean)

I respect platform rules. If you choose to leave a public review, it should always be your real opinion, in your own words, posted after the book is released, and on the platform you would normally use. I do not buy reviews, pressure reviews, or require reviews. Ever.

ART exists to improve the books first. Reviews are optional and only happen if you believe the book earned it.

Who ART Is For

ART is a fit for you if you are:

The kind of reader who underlines, highlights, and actually uses what you read.
Living through a reset, transition, layoff, reinvention, or major life decision — and want tools that are calm and practical.
A coach, counselor, HR leader, manager, or mentor who wants better frameworks to put in people’s hands.
A reader of intense, romance-forward techno-thrillers who is comfortable with explicit content and high-stakes consequences (specifically for the Stark Naked Startup™ ART).
A thoughtful human who wants to help make these books more useful for the people who follow.

ART is not a fit if you only want quick entertainment or if you do not want to give any feedback at all. (No judgment. Just not the purpose.)

Privacy and Respect (Important)

ART is built on a simple principle: privacy creates honesty.

You will never be asked to “perform vulnerability” in public. Feedback can be brief, private, and practical. You can share as much or as little of your personal story as you want. You are always in control of what you disclose.

Choose Your Advance Reader Team(s)

Some people want early access to everything. Some people only want one book. Both are welcome. Every ART is free, and every benefit listed above applies across all of them.

Your Last Paycheck™ ART — In the last 24 months, more than 40 million Americans have been laid off, and another 80 million have quit — many of them, in honest truth, forced exits dressed up as resignations. If that is you, or you are one of the millions still employed who see the writing on the wall and want to get ahead of it while the paycheck is still coming, this book was built for exactly this moment. It opens with financial triage and 23 self-contained Action Plans: what to secure in the first 72 hours, what to protect, and how to preserve both your finances and your footing during the most vulnerable weeks of a transition. Then it devotes roughly 30 percent of the book — Part Two — to 100 AI job and career titles you’ve probably never heard of, none of which require you to write a single line of code. Whether you want to close targeted AI skill gaps in the career you already have or pivot into something new entirely, the book maps both routes clearly. You are not starting over. You are leveling up. Team Members also receive exclusive early access to The Upwork Exposé™ — a fully sourced, independently verifiable investigation into how the platform’s structure can quietly cost freelancers thousands of dollars — before it is released to the public.
Reset Protocol™ ART — Beyond the Road Less Traveled: The Road Most Desired. This is the book for the millions who are not in financial crisis but in a quieter, harder crisis: they know they are on the wrong road and do not yet know what the right one looks like. Drawn from more than 33,000 candid, one-on-one conversations across four and a half decades, its 108 carefully crafted questions across 22 chapters do not tell you what to change — they surface what your own heart and mind have been trying to tell you for years. The questions are organized not by topic but by how you feel right now, through a 10-bucket emotional navigation system called The Question Picker™, so a reader in the grip of anxiety, burnout, or financial fear can find the exact question that meets them there. Four reading paths — a single question a day, a 7-Day Triage for acute stress, a 30-Day Reset for steady momentum, or a 108-Day Deep Reset for a deliberate transition — mean the book adapts to your life instead of demanding you adapt to it. This is how you get from your Current Point A™ to your Most Desired Point B™, on your own terms and in your own words.
Reset Protocol Workbook™ ART — Beyond the Road Less Traveled: The Road Most Desired. The same 108 questions from Reset Protocol™, stripped of all 22 narrative chapters and rebuilt as a compact, active-use format designed for writing, not reading. Every question gets two full pages: the left page frames the question and four focused sub-questions, the right page gives you generous room to actually write plus a 24-Hour Action. Built into every single question is the Workbook’s signature innovation, the Stop Signal™ — explicit permission to stop after just one question and count the day as a win. The same 10-bucket Question Picker™ navigation carries over, so you can go straight to whatever you’re feeling right now without reading anything first. This is the book for people who process by writing, not just thinking — a tangible, filled-in artifact of your own thinking during a moment that matters.
Efficient Love™ ART — I Had 1,200 First Dates So You Don’t Have To™. Built from a decade-long personal experiment involving 2 million visitors, 15,000 serious candidates, and 1,200-plus first dates — an experiment that ended with the author finding the one woman in two million who became his wife. The book distills that entire journey into the Good-Man Methodology™: the Three Lists (the Profound List, the Profane List, and the DIDO List), the Six Lists™ Principle, the Ten Filters™, and the 17 Dragon Alerts™ — a structured, unflinching framework for figuring out what you actually need in a partner, spotting the mismatches early, and avoiding years of misaligned relationship investment. This is not theory. It is deeply personal, candid, and direct about what real compatibility requires, including sexual compatibility. Team Members also receive private access to the restored raw, without updates or polish, (and somewhat personally embarrassing) NovelistSeeksHeroine.com™ archive — closed to the public for over two decades since the author married his Heroine, and reopened first for this Team.
Stark Naked Startup™ ART — Book 1 of a planned four-novel series, and a sharp departure from the rest of the operating system: an intense, romance-forward erotic techno-thriller about attraction, secrecy, and ambition, set at the exact moment an AGI breakthrough begins to matter — not just emotionally, but strategically, for everyone in the story’s orbit. If you read fiction where intimacy and power collide with real consequences, where the stakes are personal and existential at the same time, and you are comfortable with explicit content (18+), this is the ART for you. As an early Team Member, your reactions to pacing, tension, and character help shape a series still being built in real time.

