Business Book ROI Study: Thought Leadership Data Analysis + Q&A

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on this LinkedIn Live, which is an extension of the Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast. So today my guest is none other than my right hand, our COO, and my dear friend Bill Sherman. we are going to dive into this research study that we just released. So let me hand it to Bill without further ado, because there's a lot of really amazing stuff for us to walk out on today.

Yes. So thank you, Peter. This is something that I'm excited to share and also want to level set. This has been a big project that we worked on in 2024. And we did not do this work alone, nor do we deserve all the credit or the accolades on this. We had 4 organizations in the thought leadership service industry come together: Amplify Publishing Group, Gotham Ghostwriters, Smith Publicity, and ourselves, Thought Leadership Leverage, as well as Josh Bernoff, who is the author of Build a Better Business book. And to put this study together, you have to step back and say, well, what is the study and how did it come about? Peter, you were the one who is closest to the origin story. Would you sort of share how that conversation came to be?

Yeah, so, uh, I got a call, I guess about 6 months ago or so now, from my friend Dan Gerstein, who is the founder at Gotham Ghostwriters, and we've known each other for many, many years and collaborated and shared ideas and clients and whatnot. Someone I admire and respect. And he said, hey, I had a client ask me this question a couple of weeks ago, and it's been driving me a little nuts because I can't find a really solid answer to it. And the question was, what is the research? What does the research say on what is the ROI of a nonfiction business book, of a business book? What's— you know, there's a lot of investments to be made ghostwriting strategy, PR, all these things, but what's the ROI? I'm like, wow, that's a really cool question. Let me— give me a day or two. Nothing pops to mind, but I'll, I'll do some research for you and I'll see what I can find out. So I searched around, looked around, looked around, and I called Dan a couple days later and I said, I have good news and I have bad news. The bad news is I couldn't find anything. The good news is this is an opportunity. This is a great question. Let's do it. So we put together, Dan and I, this, this working group that Bill mentioned of other folks that we, we love and admire that are of service to the thought thought leadership community, and voilà, that's the outcome of what you have today is the world's largest, to the best of our knowledge, research report of its kind.

So yeah, like all good thought leadership and data-driven thought leadership, it starts with a very clear question that needs to be answered, right? And in this case, what is the ROI? And if you've done any research before or tried to figure out a problem, one of the first things you've got to do is figure out, well, what do you mean by book ROI? And so in this project, we had to lay some assumptions down in terms of what costs we would consider, what both financial and non-financial, as well as where would we go looking for returns? And as we share these findings, we're going to talk about the journey of publishing a business book, the costs as well as the rewards. And we're able to put some numbers to things which people had thought or assumed or heard anecdotally, but didn't have data for. So Let's talk about how we created this study. We started by defining what we wanted to study, and we knew we needed the help of business book authors and people who had written nonfiction books to be able to give us the data that we needed to analyze. And so we did outreach from April. through August of 2024. And through not only our collective networks among the sponsors, but a number of organizations in the industry— publishers, ghostwriters, PR firms— all stepped up and said, hey, we're not going to be a sponsor, but we're happy to spread the word. And so when you look at the report, uh, and you can download it at authorroi.org, you'll see that a number of organizations rallied around this research. Once we had the data in hand, our organizational psychologist here at Thought Leadership Leverage, she did the data analysis and led that process along with Josh Bernoff, who I mentioned earlier. A key thing to mention, the sponsors, although they wanted the data, They did not influence the data analysis. So we come with clean hands on these findings. So let's take a couple moments to look at the study highlights in terms of author ROI. A couple things that I wanted— want to point out here: 64% of books were profitable. So the answer is positive. And 89% said that writing the book was a good decision. 90% reported a boost in credibility. And what we noticed as well is that median unit sales ranged— and we'll dig into this— traditionally published books had a median sales of 4,600 units, 1,600 units for hybrid, and 700 for self-published. And let me pause here for a moment. Peter, you want to define maybe the difference between traditional, hybrid, and self-published authors?

