(FORTUNE Small Business) – There's a reason that you are not in the first sentence of this story—and that Fern Reiss is. Is it that she has authored five whole books? That she has been quoted in more than 100 publications, including the National Enquirer, in just the past six months? Could it be her clever quips that endear her to me? Fern Reiss's popularity among my ilk can't be traced to any one of those accomplishments, but add them up and you can't miss what makes her indispensable to writers: She is an expert. People like me (nonexperts, I'll generously call us) need people like her to lend credibility to our scribblings. And she knows it.

The 41-year-old Reiss, mind you, is not an expert in anything in particular. But much like the confident, well-rested travelers in the Holiday Inn Express commercials, she can sound knowledgeable and even witty about almost anything, from mold allergy (the New York Times) to mausoleums (Newsweek Japan). "Once you've got the technique," she boasts, "you can be quoted anywhere." Over the past year Reiss has made a business of daylong seminars in which she charges ordinary people $2,500 apiece to undergo what she dubs "expertizing"—the art of seeming to be an expert. Many of those who attend, she says, are entrepreneurs eager to get more public attention for themselves and their businesses. Her basic contention: In a world saturated with media, experts have never been in hotter demand. And thanks to the Internet, once you are quoted in one media outlet, others will soon beat a path to your mouth.

I set out to unleash my inner expert with six other workshop attendees on a recent Sunday in Boston. Reiss, who lives west of the city, was writing and publishing her own books when she started conducting workshops to teach authors how to get attention for their work. She quickly learned that "Writers don't have a lot of money" to pay for promotional advice. So she concocted the notion of an "expertizer," promising to teach businesspeople how to speak in entertaining, provocative ways that would get them quoted in the news media and accepted as experts. At my session four attendees were entrepreneurs and one was the Nashville-based head of public relations for the United Methodist Church.

Low-key and nasal, Reiss looks down at a binder as she speaks and checks off points as she dispenses them. Her interactions with the experteers (my coinage, thank you) are equally nondramatic. When Sheila, 54, a former physician who has a business finding homes in Italy for U.S. buyers, worries that she doesn't have the credentials to write the book she imagines, she comes in for a quick scolding. "The book becomes your credential," Reiss says. When Julie Anna, 40, a former intellectual-property lawyer turned feng shui consultant, mentions that she is halfway toward her weight-loss goal, Reiss interrupts with a commercial epiphany: "Feng Shui Your Diet—that's a bestseller! Do it fast." For Reiss, who wrote and self-published a 160-page book called Terrorism and Kids: Comforting Your Child the week after 9/11, producing a book is key because "the media gives you maybe too much authority as the author of a book."

Most of Reiss's training involves her "proprietary method for creating killer sound bites." She urges the expertized to be funny or contrary or punchy—as she was when she told the New York Times that child rearing had left a space "more like a canyon than a gap" in her résumé. She assured a Voice of America reporter, "You can thank Osama bin Laden for the popularity of home theater systems." Now, as Reiss's students hunch over their "Creating Killer Sound Bites Worksheet," it is quiet enough to hear a pun drop. Nobody earns more than a gentle "That's got potential" from Reiss. I wonder: Do they know too much to be good experts?