Business Book ROI fact: Among serious authors, only 1/3 of revenue comes directly from the book
You’ve probably heard that the real money from publishing a business book comes from sources other than the book: speaking, consulting, workshops, courses, and sales for your organization. Now that we have completed the Business Book ROI Study, I thought I’d see whether the survey data backed that up. What it shows is that the more money authors generate, the higher proportion comes from sources beyond the book.
Here’s a quick recap about the study. To create the Business Book ROI Study, four sponsors — Amplify Publishing, Gotham Ghostwriters, Smith Publicity, and Thought Leadership Leverage — collected survey data from 300+ published business book authors between April and August of 2024. I did much of the data analysis and wrote the final report, which you can download for free at AuthorROI.com.
Where do authors’ revenues come from?
The report includes a lot of detail on author’s sources of revenues. For example, this chart shows the categories in which authors were most likely to see revenue gains: speaking fees, consulting, workshops, and sales for their organizations.
But I realized that we hadn’t actually directly tackled the biggest question: what proportion of authors’ revenues comes from books, and what proportion comes from knock-on effects like the sources listed in the chart above?
To answer that, I classified revenues into two categories. Book revenue included advances, royalties, direct sales of books, and sales of auxiliary rights like foreign translations. Non-book revenues included everything else. I eliminated authors who reported no revenue of either type — most likely people who didn’t feel like revealing their revenues to us — and analyzed the revenue splits for the remaining 263 authors.
I was surprised to see that the average proportion of revenue from sources other than the book was only 47%. However, there are plenty of people in the survey who are just doing books for their own enjoyment, or have limited ambitions. How would that proportion change based on the author’s total revenue? Here’s a chart.
The greater the author’s revenue, the more likely that the bulk of their revenue comes from speaking, consulting, and other sources not directly attributed to the book. For authors that generated more than $10,000, 63% of the revenue, roughly two-thirds, comes from sources other than the book. And for those who generated $25,000 or more, that rises to 69%. (In case you are wondering about sample size, 65% of the authors reporting revenues made more than $10,000, and 55% made more than $25,000 — so there were still far more than 100 authors in each of these categories to analyze.)
This analysis varies by publication path, but not as much as you might imagine. Among traditionally published authors who typically get an advance, on average 44% of revenue comes from non-book sources. And among hybrid-published authors, that rises to 51%. Self-published authors have much lower revenues and lower book sales, but 51% of their revenue still comes from sources beyond the book.
What this means for you
If you’re hoping to get rich from publishing a book, don’t count on advances, royalties, and book sales to get you there. The median revenue from all direct book sources for business authors in our survey was only $5,500. Even the top 25% of authors by direct book revenues only made $28,500, which is not going to have you traveling first-class.
The authors who really made money generated it from other sources like speaking and consulting. The median author made $10,000 that way, but the top 25% made $100,000 or more. The more money you make, the more likely it is to come from sources beyond the book.
If your objective in publishing is to generate a profit, you’d better plan for that. Because unless you’re very lucky, the book isn’t going to generate those profits all by itself.