Yeah, high level, there's, there's 3 models for publishing. Traditional is the one I think most people defer to when they talk about publishing. So these are typically the New York houses. You're submitting a manuscript to them directly or through an agent or whatever the case may be. There's this fantasy of getting a huge advance, and, uh, the risk is borne primarily, uh, uh, by the publisher, and therefore they have a lot of control editorially, timing, uh, look and feel, etc., etc. In essence, the author works for or is contracted by the publisher to produce something, a book, manuscript, etc. So that's the traditional model. The other end of the spectrum is self-published, right? So self-published means I become a publisher, right? It could be through Amazon Web Services, or there's a million different models there, but you, uh, take all the risk as the author. You have all— you make all the decisions, and you're responsible for all of it, right? And there's lots and lots and lots of things that can go wrong or need to happen that become your responsibility. Good news is you control everything, you keep all the profits, et cetera. In the middle there is what we call hybrid. So hybrid maintains for the most part the same or similar editorial standards as a traditional publisher would. They want to put out a good, high-quality product, but there's a sharing of the risk, if you will, in terms of Who's paying for things, who's taking the risk, and a lot of that burden, not all, goes back to the author. So you're gonna put some money up front, you're gonna pay for the product, you have far more influence and control over speed, over timing, over look and feel, over the editorial process, and you own the rights in their entirety. So those are, I mean, we could spend an hour on that, but high level, the 3 variations of how can I publish.

Fantastic. Thank you, Peter. So today we're going to give an overview on a few topics: what the respondents looked like and as author profiles, how much did they spend, what were their motivations, method, and strategy, what revenue did they see and where did it come from, and then what profit did they report. A couple things to note here before we dive into the details. Number one, all of this data is self-report provided by the author respondents. Number 2, this was not a random sample. We reached out through our collective networks and asked authors to respond. That said, let us take a look at some of the author profiles here. So, the first thing If I turn back to what Peter said here, if we look at publication paths on the left, we had a good representation between traditional published, hybrid published, and self-published authors. Not exactly equal, but roughly a third each. Many of the respondents, 66%, were self-employed. And most, 69%, said they were the sole author. We had 24% who said they had a ghostwriter with that, or a co-author with that, and a, and a 5% who had a ghostwriter. We also looked by the number of books published, ranging between 1 and 5+. We had a lot of new authors with their first book, and we had 26% of respondents who had written 5 or more books, which meant they had become deeply embedded in the process of writing books. And you would assume, and we'll soon see, that they saw value in that process, otherwise they would have stopped. I want to then drill down for a moment. At Thought Leadership Leverage, we have 5 distinct thought leadership avatars that we talk about, and I want to walk through these and then represent— explain how they fit to the sample. So the largest group are what we call the thought leader on the go. They are sometimes a solopreneur, sometimes they have a small team with them, Whether that's an assistant or someone else who knows the content, someone helps them with coordination and logistics. But often the thought leader on the go needs to be in the room or in the Zoom to create value for clients. And this category encompasses those who are keynote speakers, those who are facilitators and coaches, all of those roles fit into the thought leader on the go category. The next largest category of respondents were impact and legacy executives. These were senior leaders who had retired and said, you know, I'm not ready to step out of the game fully. I want to remain part of the conversation. I might want to use thought leadership to remain engaged or help me acquire board positions. They, although have developed a high level of expertise, still feel they have something to say and remain active. Third category, the growth-minded CEO. That's an executive whether at a Fortune 500 or a VC-backed startup or a small self-funded startup who uses thought leadership to open doors that their sales team cannot. And that can be because the thought leadership provides them speaking opportunities and access in ways that a request for a sales call or a sales conversation wouldn't. Fourth category, the brand name author— someone who has published multiple books like those 5+ authors that we've seen. And then finally, the in-house expert— someone who practices thought leadership on behalf of their organization and their employer. They're the person who either has the secret sauce to the Coca-Cola or KFC recipe, or they are the internal chief evangelist for ideas that attract attention for the organization's goals and its business. Peter, anything you would like to add here?

Yeah, not on this piece. I mean, other than it lines up fairly Similarly to our experience in terms of who we work with and how. So it's a good sort of representation of what the market looks like. And I think a lot of times what we hear is, oh yeah, that's me. Like, they didn't have the words for it or the language for it, but once they see how we describe the different personas, then they can relate to it.