You can join one Advance Reader Team or multiple. Choose what fits your life right now. Every Team is free. Every Team Member benefit applies.

Questions

Questions about an Advance Reader Team? Email ARC@FiveYearLife.com.

For general inquiries, Email Info@FiveYearLife.com.

A Final Note

A lot of people go through life without ever getting invited behind the curtain while something meaningful is still being shaped.

If you join an Advance Reader Team, you are not just reading early.

You are helping build a calmer, more useful set of tools for people who are trying to survive change — and redesign their future with dignity.

Thank you for even considering it. The readers on the other side of these books will never know your name. But your feedback will reach them anyway.

Thanks,

Robert

Robert Lee Goodman, MBA
CEO and Publisher, Good-Man LLC
Founder and Author, Five Year Life™ Series
44X Founder · Rocket Scientist ·
33K Compound Knowledgist™ ·
Chief Dragonslayer™ – Business & Love ·
Novelist Who Successfully Found His Heroine™

PS — For the Fellow Authors Who Read This Far

If you’re a writer developing your own book, and you have a manuscript completed or even partially completed, I’d like to offer you something totally free. No upsells. No

Triple Hat Critics™ – Join The Advance Reader Teams Now | Any or All Books | FiveYearLife.com/ARC — The Triple Hat Critics™ — A Virtual Manuscript Review By A Senior Editor, Literary Critic, and Marketing Director, Each With 30 Years Of Experience, Reviewing An Author’s Manuscript. Built By Robert Lee Goodman Over 18 Months For His Own Five Books. © FiveYearLife.Com

money whatsoever.

It’s a major tool I developed for myself that forces AI to behave itself and review my manuscripts — or even just individual completed chapters — from the perspectives of a 30-year senior book editor, a 30-year literary critic, and a 30-year book marketing VP. Hard-hitting, totally objective narrative analyses from all three different perspectives. I call it my virtual Triple Hat Critics™.

I don’t sell the Triple Hat Review. I don’t give away my proprietary prompt. I don’t offer anybody else any way to benefit from it. It’s what I built for myself over 18 months while writing my own five books.

The one exception is fellow authors who join an Advance Reader Team. As my thanks for reading at least some of my book and providing candid, specific feedback, I’ll personally run your manuscript through exactly the same rigors I use on my own drafts. Same prompt. Same three virtual experts. Delivered about a week after your feedback.

Your report is yours to share — publicly or privately — however you find useful.

→ Read the full explanation of the Triple Hat Critics™

P.P.S. — If you’ve ever wondered what 1,200 first dates, 15,000 serious conversations, and a decade-long personal quest actually produce — there’s a page on this site you probably shouldn’t miss. It’s the real backstory behind Efficient Love™ and the decade that made it possible. Some of it is embarrassing. All of it is true. And somewhere inside it is the methodology that led me to the one woman in two million who became my wife.

