Join me Thursday 24 October, 1 pm ET, to hear more on the ROI of business books

This Thursday I’ll be on a Zoom Webinar to discuss results from the 2024 Business Book ROI study, conducted earlier this year on behalf of four business-book-oriented sponsors.

Sign up here. It’s free.

I spent many months working on this, and it’s the biggest data-heavy research report I’ve worked on since Forrester.

I’ve already shared some of the top-line results from this survey of 300+ published authors (free report available here):

  • 64% of business books showed a gross profit. 
  • The median gross profit (revenue minus expenses) for books out for at least 6 months was $11,350.
  • The median book generated $7,000 in expenses and $18,200 in revenue. (And no, you can’t subtract those two numbers to get median profit, that’s not how medians work.)
  • 18% of authors reported $250,000 or more in income.
  • 89% of authors said writing a book was a good idea.
  • As compared with traditionally published authors, authors with hybrid publishers were more than twice as likely to strongly agree that they were satisfied with their publishers.

Here’s what surprised me about this survey

We undertook this report with some hypotheses, and most were confirmed. For example, it didn’t surprise me that most business authors generate far more profit from speaking and consulting than from book sales, or that half of authors have unexpected costs. But there were some surprises in the data:

  1. The median advance for traditionally published authors was only $5,500. Advances have been dropping for years, but with advances that low, you really have to ask if a traditional publisher is worth the delay and loss of control versus hybrid publishing.
  2. Serial authors are working too hard. More than one in four authors in our survey had published at least five books. For authors of five or more books, median revenue on the most recent book was only $12,000, about one-fourth of revenue for first publications. Clearly, there is a class of authors who just pump out book after book with diminishing returns. (To eliminate the effect of very recently published books that hadn’t had a chance to generate revenue yet, this analysis includes only books at least 6 months past their publication date.)
  3. Some promotion strategies underperform. While only 12 authors in the survey paid for bookstore placement (typically in airport bookstores), only one-third of those were satisfied with the results. And only half of the 41 people who used social media specialists were satisfied. Fewer than half the authors who tried soliciting book reviews from media, speaking events at bookstores, or promoting on X (formerly Twitter) felt those strategies worked well.
  4. Some less popular revenue strategies paid off. Only 9 authors generated revenue from partnerships, but their median payoff was $100,000. And 15% of authors attempted to use books to boost their company’s sales, but those who did scored a median boost of $64,000 (and those with traditionally published books saw a $250,000 increase in sales).
  5. There was huge variation among authors. Surveys you may read about writers and their income aren’t really applicable to the type of people that write business books; it’s impossible to learn much comparing someone who writes horror novels to a corporate CEO boosting her thought leadership. That’s why our survey drilled down on business authors. But even among this group, there were authors who churned out self-published quickie books and made little money, and authors whose books generated millions. Gross profit varied from a loss of $180,000 to a gain of $8 million. One in three authors made no money; one in eight made at least $250,000. Clearly “your mileage may vary” is an understatement.

I look forward to sharing more details with you at Thursday’s webinar, which takes place on my 66th birthday.

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