In this 600th episode of the Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast, host Peter Winick and co‑host/guest Bill Sherman discuss the release of the Business Book ROI research study, the largest survey of nonfiction business authors to date. The study was sparked by a client’s question about the return on investment of writing a business book and was funded by a network of industry partners including Gotham Ghostwriters, Amplify Publishing, Smith Publicity, and others. Over 350 authors (301 with published nonfiction books) completed a detailed 20‑30 minute survey, providing data on revenue, expenses, goals, publishing routes, and satisfaction. Key findings include: 64% of books generated a gross profit, with a median profit of $11,350 for books out at least six months; authors who employed a clear revenue strategy saw a median gross profit of $96,000 and earned roughly $1.24 in revenue for each dollar spent, though most revenue came from ancillary services such as speaking, consulting, and workshops rather than book sales. A strong strategy also reduced unexpected costs (69% of authors with weak strategies faced extra expenses). The most common author goals were sharing knowledge (78%), elevating the topic (68%), and boosting reputation (67%), yet fewer than two‑thirds had a solid plan to achieve them. Publishing routes were fairly balanced—35% traditional, 31% hybrid, 28% self‑published—with hybrid authors reporting the highest satisfaction. The conversation emphasizes that books should be viewed as a platform for broader business opportunities, and that authors need a goal‑aligned strategy and the right publishing model to maximize ROI. Listeners are directed to download the full report at authorroi.com and encouraged to consider these insights when planning their own book projects.
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And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. And this is a special edition for a couple of reasons. Number one, we hit a round number, so that's worth celebration. This is the 600th episode that we are putting out into the universe. And then reason number 2, this is fun, is Bill Sherman, my co-host, is actually the guest today, or the co-guest, or the co-host, co-guest, whatever. And we are going to talk about the release of the single most comprehensive research study on the ROI of a business book that we are a sponsor of along with some of our partners that we'll get to in a little bit. So anyway, first off, Welcome, Bill. Joy to be here.
And it's a joy to be talking about this research study.
Yeah. So this has been going on for several months. So I'll start with sort of the, the origin story and then hand it to you to talk about what we did and what we learned and where we're going with it. Anyone interested in downloading the survey, it is available for free. It is a— the Business Book ROI research study, and you can download it at authorroi.com. So you can just go to that site and download it and you'll be good to go. So let me give you the quick backstory here. A couple of months ago, my friend Dan Gerstein, who is the founder and CEO of Gotham Ghostwriters, called me up and he said, hey, I had a client ask me this question and I've been trying to find the answer to it and I haven't had any luck. I thought you might be able to give me some insight on it. I said, sure. So what the client asked him was, wow, okay, it's a significant investment between the ghostwriter and publishing and opportunity costs, etc. To write a nonfiction business book. Has anybody done any research on the ROI of that? So Dan snooped around, found nothing. I said, that is a really good question. Let me see if I can help. I spent a day or two snooping around, making some calls, and I couldn't find anything. So I called Dan back and I said, we have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is I can't help you. I can't answer that question. The good news is I think we identified an opportunity and we should go, go forward and figure this out. So we reached out to a couple of folks that are good friends, Naren at Amplify Publishing, Dan at Gotham Ghostwriters, Smith Publicity, and then we engaged Josh Bernoff to help us write this. So those are your sponsors of the survey. And to add to that, it takes a village and Bill will get to this in a little bit. We talked to a lot of people. We talked to hundreds and hundreds of authors. And even though we have a pretty slick network, we needed to reach out to our network of friends to help us do that. So we've reached out to probably a dozen other supporting sponsors, if you will. Everyone from, let's see, the Greenleaf Book Group, Jane Westman, Page Two Publishing, Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches, and probably about a dozen others. I didn't mean to leave anybody out, but I want to get to the podcast instead of just thanking everyone. This took a village to get through. So anyway, Let me, let me hand it back to you, Bill, and give us the A, what was the methodology that we used here? And then B, what were the maybe the top 3 things that we, that we—
Yeah, so let's dive in with a couple things. As you said, this wound up being the largest nonfiction book study that we know of. I mean, in terms of understanding authors' revenue, expenses, experience, and that data wasn't collected anywhere, right? And so as you said, it was an opportunity for data-driven thought leadership, the ability to answer questions that an audience that we deeply care about was asking, right? Or would be deeply interested in. And so to reach this audience, we had to ask people who had to, written and published books. And you can't simply go to a group like SurveyMonkey and say, hey, we'll pay a bunch of money, can you poll some people for us and collect some data? No, it takes a village, as you said, to find people. We had over 350 authors respond. 301 had published a nonfiction book. And two-thirds had published multiple books. And so that was a fantastic response from the nonfiction and business book author community. And so I want to give a shout out to everyone who heard the call, leaned in, and sat down and took the survey, which wasn't a quick 3-minute, you know, Likert scale 1 to 5 and you're done. We asked some deep questions and in order to get meaningful data, we went deep and the participants, those who completed the survey, spent over 20 to 30 minutes on the survey providing meaningful information. So there's a layer of gratitude, not only for the sponsors and the people who help amplify and reach out to their communities of authors, And then finally, the authors who said, yes, this is worth my time.