→ The Story Behind Novelist Seeks Heroine™

P.P.P.S. — The frameworks in these books didn’t come from research or theory. They came from something far harder to replicate: 33,000 deeply candid, one-on-one conversations — across business and love — with people who couldn’t see their own best path forward and were looking to me to help them find it. If you want to understand why these books are different from anything else you’ll find, that’s where the answer lives.

→ Compound Knowledge™ — What It Is and Why It Matters to You

P.P.P.P.S. — If you are a corporate buyer, HR leader, coach, or program director interested in bulk purchase or organizational use, contact: SpecialSales@FiveYearLife.com

Job loss is never just a financial event. It's an identity shock, a loss of stability, and a rupture in how you understand your own value. And in today's economy, finding stable work often takes far longer than people expect — especially as AI continues to reshape entire professions.

Your Last Paycheck™ was written to prevent panic-driven decisions during one of the most vulnerable periods of a person's life — and equally for the millions still employed who see the writing on the wall.

Part One provides a calm, step-by-step financial triage plan for the critical early weeks: what to secure, what to protect, how to preserve both finances and emotional footing.

Part Two maps your new career path in the Age of AI — 100 AI job and career titles you've probably never heard of. No code required. You are not starting over. You are leveling up.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/YourLastPaycheck

There comes a point in nearly every life when the internal alignment that once held everything together begins to fracture. You feel it before you can explain it — a heaviness, a resistance, a sense that you are living slightly out of phase with yourself.

Reset Protocol™ exists for that moment. It guides you through 108 carefully sequenced questions designed to reveal patterns you've lived with for years, surface truths you may have been avoiding, and help you see your life with clarity rather than judgment.

You'll also learn the Five-Year Lens™ — a future-focused way to evaluate decisions based on who you are becoming, not just what you're trying to escape. Not the familiar path, but the one most aligned with what you actually want.

Reset Protocol™ is not about blowing up your life; it's about realignment — done deliberately, honestly, and with realistic compassion. It's how you move beyond the road less traveled and step onto the road most desired.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/ResetProtocol

Some people prefer to read and reflect. Others need to engage, write, and move. This Workbook is built for action.

The Reset Protocol Workbook™ transforms insight into execution. It follows the same 108 carefully sequenced questions, but provides structured space to capture your answers, clarify your thinking, and turn reflection into forward momentum.

This is where your Reset Protocol becomes your own — not just something you understand, but something you actively work through, decision by decision.

Whether you use it alongside the main book or on its own, the purpose is the same: to move you from awareness into alignment, and from alignment into action.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/ResetProtocolWorkbook

"I had 1,200 first dates" sounds like a gimmick. It wasn't. It was the byproduct of an accidental experiment that started with a simple website: NovelistSeeksHeroine.com.

That page described the 28 traits I believed mattered most for long-term compatibility. More than 15,000 women responded, convinced they matched. What followed was a decade-long journey — roughly 1,200 first dates, over 300 second dates, and a hard-earned education in the difference between attraction, projection, and true alignment.

Out of those 15,000, out of those 1,200 first dates, there was one — and only one — woman I asked to marry me. She said yes. That was more than two decades ago… and we're still happily together and counting.

But this book isn't about my story. It's about yours.

Efficient Love™ shows you how to avoid years of unnecessary detours, identify real compatibility earlier, and find the person who is right for you — where you also happen to be right for them.

It distills everything learned from that journey — including the Three Lists — into a practical, repeatable approach you can apply immediately to your own search.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/EfficientLove

Stark Naked Startup™: A Novel – Book 1 — Loneliness Epidemic, Solved By An AI Startup. Sexual Intimacy and Desire, Uncontrollably Addictive. Unintended Consequences, Their Truth Algorithm Weaponized — And Every Government on Earth Their Enemy.™

It begins with a problem that has quietly grown into a worldwide epidemic, spreading across cultures, countries, and generations, affecting not just millions, but likely hundreds of millions and even billions of souls on this planet, often without being openly acknowledged because it hides so easily behind lives that appear complete from the outside.

