A panel discusses why standing out as a thought leader is harder than ever. With 11,000 business books released yearly and 95% selling under 5,000 copies, the noise is crushing. Direct engagement like coffee conversations beats traditional publishing for building real influence.
Good stuff. One of the things I'm curious about, early on you said you thought it was the hardest time ever for somebody to be recognized as a thought leader. And I'm just curious as to why you think that.
Well, I think because on the one end of the spectrum, everybody's calling themselves that. And there are lots of folks that are truly thought leaders that will never see the light of day. Because they're so sort of stuck in their stuff, and maybe they're more academic and whatever, and there's just a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of crap, and there's a lot of noise, and you've got sort of these introverted, really smart people, and then you've got these marketers that can bang the drum really well that don't have anything to say. It's sort of what's the sizzle and what's the steak? Lots and lots of sizzle out there. So I think it's hard, it's not impossible, it's hard, and we all know the numbers, how many books come out a year, and all that other kind of stuff. There's a lot, you know, we're living in an age where the democratization of ideas is global, right? So that's kind of a good thing and a bad thing. It's a big data problem.
Erica, how many, we keep throwing these things around, how many business books do come out in a month or a year or what?
About 11,000 a year.
11,000 a year.
And that doesn't include the peer-reviewed self-published sections.
That's just commercial published.
Yeah, and then the average business book sells under 2,000 units, and then if you figured out how many hours the average author spends investing in their book, you're better off going to Starbucks every day and just grabbing 3 people and saying, I want to buy you a cup of coffee and talk to me, right? It's more effective.
Yeah, 5% of all books sell more than 5,000 units. 5% of all books sell more than 5,000 units.
Right.
Yeah, so you really got to know your audience.
Well, please depress the crowd before we go to dinner. Absolutely, absolutely, compliments of Peter.
Thank you.