Great. The investment that everybody made in time and energy is duly noted and greatly appreciated. Okay. So that being said, let's talk about what the top 3 or 4 takeaways were from the report and everybody out there listening. Again, you can go to AuthorROI.com and download the full report to read for yourself.
So let's go into a couple of the top line pieces. Number one, good news, 64% of business books showed a gross profit and the median profit for a book that had been out for at least 6 months was $11,350. But let's go a little bit further. Authors who invested in the book to make it more successful through things like a strategy, launch PR, and ghostwriting, all of those activities were correlated with increased profitability. And so on the revenue to strategy correlation, books with a strong revenue strategy had a median gross profit of $96,000. So The question becomes, if you know what you're trying to accomplish with your book, you have a much better chance of accomplishing it with a clear strategy. And if your goal is financial, you need a clear strategy to be able to elevate those returns.
So it was great to hear this return number that people got that invested in the strategy. Selfishly speaking for you and I, Bill, right? Like, given that that's how we spend most of our days developing strategies for people that are writing books or are thinking about writing books. That was really important to hear. I think it's also equally important to realize that the magic formula, there is no magic formula here, but if it was, is not something as simple as number of units sold times some gross profit margin per unit that varies whether you go hybrid or self or traditional. So, Where'd the money come from, Bill? Let's, let's go back to that $96,000 question.
Yes. So if we look at revenue, books generate $1.24 in revenue for each dollar spent. But the majority of that revenue isn't coming from book sales. It's coming from supporting services. So that can be keynote speeches, it can be consulting, it can be workshops. And those types of offerings that fit within a thought leadership ecosystem wound up generating far more revenue for the authors than direct book sales.
Yeah. So if you're just going to publish a book and expect the ROI to be book sales, be cautious. What else do we learn here? I mean, we learned a lot, but just in terms of giving folks a highlight, here?
Well, it's probably no surprise that writing, and this is a quote that I loved from one of the respondents, "Writing can be a lonely and frustrating process." And so if you're going on that journey and you're writing that book, having the strategy to go forward makes it easier to get the return. And the thing I want to call out on that is it also helps you boost ROI because you know where you're spending and investing time and money. So what was interesting was around the relationship between strategy and unexpected book costs. 69% of authors with a self-reported weak strategy had additional costs, unexpected costs, whether that was a little more or a lot more. So again, that indicates that book strategy really ties to how you manage the production and the go-to-market to drive revenue for yourself. And create impact in the world.
Yeah, I love that. Well, and that spending issue is, you know, there are many, many industries designed to help authors, you know, air quotes, get their books out there, you know, be number one on a list, on and on and on and on. And many of them at, you know, at face value or at first blush appear to be logical, appear to be rational, appear to be valuable. So in essence, you know, we're seeing a lot of smart people making investments in things the first time when they write a book that they wouldn't repeat the second time, or in the absence of a strategy, trying, you know, throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall. Both are expensive, right? So throwing stuff against the wall is really, really expensive. So that's, that's a good takeaway.
It absolutely is. And there are places where you can spend money wisely. As we saw in the study, while we can't determine causation, we can identify correlation and say people who do these things see a higher return and report a higher return than authors that didn't. So authors who had a financial goal and a clear strategy earned $100,000 in revenue, which was twice as much as those who lacked a clear strategy but had a financial goal.
Yeah, that's significant. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL. And share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. When it comes to goals, one of the things that I found interesting is authors had lots of goals that they identified that they put out there, right? Some would be ones that you might guess they would want, and others not. What— give us a sense of what some of those goals were, Bill.
Yeah, so in terms of goals, we tested over 10 different possible goals and asked people, was this goal of yours? Was it your primary goal? And then did you accomplish it, right? And again, this ties to strategy. A couple of the top goals sharing knowledge at 78%, elevating the topic within an audience, 68%, and boosting the author's reputation, 67%.