Well, and exactly that is Often, if you're practicing thought leadership solo, you have a small sample size of people who look like me, and you may define that based on the modality you work through as a speaker, as a consultant, etc., rather than seeing patterns on a larger scale. So let's dive in here a little bit deeper into why do authors write books, because we know it takes effort and time. And what methods do they use? So we saw revenue drivers for thought leadership included ghostwriters, a clear strategy, and launch PR. And if you look at what drove revenue here, you'll see a distinction between people who reported a strong strategy and a weak revenue strategy. Significant difference between $103,500 and $50,000. Similarly, ghostwriting, launch PR, all added to the revenue-driving side of the equation. And we asked our authors, why did you write this book? What was your purpose? 78% said they wanted to share knowledge, and a large— well, not a large— 15% said that they wanted that sharing knowledge to be their primary reason to have written the book. Other authors said that elevating a topic that needed attention, boosting their personal reputation, and acquiring more engagements and more leads were important to them. These were their stated goals. This is what they said they wanted to go out to achieve. We saw here that in terms of strategy alignment, it was really interesting. We asked people, did their book strategy align with their personal strategy or their business strategy? And you'll see there's a difference here and an increase between strategy alignment and personal strategy and strategy alignment and business strategy. It increases in the second book. Okay, we're not talking about how strong the strategy is. It's self-reporting, saying, oh, second time around I had a clearer idea that I needed to have a strategy, because when I put out the book, we didn't have— my first book, we didn't have unicorns and rainbows. Peter?

Yeah, I think that was a really key finding because anybody that's going to do this again and again and again, and we had several folks that did 2 books, 5 books, 4 books, whatever the case may be, one of the key things that we looked at, what's different, right? So, well, if they didn't have a strategy or a good strategy or a clear strategy up front, and they were gonna make the investment of the time, the energy, the money, the dollars, the opportunity cost, they did pull that strategy in, right? And, and that was one of the things that they learned. There'll be a couple other things I'm sure Bill touches on in terms of, well, what's different the second time.

Exactly. So one of the things that we found quite interesting is the difference between expectations on book sales versus actual book sales. And you can see a difference here in 2 of the 3 publishing modalities. In traditional book sales, the median expected number of units to be sold by the author was 8,900. The median actual sales, 4,600. And with hybrid publishing, a similar discrepancy as well, 4,400 expected versus 1,600 Actual. And this is important because remember we said that ROI existed and most books were profitable. It wasn't coming from meeting book sales expectations.

Yeah, so a couple things I want to just touch on here, Bill, is ROI. And, and we knew this intuitively going in and we validated it on the other side. is not number of units sold times some profit per unit, and your profit hybrid is far greater than traditional. That wasn't the answer here. So if you're only looking at profitability based on units sold, no one would publish a book, or at least logical, rational, financially savvy people would not publish a book. Second piece that's interesting here is to get through a traditionally published book, So this is that expectation of 8,900 versus 4,600, so 50% plus or minus. You had to go through all the editorial stuff. You had to go through publishing houses with 200 years of history, and you're still off by 50%. That's amazing to me. Amazing. When you do it in a hybrid way, it's your money making your decisions. Yeah, they're off by 60% or so, But you're able to look at it through a broader lens of what does profit mean? I'm getting more speaking engagements, more consulting engagements, invited to submit proposals, partnerships. We'll get into the what is, but clearly there's different ways to measure profitability.

Cool.

Yeah.

So let's take a look at spending patterns here. And one thing that I wanna call out is, As I mentioned earlier, authors' goals varied widely, and therefore the range of spending was pretty large, partly because of experience, available budget, goals, etc. Some authors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars while other authors spent virtually nothing on the book. Median spending per book was $7,000. Hybrid authors spent about twice that, while experienced authors' median spending was about $10,000. And on this slide here, one of the things that I do want to call out is in the column that's white in about the middle of the page. If you look on the left, In the survey, we asked people a question about their strategy for the book. 71 people said they had a strong strategy, given a range of choices on a Likert scale, and then 224 people said they had a weak strategy. Now, one of the things here is if you look at Spending versus self-reported quality of strategy, there's not a massive difference here between $5,000 and $8,000 on the spending side. But what we do see, and we'll explore later, is a difference on the revenue side and the return on investment side. Peter?

Yeah, no, I, I think what— not how much they're spending, that's part of the equation, but where they're allocating those dollars is different and substantial, right, to get to those outcomes.

Exactly. So let's break down by services where our author respondents told us they were spending money. Here we show the medians, the 25th and 75th percentiles, as well as percent satisfaction with services. And one of the things that stands out is there is a wide range, and you'll see it. The people that hired thought leadership Strategists reported an 88% satisfaction, so they were making an investment and they felt satisfied with it. Let's turn to revenue. Where does the revenue— what were the revenue totals? First off, um, we looked at books that were published more than 6 months, and we asked authors, how long has it been since your most recent book came out? Simply because a book that has only been out for a month or two isn't necessarily going to generate revenue in all of the ways that a book with a longer publication tail will have done. So Here, across all published authors, the median revenue was $18,000, and you'll see a distinction between traditionally published at $67,000, hybrid published at $35,000, and self-published at $8,000 in revenue. When we looked at the correlation between PR, revenue strategy, and ghostwriting, we saw a correlation with revenue. Specifically, again, looking at people who had had books out for at least 6 months. And when it comes to strategy, we limited to the people that they said that they had a strong strategy, or correction, that they had strategy that they— I hang on— they limited to the 81 authors that said financial goals were important. So if you see here, the difference between a strong revenue strategy generated $103,500 as median revenue on average, but a financial goal with a weak revenue strategy generated only $50,000 of revenue as a median. Peter?