Call it loneliness, if you want, though that word barely captures the full weight of it, because what is actually being felt is not simply the absence of company, but the absence of being truly known, truly understood, and truly connected in ways that feel real, dependable, and impossible to fake, whether in romantic love, friendship, family, or the quieter forms of human connection that give life its meaning.

Four founders come together around that recognition, not because they believe they have all the answers, but because they share the conviction that this epidemic is neither small nor inevitable, and that if something could be understood at a deeper level, perhaps it could be changed, not merely for a few fortunate people, but in a way that might genuinely make the world a better place.

What draws them forward is , and at the beginning it still looks, at least from a distance, like a startup story, a few brilliant, driven people building something ambitious and hopeful in the face of a problem that seems too large for any small company to solve.

Then something begins to shift, though not in any clean or predictable way, and not in any form the founders would have recognized at first for what it really was, because whatever they had touched was no longer simply shaping what people said to one another, but the space beneath what they said, where hesitation, desire, restraint, and truth normally remain guarded, filtered, and quietly distorted.

Because when two people connect through , the distance between what is felt and what is revealed does not gradually close the way it usually does, but instead begins to collapse, giving way to a form of shared awareness that feels at once intoxicating, disorienting, and impossible to resist.

It does not feel reckless. It does not feel confused. It feels certain in a way that is almost unnerving, because the usual space people rely on to stay in control seems to dissolve almost immediately, leaving behind the unmistakable sense that something deeper has already recognized what neither of them has yet spoken aloud.

Time does not disappear. It accelerates until hesitation has no place to live, until desire and certainty arrive together, and what would have taken months becomes something neither of them can delay, and neither of them would ever choose to.

This is not the familiar courtship minuet people have come to expect, not the cautious circling, not the incremental testing of boundaries. It is something else entirely, a different kind of dance, where recognition arrives first, where alignment follows immediately, and where passion does not wander aimlessly but locks into place with a precision that feels both overwhelming and inevitable.

Desire is unmistakably part of it, but it does not stand alone, because what rises with it is something far more disarming, a sense of alignment so complete that the usual friction is simply not there, no second-guessing, no misread signals, no quiet holding back that people are used to carrying even in their most intimate moments.

Here, there is to reinterpret, to correct, and almost no place left for the subtle evasions that normally prevent passion from becoming what it was always capable of becoming.

What unfolds in that space is not merely erotic, though it is undeniably that, and not merely romantic, though it is deeply that as well. It is the experience of two people entering a form of connection where closeness is no longer negotiated, but revealed, where desire and certainty rise together, and where intimacy carries a depth that feels both intensely physical and profoundly understood at the same time.

Within that convergence, moments begin to emerge in which , where sensation deepens into meaning, and where the line between emotional connection and physical experience becomes impossible to separate.

And yet what begins here is not confined to romance, because the same underlying shift begins to extend into , , and , suggesting that what is being touched is not merely a better way for people to fall in love, but a deeper way for human beings to recognize, understand, and relate to one another across nearly every meaningful dimension of life.

What began as an attempt to address a global epidemic affecting hundreds of millions, and likely billions, starts to reveal implications far beyond anything the founders imagined, becoming less a product and more the early edge of a black swan event, one capable of producing outcomes no one can fully model and no existing system of control can comfortably absorb.

And that is when the attention shifts, because something like this will never be left alone once outside forces begin to grasp even fragments of what may be possible.

What follows is no longer simply a question of whether the founders can protect what they have built, but whether what they have touched can remain what it was meant to be once others begin trying to control, redirect, weaponize, or own it.

Especially once it becomes clear that beneath the emotional, romantic, and philosophical implications there may also be elements of that extend beyond fiction.

That realization was never part of the original plan, and yet somewhere in the process of developing this story, it became impossible to ignore the possibility that what was being described might represent something more tangible, something that could, under the right conditions, constitute , with the specific details intentionally withheld for reasons that should be self-evident.

This is not just a story. It is a partially redacted case file. And whatever is happening inside it has already begun.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/SNSPreview