So stay with me a minute because those three, you know, are really somewhere between intrinsic intellectual brand ego, right? Those don't necessarily come with a hard dollar sign, but if I had a goal to elevate the topic, meaning it's gonna be discussed by these type of people in these formats more often. I could gauge that, right? I want to bring my thought leadership to the next level or to Davos or to my industry or to my place. You could monitor, did that happen, right? Even though that's an abstract goal, but you could, you could actually come pretty close to measuring it. So they identified those 3 goals, or we're talking about those 3 out of 10. You could, see the rest of them in the report. How did people feel about, you know, after the fact? Well, I accomplished that. This was the goal I set out to achieve. Did I hit the mark or not?
So in the report, you'll see that people reported different primary goals, and it's the process of writing a book. The median was 10 months, right? So it's a personal journey. That's a time investment that requires the support of family, friends. Sacrifice of weekends. But what I found interesting there was that regardless of goal, for each goal, less than 67% of authors reported that they had a solid plan for what they wanted to accomplish on their goals.
Yeah. So then there's a quote that I'll, I'll botch, which is, you know, a goal without a plan is, is a dream, right?
Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah.
And so That ability to know what am I trying to achieve through my goals in writing this book and how am I going to measure it and where am I going to spend time, money, effort after the manuscript is done and off to the printer, okay, is as important as can I start on page 1?
Maybe more, maybe even more important.
Yeah, exactly. Because the book is a 5 to 7 year asset. Yeah. That it's not going to go out into the world and revolutionize things on its own.
Yep. So the last thing I want to hit on a little bit, given this is a business book research study, books need to be published. How do we go about doing that? Right? So people ask me all the time, and I'm sure you get asked this frequently as well, Bill. Well, what's the, what's the best plan? You know, what's the best way to publish? And, and number one, I think that's a bad question. I think what you need to think about is what is the best way for me to publish given my goals, budgets, timelines, et cetera, et cetera. That's really a better question. There are 3 primary ways that one can publish. There's self-publishing, there's hybrid publishing, and there's traditional. So what did the data tell us about those things, Bill? Anything noteworthy there?
Yes. So we asked the question of how was your most recent book published? And among those 300 authors, we had a pretty good balance of respondents. 35% of authors had published traditionally.
Yes.
31% had published on a hybrid format and 28% were self-published. So it was a really good representation. What we saw was 70% of traditional and hybrid authors were satisfied. But there was an interesting insight if you dug a little bit deeper into the data. Hybrid published authors were twice as likely to voice strong agreement about satisfaction with their publisher.
Yeah. So that's, that is a fascinating insight that we gleaned because if you look at it sort of the inverse of that, after the fact, people that have self-published were frustrated, disappointed, et cetera. I think on the traditional publishing side, people are somewhere between enamored, flattered, elated early on to get that publishing deal. But then you ask them after the fact, hey, what was that experience like working with Big Publisher X, right? But it was really interesting that hybrid came up on top there in terms of, I guess what I would call author satisfaction score for lack of a better term. And that's really interesting. And it could be because you have alignment around business objectives. It could be because you're a client, right? When you're with a big publisher, you kind of work for them. You know, when you're engaging with a hybrid publisher, you're writing the checks, right? So you're the boss and you need to be treated as such. So, That was an interesting insight and not necessarily one that we might have expected to come to light here.
So I wanna close with a couple quotes from authors.
Yeah, great.
That I think would be relevant here.
These are the quotes from people that actually took the survey.
Exactly.
Okay. Exactly.
So this author was hybrid published and was talking about their first book. Authors don't make money on book sales. They make money on what the book makes possible. Spend time and money getting the book off the shelf.
Yeah.
Additionally, another author said, "I can divide my career into two parts, before book and after book." And so when I conducted interviews along with this study, One of the things that I heard again and again was the authors who used the book as a tool, who were out there promoting, speaking passionately about the idea in an authentic way that you really can't manufacture or fake, but they had written the book because they cared about the ideas. They wanted to evangelize them. They found their audience. And they found their market as a result.
Yeah, and I like that way of thinking about it, pre and post. Well, this, this has been fun. So again, 600 episodes. Holy cow, that's, that's a lot. Like, we started this 7 years ago. Really, really interesting findings. And we, we just skimmed the sort of the top line here. Again, go to authorroi.com and would love to hear everybody out there's feedback and thoughts on what they think about the report as well. Well, thanks for your time. This has been great and I will definitely talk to you again shortly. Thanks, Bill.
Thanks, Peter.
To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