Yeah, I mean, I think for me personally, this is probably one of my favorite data points because Bill and I kind of intuitively knew it, which is part of the reason we, we said let's do this, let's figure this out. But There's a connection now. There is a correlation now between the investment in the development of a viable strategy and the outcomes that you get, period, full stop.

If you have a financial goal.

Well, that's what I was gonna say. If you're writing a book because it's one of the reasons you're put on the planet, it's legacy, it's a challenge. There's lots of other reasons to write books, and that's all fine and dandy. But if you say one of the reasons that I am writing this book or I'm thinking about writing a book is I'd like to have an ROI, I'd like to make money directly, indirectly, elevate my brand, all those other things. There's a connection here. Now, if you, if you do it and you don't have a strategy, that's a big risk. I mean, it's almost, you know, it's— you're going to get cut 50% based on what this tells you.

So exactly. So where does the revenue come from if it's not coming from book sales and royalties, right? So we asked this of our authors, and we asked them where did they see revenue increases in a number of categories: speaking fees, consulting, workshops, online courses, partnerships, etc. And you'll see that speaking fees, consulting, and workshops really stood out as the 3 that generated revenue increases. But those are also common modalities for people that describe themselves as thought leaders on the go, right? That is how they are exchanging their expertise and time for value.

Yeah, and I would— what I would add to that, Bill, is this isn't a breakdown, meaning 31% or 34%, uh, came from speaking. It's where those increases came from. So there's a self-selection piece here. More people than in the general population that write books happen to be keynote speakers, right? You know, your dentist may write a book. That's interesting. The fact that a keynote speaker writes a book or another book or, you know, a 3rd or 4th book, not as surprising. And has a little bit more of a focus and a, uh, an understanding of what the market is looking for.

Well said, Peter. So let's also take a look here in terms of where revenue came from among authors who generated revenue in each category. Speeches generated a median revenue of $30,000. Consulting $50,000, and workshops, $60,000. Now, some authors saw a windfall in categories like corporate sales, partnerships, or seller increase. But very interestingly, more than 70% of authors also reported an increase in the number of leads that came in and the gigs they acquired.

Peter? Yeah, nothing to add on that one.

So we touched on this at the top— writing a book, 89% of authors say it was a good decision, 72% strongly agreed, and While I can't confirm that the sole reason is ROI, we can't make that jump. The fact that most books out there in the market show a profit and an ROI over time has to be related to satisfaction because there's an intrinsic value of Yes, I did it. I wrote the book, the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest. But at least you want to be not for loss, if not, not for profit, right? Yeah.

And I think, you know, sort of in closing here, this is a good place for us to sort of land the plane. That 89% says a lot to me because it says that when we look at, as Bill mentioned, that span of goals, the fact that basically 9 out of 10 folks said it was a good decision. When you think about all the initiatives, all the projects, all the things, experiments that you may have done in your career over the last 10 years, not many of them get to that 90% level. How many people started to dot, dot, dot, blog or create a marketing campaign or whatever the case may be? To get to 9 out of 10, I think that pretty much says what most folks need to know when they're in that, should I write a book? does it take? Should I write a book? Do I not write a book? It would be good to know that before I made a decision to do something, that 90% of people like me thought that was a good decision. That would give me a sense of confidence. Doesn't mean I'm going to fall into that 90%, but it would make me feel better than just saying, yeah, okay, it seems like a good idea, let's go for it. So I want to reiterate before I hand it back to Bill, this study is available for free at authorroi.com. You can download the entire study with all of the data and all the insights that we've been able to put together and would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on that. Bill, anything else?

Yeah, just a second. I'm pulling up here. I want to put the, uh, that on the screen. Yeah, so we talked about Author profiles, we talked about spending, we talked about revenue. Where we didn't discuss today is around profitability and the details on that. Again, I'd point people who are curious on this adventure to take a look at authorroi.com.

Thank you all for showing up on this lovely afternoon. Thanks, Bill. You're welcome.